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HIJACKING MYTH #3
HIJACKING MYTH #3
RENEGADE D.B. COOPER VANISHES FROM AIR.
DOLAN OFFERS A THIRD PIECE ON THE
MYTHOLOGY OF HIJACKING.
LISTEN TO THE MYTH NOW >>
RENEGADE D.B. COOPER VANISHES FROM AIR.
DOLAN OFFERS A THIRD PIECE ON THE
MYTHOLOGY OF HIJACKING.
LISTEN TO THE MYTH NOW >>
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D.B. Cooper isn’t a real person. Yet the Eugene Register-Guard quotes Robert Lindsey of the New York Times, saying in 1972 that “D.B. Cooper is the best known of 124 persons at large or unaccounted for who have hijacked United States aircraft since the Federal Aviation Administration began keeping records in 1961.”1 What he means by “best known,” however, is in fact least known; Mr. Cooper is only famous due to his having completely disappeared, almost without a trace, despite the fact that events of the hijacking itself were watched on television with rapt attention by the American public. Events of the hijacking itself were watched The Thanksgiving eve spectacle proved even more grand than the local football game: “Brandishing what he said was a bomb, the man demanded—and a few hours later received—$200,000 and four parachutes,”2 somehow achieving the unspoken dream of almost everyone: to fly through the sky, awash with free money. The evening events played out like the plot of a cheap thriller, tense and sudden, until “as the Northwest Boeing 727 flew somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, he vanished into the darkness,”3 jumping from the plane into the wilderness below.on television with rapt attention by the American public. |
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An enormous manhunt ensued, organized by law enforcement, yet “after about four days, the official search around Woodland, Washington—the area where Cooper was believed to have landed—was called off.”4 This is probably for the best, as “there is rumored to be a curse that befalls anyone who looks into the Cooper case too closely. It is said to lead to madness, obsession, depression, and even suicide.”5 Despite this, “an unofficial treasure hunt began in earnest,”6 people searching in vain for the man and his money. “The Willipa came from across the river, the Chehalis and the Cowlitz from farther north, and even the Quinalt from up the coast.”7 All of it is given a timeless aura by the song “D.B. Cooper, Where are You?,” a popular “twangy ballad that’s sold 1,500 copies and depicted on a T-shirt that shows a parachute floating downward with a case of money,”8 as if it were an angel with green wings. Since then, “The FBI has investigated more than 1,000 tips without finding a suspect.”9 The nation has waxed and waned in its obsession with the unsolved case, which—like most mysteries—is best described as a kind of identity crisis writ large. Who is D.B. Cooper? And where has he gone? Did he escape and return home only to become an anonymous uncle living out the rest of his days in peace? Or is he still hanging from a Thuja plicata, the western red cypress, all his money strewn |
across the forest? There have been so many attempts to explain his person, innumerable false leads on his history—all detailed, almost parasitically, in the press and tabloids—that D.B. Cooper’s identity can only be explained as follows: he has become a part of the landscape. There is rumored to be a curse What this says about self is hard to decipher, but we ought to think of the indigenous Nez Perce myth, wherein D.B. Cooper “still stands alone on the top of the hill where he stopped, near the junction of Grande Ronde and Big Snake rivers.”10 Even if he is discovered, an unknown residue will forever be left behind by the long standing mystery—a kind of ectoplasm of the dead, something greater than any one identity or idea—for no arrest can lead to the total conviction of memetics, or ghosts or spirits. In this way, Mr. Cooper, as a cultural trope, “wants to catch sight of a future that can exist without the present; he accommodates the facts willfully, with love, in a way that protects the future from the present.”11 This is admirable.that befalls anyone who looks into the Cooper case too closely. More so than any FBI claim, witness or testimony, the Nez Perce myth, native to the wilderness where Cooper fell, is genuinely fitting: Cooper “is very |
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old, so old that his top is dead, and he still stands as a testament to the story’s truth. That the chase was a very long one is shown by the fact that there are no cedars within a hundred miles upstream from him.”12 Yet it’s possible that the story is as the Wasco people might tell it, where Cooper “fell into a deep sleep,” and awoke “on the bottom of the lake” surrounded by “the spirits of many elk, deer, and bears.”13 Or perhaps, as the Yakima people might have it, Cooper, as a hijacker, “lived up in the sky all alone” and then “went down to the shallow places in the water and began to throw up great handfuls of mud that became land,” and unlike him, “the rocks have not changed—they have only become harder.”14 Think of the books and movies that have been made in Cooper’s name. Someday, “he will overturn those mountains and rocks. Then the spirits that once lived in the bones buried there will go back into them.”15 The image of D.B Cooper as a ghost or magical cedar in the woods brings to mind Alejandro Zambra’s novel The Private Lives of Trees, both for its title and somber tone. As the news about D.B. Cooper rolls onward, and tantalizing articles continue to be published, we can imagine Cooper as a tree floating or hanging in the forest, reciting words from Zambra’s book, thumbing his nose |
in defiance of any “discoveries” and applauding his own mystery: “Let’s pretend there once was a world that was more or less like this, let’s pretend that I’m not me, that I’m a reliable voice, a white face over which less-white faces, semi-dark, dark faces pass.”16 Yes, Cooper is simultaneously not any of the thousands of suspects, and in fact all of them, not to mention many more. D.B. Cooper is the entire portion of the United States running from Nevada to Washington state, sleeping with its head against the ocean. The protagonist in Zambra’s novel, meanwhile, spends almost the entire book quietly watching his daughter dream. As well: All of the D.B. Coopers, in all of their forms, in one way or another, “live in the tops of the mountains, watching their children on the earth and waiting for the great change which is to come.”17 What change is that, exactly? The one where we stop looking for D.B. Cooper, and simply let him into our hearts. For otherwise, despite “the abrupt changes of fate for those who go up and down but don’t go or stay,” we are left only with “fleeting words, words that anticipate a revelation that never arrives.”18 And for those who stubbornly, and against all reason, insist on knowing which gap Cooper has fallen into, please accept that “it is the hole through which humankind originally emerged from the underworld"19—if it’s anything or nothing at all, which it isn’t. |
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*** Dolan Morgan is a writer whose fiction and poetry can be found in venues such as Armchair/Shotgun and The Believer (upcoming). For previous pieces in Dolan's series on the mythology of hijacking, see: Myth One; Myth Two . The next column provides a list of the author's reference notes, citing historical periodical research. |
REFERENCE NOTES 1-3. Lindsey, Robert. “124 Hijackers--Including D. B. Cooper--Still at Large.” Eugene Register-Guard. November 23, 1972.4, 6, 8. “Song, T-Shirt Mark $200,000 Hijacking.” The Press Courier. January 7, 1972. 5, 9. Wasson, Megan. “A New D. B. Cooper Book--and a New Lead.” The Christian Science Monitor. August 2, 2011. 6. See 4. 7, 10, 12-15. Erdoes, Richard and Ortiz, Alfonzo., Ed. American Indian Myths and Legends. Pantheon Books: New York. 1984. 8. See 4. 9. See 5. 10. See 7. 11, 16-18. Zambra, Alejandro. McDowell, Megan., Tr. The Private Lives of Trees. Open Letter: Rochester, NY. 2010. 12-15. See 7. 16-18. See 11. 19. Hultkrantz, Ake. The religion of the Goddess in North America. Crossroad Publishing Co: New York, 1990. |
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