Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  Erik Vogel at the fire hall in his early days as a firefighter. Back row, left to right: Tom Chapman, Kris Andersen, Erik Vogel (centre), Norm King, John Titley. Seated, left to right: Captain Bob Zetterstrom, Lieutenant Brian Davis. (photo credit 1.20)

  Erik Vogel (right) and fellow West Coast Air pilot Brent Mclean on the float of a de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter during Erik’s final days as a commercial pilot. (photo credit 1.21)

  The author at her home with the survivors on their twenty-year reunion in October 2004. Left to right: Erik Vogel, Larry Shaben, Carol Shaben, Scott Deschamps. (photo credit 1.22)

  PART IV

  As you go the way of life you will see a great chasm. Jump.

  It is not as wide as you think.

  NATIVE AMERICAN PROVERB

  HERO

  For Brian Dunham, the Wapiti search-and-rescue mission and its unlikely assortment of survivors was one of the strangest and most memorable in his twenty-five-year career as a SAR Tech. After Dunham hoisted the four survivors aboard the Chinook, Dr. Kenneth Betts, the military medical officer, tended to their injuries. The doctor had quickly assessed the two men who had been hauled up on stretchers—Erik and Scott. What Betts found wasn’t good. The pilot had a potentially life-threatening collapsed lung and a head injury, in addition to having lost a lot of blood. Scott had blunt chest trauma and hypothermia, and was in extreme pain. Larry had broken ribs and a probable compression fracture of his spine, while Paul appeared only scraped up. Betts radioed Slave Lake, requesting immediate transport of the four survivors to Edmonton for further assessment and medical treatment. Word came back quickly that the Hercules was refuelled and standing by to fly the men south.

  Hearing this, Larry insisted that he not be sent to Edmonton, so the medical team on the chopper decided that he and Paul, having more minor injuries, would be admitted to hospital in Slave Lake. Paul, who had been reclining in the back of the Chinook, sat up. “I have to be with Scott,” he said. “Wherever he goes, I go.”

  “Why?” Dr. Betts asked.

  “I’m a prisoner in his custody,” Paul replied.

  Betts regarded Paul skeptically and then turned to Scott, who nodded. Then he added, “He saved my life.”

  Just before eleven in the morning, the Chinook descended from the clouds over Slave Lake like a noisy, inelegant bird. By the time it touched down, a small army of local paramedics and medical personnel was waiting to meet it. So was Bob Giffin. The premier’s right-hand man watched intently as medics unloaded two men on stretchers from the aircraft. Both were hooked to intravenous lines, their bloodied faces half-hooded by blankets. Giffin didn’t recognize either of them, or the lad on the third stretcher that followed. He moved anxiously toward the helicopter’s open ramp and peered inside. There was his old friend, his face battered, hobbled by pain and limping badly but refusing to be offloaded on a stretcher. Larry wanted to step down from the plane under his own steam.

  “Larry!” Giffin shouted.

  “Bob,” Larry replied, “call Alma right away and tell her I’m okay.”

  Giffin raced to the terminal building. When he reached the Shaben home in High Prairie and asked to speak to Alma, a woman whose voice he didn’t recognize asked him to wait. Giffin could hear sombre background conversation. He waited a long time before the woman returned.

  “Alma doesn’t want to come to the phone.” (She later admitted that she’d feared the worst and couldn’t bear to take the call.)

  “Tell her Larry’s okay.”

  “He’s okay!” he could hear the woman shout and then the room exploded in cheers.

  Alma didn’t cry when she heard the news. She drew her three grown children into a tight embrace. Then the four of them grabbed their coats and, along with close family friends, drove to Slave Lake.

  “I walked into the hospital and there he was,” Alma recalled. “He had a black eye and scratches all over his face. The media was everywhere, but I didn’t see anybody but him.”

  Larry wrapped his arms around his wife and held on as if he would never let her go.

  “The tears came then,” Alma said.

