On October 6, 2024, my two brothers and I drove into the Ouachita National Forest. We were navigating to the best lead we’ve had in years on locating the place where my father died. 

Captain Richard Lumpkin was in the second seat of an F4 Phantom fighter jet when it crashed into the south Arkansas forest on June 5, 1985. That’s as much as I knew when I started searching for answers in my 20’s in college. My search for where he died ended this year after a series of breakthroughs led to some locals confirming the place where the plane went down.

Crash Site Visit

Day 1

We met up in Mount Ida and all piled into my little brother’s Tacoma which we were glad of when we hit our second portion of the road washed out by a dry stream.  About an hour later we pulled off into a clearing with a metal gate blocking the path down a grassy road.

We walked down the road through another clearing and into a food plot that had been plowed under.  A large forking oak stood on the eastern edge of the food plot.  We walked beyond it into the trees.

Within 5 minutes we started spotting pieces of the plane.  Small, hand sized pieces of forest green aluminum; the skin of the plane twisted and deformed.  Wiring harnesses embedded in the ground we pulled up like carrots. 

The first thing that struck me was the violence of the destruction. It was as though the plane had been put through a blender. I had always imagined that the plane had crashed and my dad and the pilot had burned. But it was clear that the plane had simply been annihilated; turned to confetti. We filled three shopping bags with debris before we stopped picking up pieces. There were too many to gather them all. 

My little brother had a special knack for seeing things my older brother and I missed. He kept pulling pieces from the ground I had stepped over without seeing. 

He found the end of a zipper attached to a piece of green nylon flight-suit.  At that moment I realized and said aloud, that we needed to be prepared to find human remains. I learned in 2022 that they only found 40 lbs of human remains between the two men who died there and that’s what we buried in the cemetery. This spot is where they were truly buried.

We walked the compass bearing 40 degrees off north from the first pieces we found.  We found a partially buried piece of one jet engine and another large piece eroding out of the ground.  Beyond the buried pieces we didn’t find any more debris.

We left most of the pieces near where we first found them.  Each of us selected some to take.

What they would have seen

I flew a drone capturing video along the trajectory they would have taken before hitting the trees.

Day 2: He would have loved this place

The next day I came back alone.  I drove another dirt road about a mile south looking for any clue of a road or offshoot from there to the second jet engine which eye witness accounts place about one mile southwest of the main crash site.  Then I drove back to the main site and stopped about a mile west and walked south to pick up the trajectory line again.  I walked that line back to the main crash site and found nothing.

On the second day in these woods, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place.  My dad was an avid hunter who traveled all over the United States hunting big and small game.  I have a photo of him posing with a bear he killed. In the photo, my dad is dressed in camo with a camo bucket hat and two turkey feathers sticking out in front. 

I found a turkey feather near where we first found the pieces of the plane.  I put it on a rock near where I found the flight suit as a kind of gesture at a memorial.  This is where he died and where his body went into the ground.  He would have loved this place.

I returned to the main debris field and immediately started finding more.  Shortly after while walking back up toward the clearing, I found a piece of a boot.  The toe section, sheared off with the lining still inside.

What it means to me

It’s taken me months and I’m still unpacking what this all means for me.  But a few things feel different now:

1. He’s no longer missing 

One day he just disappeared from our lives and I knew it happened somewhere in the woods but now I know where.

2. I am heir to his life

I have felt from the beginning of this quest that I wanted to join the line of my life to the end of the line of his life. I had expected it to close the loop and bring something to an end.

What I did not expect is that by joining my line to his, I feel a new security and confidence in my identity as the son of Richard Lumpkin. And as a result I feel a new quiet power that flows from his supreme competence, curiosity, gregarious exploration and self-reliance. I’ve spent my adult life waking up to little bits and pieces of this. But now, somehow, after visiting this place, I feel the heir to it all. I am this kind of man because he was this kind of man. His way of being lives in me and is fully mine. And it wants to explore ever outward into new territory, new wilderness, new creativity, into fresh possibilities. And because of who he was, I am.

Thanks

I want to say thanks to a few people in particular who went above and beyond in helping us find the spot.

– Bill Womble who was one of the first on the scene and went over maps with us to help us confirm the general area.

