Once more, I’ve written a strange seasonal yarn for Jon Solomon’s 25-Hour Holiday Radio Show.

Here we were, 76 miles from the end of the Parkway. A clear night on Christmas Eve. Washburn told me it was important to look for them at the right time. “If no one was watching, they’d come out on the regular,” he said. “But people are always watching, eyes craned up to the skies. Too many and it’s…what’s the phrase. Tipping point.” It wasn’t anything like stargazing, he explained. It was more of a seance, us earthbound and the shapes above.

“We look up,” Washburn said once, early in this process, and I didn’t understand what he meant until weeks later; until months later; until years later. I’d met Washburn because a mutual friend had told me he could show me things, and so began my apprenticeship, which stumbled over the better part of the decade that followed.

Washburn said that the phenomenon we were there to observe had something to do with methods of perception, he said it was maybe to do with quantum physics or the air quality in this part of the state. Could’ve been a curse, could’ve been a blessing. “A miracle?” I asked him and he huffed. “Miracles have reasons,” he said. “I don’t see reasons here.” And I said to Washburn, we’re standing here on Christmas Eve, isn’t that reason enough?

The parking lot of the Forked River rest stop — it was still Forked River then, the powers that be hadn’t yet renamed it — was where we stood. It was a cold night; it always was. 

“The thing you have to understand is that these aren’t ghosts of people,” he said. “They’re like the memories of an object, or at least that’s how I understand them.” How do you know that, I asked him. “I don’t. I have no way of getting up there to see them. Maybe it’s some pilot, long dead and feeling unrest, who’s manifested the entire thing. But it’s my sense of the things. The ghost of the thing, not the thing itself.” He sipped from his flask and I abstained. “Hindenberg was the last one through, but there were plenty before it,” he said.

We’d come out here seven years running, and every time there’d been nothing. I was getting too old to be an apprentice and Washburn was talking about cataracts more and more; the clear sky and the clouded sky were blurring together for him. It was a question, open and unspoken, as to whether he’d even be able to see the ships if they came next year. For now, this was it; this was all we could hope for.

I blinked and suddenly the sky above me was full, these massive translucent forms moving in front of the clouds and revealing the clouds as they went. I tapped Washburn’s arm and pointed up. He looked up and paused and said, “This is a good crop” after a little while. And I just stood there and watched, a fleet of spectral airships crossing the sky and headed west, no terrestrial destination in mind. Ovals hundreds of feet long, fins at the back, passenger compartments below. Dozens of them, far more than there ever had been in life. I was at a loss as to where they were from, if they weren’t the memories of airships that had once flown through these skies. They were simply there; a reason, after all that, to be out here on a cold night watching the sky at a rest stop in south Jersey.