  But there was no good news for the family and friends of most of the passengers. Several had made their way to the Slave Lake airport in anticipation of the Chinook’s arrival. Reporter Byron Christopher was on the scene that day, having jumped a plane from Edmonton as soon as the news of survivors broke. Christopher was standing beside a pay phone in the terminal when two teenage girls burst through a nearby side door.

  “Do you have any information on the plane crash?” the older one asked him, her voice desperate.

  “Four survived.”

  “My mother, Pat Blaskovits, was on that plane. Did she make it?”

  “I don’t know,” Christopher told her, though he did. He’d seen the four survivors being taken from the plane and knew that they were all men. But he didn’t want to be the one to break the news to the girls, so he directed them to an office at the end of the hallway reserved for the families.

  “The girls ran down the hall, knocked on the door and walked in,” he recalled. “The door closed. I could hear voices and crying. The girls were in there for only minutes when the door flung open and they ran past me, opened the exit door and ran toward a vehicle in the parking lot. The older girl had her hand to her face. She was sobbing uncontrollably. It was awful to see that. The memory of the two girls running by me crying is locked in my mind as though it happened yesterday.”

  That scene would repeat itself for several other families, but for none more publicly than the family of Grant Notley.

  At the High Prairie RCMP detachment, Marv Hopkins’ long night was unfolding into an interminably long day. After fourteen hours supporting and coordinating the ground search crew, his team had broken through the bush to the site shortly after the Chinook left with the survivors. Bone-weary and frozen stiff, they now faced the gruesome task of helping to remove six bodies. Brian Dunham and another SAR Tech had stayed behind to recover the bodies of the deceased and prepare them for transport to High Prairie when the helicopter returned.

  Major Dewar had called from Slave Lake to give Hopkins the names of the reds and the blacks and tell him that the latter would be taken to High Prairie for medical examination. Among the dead were two townspeople and four others from neighbouring communities. As if dealing with the devastating impact that the crash would have on the small town wasn’t enough, Hopkins had to fend off the crush of media that had descended on his detachment. He’d refused to talk to them while the search was underway, but now that the plane had been found reporters hounded him incessantly for any scrap of information. Phone lines were lighting up, all five ringing steadily, but Hoppy was determined not to release any information until the deceased’s next of kin were notified.

  Then he got a call from NDP MLA Ray Martin, frantic for news of Notley. The two men were much more than political colleagues; they were best friends, each man having stood up for the other at his wedding. As far as Martin was concerned, that made them family. Hoppy explained that he wasn’t at liberty to give out the information, but Martin insisted. In the background, Hoppy could hear the hushed din of voices—party faithful and political colleagues, he would later learn, who had gathered at the Alberta Legislature to await the news.

  “As deputy leader of the party, I need to know,” he remembers Martin saying. “Political arrangements will have to be made.”

  Hoppy hesitated.

  “Was he killed or wasn’t he?” Martin pressed.

  “For your information only,” Hoppy said, his voice halting, “he passed away.”

  “Grant’s gone,” he heard Martin cry out, and a chorus of grief erupted around him.

  The news spread with the force of a hurricane. Soon radio and television stations were awash with reports that Alberta’s iconic, long-time government opposition leader had been killed. The story of the crash tore across the nation and then spread to the international wire services where
it was picked up by newspapers from the New York Times to the Jerusalem Post.

  That’s how I learned of it.

  The summer I turned twenty-two, I left Canada for an educational tour through Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. At the end of five weeks—on the morning the group of fourteen Arab American university students with whom I’d been travelling left for New York—I stood on the front step of the Jerusalem YMCA and waved goodbye. The previous day, I’d spontaneously landed a job at a local news agency. I had no idea where I was going to live or how I would get by on the US $200 a month salary I’d been promised, but naïve and idealistic, I didn’t care.

  I lost some of that blitheness during the next three months as I experienced military occupation first hand, but the fragility of life didn’t truly hit home until the morning I picked up the Jerusalem Post and read a tiny news item about a Canadian commuter plane crash near my hometown 10,000 kilometres away. Seeing my dad’s name at the end of the article was beyond surreal. I read the story a second time, suppressing a bubble of hysteria rising in my chest. The words were there in black and white: my father was one of four men who’d survived a plane crash in which six others died.