– HC Varnadore who first took my family to visit the crash site on the one year anniversary and filled in a lot of details about the location. It was much easier to find back then and in the years since it got a lot harder to find.

– Josh Jackson who suggested I try OnX mapping software to identify who owned the land.  Turns out it’s federal land but that put me in touch with Dustin and ultimately Arkansashunting.net.

– Arkansashunting.net user AR1234 who found the historical aerial photo from 1986 that showed the shattered trees and road used in the investigation.  I was able to overlay this onto current maps indexed to the position of the road and get within 100 feet of the original ground scar to start our search.

– ArkansasHunting.net user DeputyDog (aka Seth Allen) who spent the better part of a week driving around the area talking to folks who were around when it happened and went out to visit the site ahead of us.

– Dustin Opine of Arkansas Game and Fish who responded to my cold email, remembered a local, Johnny Haga, who had pointed the spot out before and went out to confirm it. Their GPS pin led us straight to the debris field.

– Ryan Bolger who inspired me to keep pushing after he shared the story of his own search for his birth mother which had so much in common with my search.

– And of course, my two brothers, Jason Lumpkin and Andrew Wyers who joined me on this wild goose chase. Though Andrew’s father is my step-father, after the visit, he shared that he feels that so much of his life was set up by the foundation that Richard laid.

A decade and a half into my practice designing products and software, some things keep coming up. I’ll keep up with them here.

1. Make the software explain itself

Ideally software should need no manual, instructions or training. Instead the meaning and actions available should be discoverable by the user and they should be able to play with and explore them to get a sense of what they do and how they work. Users feeling free to “play” with an app is a pre-requisite to feeling comfort in it and mastery of it.

2. No ornamentation without meaning

Colors, images, icons, and especially animation that don’t convey meaning are like noise. When mixed in with elements that do convey meaning, They present the user with a puzzle to solve that has no answer. They create a lingering sense that one is missing out on the joke.

3. Use self-explanatory labels

Avoid using jargon, company or domain specific labels. Instead aim for 5th grade vocabulary level terms whose dictionary definitions make sense of what they are describing in the software.

4. The software should show its model of the problem or the world to the user

Especially when AI or models are involved, the more that the software can visualize or make clear what data it is considering to make sense of the problem or the world, the more the user will be able to match their mental model to that of the software making their experience feel intuitive by minimizing surprises. Importantly, this also allows for critical thinking about whether the user knows something the model doesn’t. In many cases this improves the safety of using automation.

5. Teach the user what they need to know when they need to know it, not before

A basic principle of adult learning is the concept of just-in-time learning. This is not only an affordance to the limited time and attention our users have. It’s also about recognizing that users are motivated to take in new information when they see that information as relevant to solving a problem they have now. Just-in-time learning is stickier because users are ready to learn instead of seeing the education as an impediment to get over to accomplish their goal. Framing is important here.

6. Show me what’s important by how much of the screen it takes up

Visual hierarchy gives unconscious cues to the user on what’s important as they scan across the page. Important features can have more than one embodiment or entry point.

7. Only break UI conventions when you want to slow the user down and add friction

Only do this when safety or the experience requires it. Using conventions in UI elements increases users sense of familiarity with your software and their sense of it being “intuitive.” Read Daniel Kanneman’s _Thinking Fast and Slow_ for more detail on how to use the two thinking systems to create smooth intuitive experiences (system 1) and when to break that by adding friction to create a pause for conscious (system 2) evaluation.

8. Don’t fear the scroll

Especially on apps with dashboard or monitoring features, there’s a temptation to put everything on the screen at once. Screens want to scroll. As long as users feel confident they are on the right track of the information they are looking for they have no problem tapping or scrolling to get to it.

9. Touch targets should be as large as large as you can afford

Apple’s Human Interface guidelines suggest 44 pt as the smallest touch target designers should use. But bigger is better because it makes it easier for people to hit without intense focus, and improves accessibility. Just pay attention that it isn’t in conflict with #6.

When I was a boy, we used to visit my grandma Jodie’s house. Grandma Jodie was a short, quiet woman when I knew her. I only knew her after the great pain of losing her son to the public violence of a fighter jet crash. Truth is I don’t know how quiet she was before that.

