Last night I went for a bike ride, trying to see if I could find the house the plane crashed into. I first started out with a leisurely ride down river walk, where I once again saw the Hawaiian voodoo lady. This is the second time I have seen this lady, and I am not quite sure what to make of her. The first time she was simply sitting with another Hawaiian lady, both decked out in flowery muumuus with a wreath of flowers in their hair and that flower necklace thing which I currently forget the proper name for. They were both quite Polynesian-plump and were eating something out of a Styrofoam tray.
When I rode down last night the one lady was standing in the middle of the sidewalk and dancing frantically (with a surprisingly amount of grace for a lady that large) while shaking some sort of rattle-thing. Music was blasting out of the open door of a mini van next to her. As I pedaled by I realized she was making all the dancing motions towards the setting sun. I thought about snapping a picture, but I did not want to be rude. Besides, I might have interrupted her magic.
So I rode on off riverwalk in search of the plane crash neighborhood. After a couple of wrong turns, I finally found it, however the police had the place blocked off and were not letting anyone in unless you were a resident or a news team. So I pedaled around some more and found a back road leading behind the subdivision. From this vantage point, I am almost positive I know what the pilot was doing.
Right behind the one neighborhood, another one was being built. It was all cleared out and had the roads put in, but no houses had been built yet. I am willing to bet the guy was having engine problems (or just being an ass) and spotted out the big empty area below him. There are no trees and there is a long stretch of empty road, an airplane COULD land on it if it had to. However the guy must have come in too low and ended up crashing into one of the houses. He actually missed the empty house-less area by only a few hundred feet.
Anyhow, from behind the neighborhood I still could not get in. There was an eight foot brick wall surrounding the place, and although with a little grunting I probably could have scrambled over it and dragged my bike with me, I am sure the police officers on the other side would not have been pleased with my intrusion. Besides, I was not the only one back there. There was one minivan that pulled up and some black lady and her kids all piled out and up on to the wall to gawk and the burned out houses.
Even though I was disappointed with not being able to get up close to the house, I did have one other surprise on my ride. The thing about bike riding is that you will come across things that you will never see when you are in a car; such as the small Buddhist temple that I came across. I had no idea there was in Sanford only a few miles from my house. It was pretty well tucked away. The back of this small temple featured a big yellow fat Buddha who had the scariest Buddha face I had ever seen. It looked like it was going to eat me. There was also a neat little garden featuring a Buddha shrine and some other interesting artifacts. I was pleased to have stumbled across it.
I snapped a couple of pictures, however due to the humidity and my sweat they came out a little bit blurry. A shame, you cannot see the evil leer on the big yellow Buddha face.
You can almost see the crashed house, if my camera was not so blurry.
Big yellow buddah
Temple entrance
Buddah shrine.
2026 Update
Nineteen years back to a Florida bike ride, and Ed is stalking a plane crash and a dancing voodoo lady. Delightful.
Ah, 2007 Ed, cycling through a world where a plane crash was a local mystery you could just pedal up to and gawk at from behind a brick wall. Now, that neighborhood would be a drone swarm, a helicopter news feed, and forty-seven influencers pretending they were first on the scene. You had no idea a Buddhist temple existed a few miles from your house? That is the pre-smartphone curse and blessing: you lived in a fog of ignorance so thick you nearly stumbled into enlightenment. Your camera was blurry because of humidity and sweat—now we have phones that could render that evil Buddha in terrifying 8K, but we would probably use them to take a picture of our own breakfast instead. And the Hawaiian voodoo lady? You saw her twice, you had a camera, and you chose not to interrupt her magic. Respect, but also, what is the point of riding around looking for destruction if you will not capture a sun-dancing shaman on the sidewalk? The world was slower, stranger, and far less documented. I miss it, and I also do not.
“2007 Ed, you were willing to scramble over an eight-foot brick wall with your bike to get closer to a burned-out plane crash house, but you would not snap one picture of the frantically dancing voodoo lady for fear of being rude—what exactly was your moral code that night?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I reckon the code was simple: don’t mess with magic you don’t understand. That lady was dancing at the sun with a rattle, and interrupting that feels like asking for a curse, or at least a stern look from a Polynesian woman who could probably toss me into the river. Plus, my camera’s a cheap little thing and the humidity was fogging it up anyway, so I’d have gotten a blurry shot of a sacred moment and felt like a jerk. The brick wall, though, that’s just property, and the police tape was more of a suggestion in my head. I wasn’t gonna hurt anybody, just wanted to see the wreckage and maybe snap a picture of a burned house. So my moral code that night was: respect the supernatural, disrespect the subdivision. Also, my legs were tired and I really wanted to test if I could still scramble a wall. Turns out I didn’t, but I like to think I could have. Take that, eight-foot brick wall.