  Two months would pass before I could get time off from my job to go home for Christmas. That delay was excruciating. I called my family every Sunday, always asking to speak to my dad—to reassure myself that, yes, he was alive. On the phone, he was always calm and comforting, as if life was as it had always been.

  Except it wasn’t. Had I been able to follow the headlines that dominated the local and national newspapers after the crash, I would have known that it had forever changed many lives. Though Grant Notley’s death commanded most of the media’s attention in the early days, another story began to emerge from the whisperings of those close to search-and-rescuers’ efforts: how an accused criminal aboard the plane had allegedly saved the life of his RCMP escort and the two other survivors.

  Immediately following the crash the man at the centre of the story was under guard in Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital. Paul had been cleaned up, X-rayed, given a change of clothes, fed, and admitted for observation. He’d even been permitted to stop in at Scott’s room to return his watch before being taken to a private room on the third floor of the hospital. A warden from the Edmonton Remand Centre came to see Paul, and after questioning him, left him in the company of a guard. The two men were alone in the room when the guard pulled out a pair of shackles.

  “Is that really necessary?” Paul asked.

  “It’s the policy.”

  Paul was furious.

  “How fucking stupid,” he would later write. “I crash in a plane. I help others stay alive until rescue arrives. Point blank, I went through a very traumatic experience and I had to be chained to my bed like an animal.”

  That same afternoon, as my dad was being bundled into an ambulance to be transferred from the hospital in Slave Lake to the one in High Prairie, the media had swarmed. One of the reporters congratulated him on surviving his ordeal, suggesting he had been heroic.

  “No,” he corrected him. “Archambault is the hero. He saved Deschamps’ life.”

  That evening the chief of police paid Paul a personal visit and offered his congratulations on a job well done. Later, on a trip downstairs with his guard for a smoke, Paul was sought out and thanked by Scott’s wife, Mary, who had just flown in from the west coast.

  On Sunday, October 21, Paul awoke stiff, sore and still shackled to his bed. The only good thing he remembered about that morning was the shot of Demerol he’d managed to persuade the doctor to give him. It softened the edges of his pain and made him feel better than any pot he’d ever smoked. After another examination, the doctor assessed him to be fit for discharge. Paul argued fiercely for another shot of Demerol but the doctor, after a long shrewd stare, shook his head. Soon after, a police guard escorted Paul to the Edmonton Remand Centre. When he arrived, he was immediately searched and stripped of his meagre possessions, including Erik’s camera, which he’d stuffed in his pocket. The authorities booked him, handed him prison clothing, and put him in isolation.

  Paul was crestfallen. He hated prison and here he was, locked up yet again. He began to think about how short life was and that he needed to do something with himself. That night he asked for and was granted a paper and pencil. With it, he began to write the story of the accident. He’d filled five pages when, for some inexplicable reason, he tore them up and flushed them down the toilet.

  Back at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Erik was facing his own ordeal. He was in serious condition when paramedics had wheeled him into the emergency room. Doctors and nurses had fluttered around his bed like ghosts, their faces drawn and serious. Words floated in the air as he drifted in and out of awareness: internal bleeding, surgery and next of kin. Erik had no idea whether he would survive his injuries or if he wanted to. If he survived, how could he live with the mental anguish over what he’d caused?

  Outside his room, journalists hovered like beggars waiting for a handout. Erik was semiconscious and alone when a nurse leaned over his bedside to speak softly to him.

  “There’s a guy in the waiting area and he wants to see you,” Erik remembers her telling him.

  Erik looked at her quizzically. His parents had not yet arrived from the west coast and he had no family to speak of in Edmonton.

  “He won’t go away,” the nurse told him, adding that the man had said he was a friend.

  Erik could only nod his head weakly before closing his eyes. When he opened them, a familiar face slowly came into focus. It was Duncan Bell.