The house was filled to the brim with craft. Ceramics, quilts in progress, all manner of hand crafts. On one end was a small chrome edged formica table. One of the square sides was up against a wall. Plugged into the wall in a night-light was a glowing, luminous column of glass the size of a child’s pinky finger. It was filled with bright red liquid churning with bubbles and spiraled ever upward. The column grew from an acorn shaped shell of Christmas red and green plastic, glowing from an inner light. I never knew what this thing was but I was obsessed with it and would go to see it whenever I was there.

I don’t remember being there enough to ever feel entirely easy. My father’s absence hovered over every visit —the pain of his non-being; of all we’d lost together.

Years later I found a photo of my dad and mom sitting at that table when they were in their teens or early 20’s. I didn’t see the light but I recognized the same corner where I had sat staring at it. I painted him there looking straight into the camera in the style of candid family photos. I liked his pose. He seemed at once effortlessly comfortable and crammed, folded around that table in a tiny space. He fitted himself into it in a way I recognize with my own body.

This year our Christmas tree was too dark. I didn’t get all the strings of lights undone before the girls started putting ornaments up and it was too late. But I wanted more light. I ordered a string of those bubble lights and carefuly wove them into the decorated tree. I see them now across the room bubbling madly, glowing warm and I feel connected to that place, that corner of the table, that mother and son, now both dead. I burn my Christmas lights and remember.

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There’s a fantasy floating around that if we could just get enough free time, we could do anything.  If it weren’t for work or school or family or any of a dozen other time commitments we could write that novel, record that album or paint that devastatingly honest, surreal landscape that pulls back the curtains of reality to reveal the eternal light shining through all reality.  That fantasy is a lie.  You will never get that time.  So you have to start now, doing art when you’re already busy as hell.
This talk originally appeared as a part of Fuller Seminary’s “Week Four: TED-style Talks” event.  They’ll be posting more talks here in the coming weeks.

1. Do stuff you love to do: 

Because you love it and you would do it anyway.  Because that energy, creativity and passion is like a force of nature that you can harness to drive your work forward.

If you find yourself doing it even when no one is looking and no one is paying, then you’re doing it because you love it, because it gives you energy and life.  Even if you lose sleep, there is a net gain of energy for you and those around you.

2.  Budget time for work-ish stuff: 

Don’t spend more time and energy on things that don’t require or deserve it.

3. Use the scraps: 

Structure your best impulses to create into your life so the choice you want to make is the easiest choice to make.  Use the left-over scraps of time by keeping the things you need to work on your art at hand.  Don’t worry about how little time you have.  The scraps add up.

4. Keep the stuff you do for fun, fun: 

It’s easy to lose the fun and playfulness that drew you to your artistic work which is one reason why people stop doing it.  If you don’t feel like doing it, skip it.  But take note if there’s something structural keeping you away.  This might mean it’s important not to get paid for your art.

5. Learn to love sketches, not perfection: 

Embrace the imperfections in your sketches and the background noise in your recordings.  Get past the pretense of everything you do being “world-class” and recognize the humble value in every movement toward being able to say what you need to say when you have something worth saying.  Perfectionism is a mixture of pride and fear that can deprive the world of the exercise of your gifts.  A finished sketch is more real than a vision of a perfect work never started.

6.  Find people who are interested and use their interest to motivate your work: 

When people connect with your honest work they are connecting with a part of you.  It allows people who get it and appreciate you to be drawn in and those who don’t to move on.  This is a good thing! Obviously, the web makes this easier.   

7. Say yes to limitation:

Limitations, deadlines, constraints help you finish.  They may also stop you from creating polished masterpieces, but they can also help keep you from ruining work by over-working it.

8. Say yes to collaboration:

Collaborations open up new opportunities for formation of a generative community out of which new work, energy and ideas can emerge more quickly than working alone.  They are also opportunities for you to give and receive generosity.

9.  Integrate Integrate Integrate:

Don’t think of your artistic work as something that you have to add to your schedule but as something that is a part of who you are that you bring to everything you do and experience.  

I used to think of all the things I am interested in and love as threads that I would one day have to cut off in pursuit of truly important things.  And it’s true that commitments to school, family and work have to take priority.

But I’ve found that with a little intention and perspective, I can wind all the threads that make up who I am into one cohesive identity.  

The key is wind the rope.