  Duncan took Erik’s hand and held it so long that Erik felt uncomfortable.

  “I know what happened,” Duncan told him. “I figured that if anybody needed someone who understands what they’re going through right now, it’s you.”

  Erik was overwhelmed, though at first Duncan’s presence seemed a bitter irony for the young pilot who had felt little sympathy for Duncan’s mistake two years earlier.

  Duncan stayed with Erik the rest of the day and most of the night. At one point, as he surveyed Erik’s battered body, he joked, “You’re going to have the same scars that I do.”

  Duncan’s understanding became an immeasurable comfort, and his unconditional acceptance helped strengthen Erik for the terrible onslaught that would follow.

  On Monday, October 22, Paul awoke in lock-up. Completely isolated, he had no idea that the crash was dominating national headlines. Notley Dead, proclaimed one newspaper. Party Leader and Five Others Killed in Plane Crash, read another. Town Devastated, stated a third. The official account of the dead:

  GRANT NOTLEY, 45, a thirteen-year elected representative of the Alberta government, husband of Sandra Notley and father of three

  CHRISTOPHER VINCE, 30, a personnel administrator with the Alberta government’s department of Social Services and Community Health, who had recently moved to the north from Calgary with his young wife, Frances

  ELAINE NOSKEYE, 39, of the Atikameg Reserve, wife of William Whitehead and a First Nations mother of fourteen

  GORDON PEEVER, 33, director of finance for the Alberta Vocational College near High Prairie, husband to Virginia and a father of six

  PATRICIA BLASKOVITS, 51, assistant director of nursing in Fairview, married to Norman and a mother of eight

  TERRANCE SWANSON, 28, a recent PhD graduate in plant pathology, who’d just landed his first job with the Department of Agriculture and left behind his two young daughters and pregnant wife, Sally.

  Paul knew nothing of the names or identities of the dead, but the images of the battered faces of his fellow survivors were seared into his memory. He was haunted by guilt over the trapped passenger he could not save. And he was angry. That morning Paul demanded to see the warden. A few hours later the deputy warden paid him a visit.

  “Why can’t I be with the other guys?” Paul asked. “I’m not a rapist or a rat, so why the isolation?”

&nbs
p; The deputy warden had nodded thoughtfully and a short time later Paul was transferred to a regular prison cell. He wouldn’t stay long. After eating lunch, a police officer arrived to escort him to the airport. He told Paul they would be flying north to Grande Prairie that afternoon and that Paul would finally face the charges that had put him on a plane in the first place. As he walked out of the remand centre, he looked up at a TV screen to see Larry’s face on the news. Paul wasn’t allowed to stop and watch, so he had no idea that his life was about to drastically change.

  Larry Shaben wore a bathrobe and a weary grin. His two front teeth were missing and his face was bruised and swollen as he spoke to reporters in his High Prairie hospital room. After being rescued, Dad had insisted on being transferred to his hometown hospital. On Sunday morning, he finally agreed to meet with the media. What he had to say would add weight to rumours already swirling about the heroic efforts of a prisoner aboard the plane.

  “I think most of the credit goes to that young man, Paul Archambault,” Dad told reporters. “He saved the mountie’s life by getting him out of the plane. Paul Archambault did an outstanding job.”

  Paul’s story would soon capture the imagination of a nation. Reporters chased the police car he was travelling in on the way to the Edmonton airport and besieged him when he arrived there. Dressed in the ill-fitting clothes the hospital had given him after his arrival, Paul shrank as reporters peppered him with questions from all directions.

  “Did Grant Notley die on impact or after?” one asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul answered. “I didn’t know anyone other than Scott, my escort.”

  “Tell us what happened,” another demanded. “Would you call yourself a hero?”

  “I just did what I thought had to be done,” he said. “The thing that bothered me was listening to a man moan until death. I really feel bad that I couldn’t get that one person out who was still alive. He lasted hours,” Paul added, his pact with Larry and the other survivors forgotten.