Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  “I can’t think of any instances.”

  “So you are saying that you have never really refused a co-pilot in the past twelve months?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Boyko later questioned Dale on Erik’s assertion that, in order to satisfy his boss, he felt he needed to descend as low as 800 feet to get in to High Prairie before bailing on a landing attempt.

  Dale’s response was unequivocal: “I have never advised him to go to take a look at 800 feet. We were concerned about, you know, a safe operation and keeping a good reputation and developing our traffic with our passengers. And I had never at any time told any pilot to go take a look and go down to 800 feet.”

  It was John Bassie, Dale’s chief counsel, who revisited the issue of Erik’s fatigue. Bassie carefully led Dale through an accounting of Erik’s scheduled flying hours in the days leading up to and including the crash, beginning with the emergency medivac on October 16, which had resulted in Erik spending the night in the refuelling depot trailer.

  “If there was any reason that Mr. Vogel did not receive adequate sleep on the evening of October 16, 1984, do you have any explanation for it?”

  “There was no reason for it as far as operation of the air service is concerned,” Dale replied.

  “Now, after he returned to Grande Prairie on October 17, was he assigned duties for October 18?”

  “He was assigned to fly the evening flight departing Grande Prairie.”

  “Do I take it from that that he was assigned no morning duties?”

  “He had no morning duties assigned.”

  “Okay. If there was any lack of sleep on the part of Mr. Vogel on the evening of October 17, can you give any explanation from the company’s point of view as to why that may have happened?”

  “I could see no reason whatsoever for any lack of sleep,” Dale said.

  “Okay. And did Mr. Vogel conduct the flights on the afternoon of October 18?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “And how many hours of flying time is that?” Bassie asked.

  “Three hours of flight time.”

  “When was he next scheduled to work for your company?”

  “Well, his next schedule was the same for the Friday as he flew on the Thursday, which is the five o’clock departure from Grande Prairie to Edmonton with a return through High Prairie and Peace River–Fairview.”

  “Again, I take it he was not assigned any duties on the morning of October 19?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And if he did not get a full night’s sleep on the evening of October 18, is there anything from the point of view of your company that you can give as a reason for that?”

  “Nothing in the operation at all that should have kept him from getting a proper rest,” Dale said.

  “So is it correct, Mr. Wells,” Bassie concluded, “Mr. Vogel did not have any flying duties with your company for the morning of October 17, the morning of October 18, the morning of October 19, 1984?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And is it also correct that for October 17, 18 and 19, he flew only in the afternoon?”

  “For assigned duties, that’s correct.”

  “On any of those days, October 16, 17, 18 or 19, did Mr. Vogel complain to you about being tired or fatigued?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Wells, is there any doubt that Mr. Vogel was the pilot-in-command … at the time of the fatal crash?”

  “There is no doubt whatsoever.”

  “He was the pilot-in-command at the time that aircraft took off?”

  “Yes.”

  “And as a pilot-in-command, is it not correct that he could have declined to depart if he so desired?”

  Dale’s answer was unwavering: “Yes, that’s correct.”

  During the inquiry, more than twenty witnesses would take the stand, including Larry, Paul and Scott. Mechanics, passengers and pilots—most former Wapiti employees—lined up behind Erik to admit that they, too, had experienced safety deficiencies. In the end, the inquest left many unanswered questions. For Erik, however, it had been a nightmare that was almost as bad as the crash itself.

  The four-day hearing ended on March 1, 1985. After his closing remarks, Chairman Deschenes announced that the RCMP and the St. John Ambulance Association of Canada wished to make a special presentation. Local RCMP Inspector Donald Webster stepped to the front of the room, a large framed certificate in hand, and called Scott Deschamps, sharply dressed in his navy RCMP uniform, to stand beside Paul. Scott beamed as Inspector Webster asked Paul to step forward. Then, in front of a flurry of flashes, the inspector presented him with a life-saving certificate.

  Paul smiled shyly as he accepted the award. “I’m very touched,” he said. “I only did what I had to do.”

  Receiving the award filled Paul with a kind of wonder. Never in his life had he been recognized for an accomplishment. When reporters finally finished questioning him, he slipped quietly out of the hearing room and stood alone beneath one of the hotel’s large second-floor windows. Paul held up the certificate, proudly examining it beneath the sunshine streaming brightly down.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked a reporter. It was Byron Christopher, who had been at the Slave Lake airport the day of the rescue and witnessed the two girls who’d just learned of their mother’s death. He’d met Paul two days later at the Grande Prairie courthouse.

  “I’m going to mail it to my father,” Paul said. “Maybe now he’ll be proud of me.”

  Though Paul hadn’t completely turned his life around, he felt like he was well on his way. When he’d returned to Grande Prairie a few weeks earlier, he’d sought out Sue Wink, the waitress at Corona Pizza with whom he’d been smitten. To his delight, instead of rebuffing his advances as she had when they’d worked together months before, she seemed to have had a change of heart. She looked at him differently, told him he’d grown up a lot. She even offered him a place to stay and their romance quickly blossomed. Paul recognized the stirrings of a happiness he hadn’t experienced for many years.

  As Paul’s life was looking up, Erik’s was headed in the opposite direction. He desperately wanted to put the crash and the public humiliation of the inquiry behind him. He might as well have wished for the moon. In June 1985, Transport Canada suspended his pilot’s licence. Families of the deceased filed a spate of lawsuits naming him, Wapiti Aviation and Transport Canada. The province of Alberta launched a fatality inquiry into the deaths of six passengers, which was scheduled to open on June 17 at the Grande Prairie courthouse, and subpoenaed Erik to appear. Mercifully for Erik, the inquiry was postponed due to a scheduling problem, sparing him the ordeal of testifying again so soon. It was rescheduled for late October, and hung over Erik like a threatening shadow.

  Downhearted, broke and unemployed, he needed desperately to put the crash behind him. Soon he would do just that, disappearing into the west coast wilderness with a man whose life he had almost ended.

  AFTERLIFE

  On Scott Deschamps’ release from hospital, he’d spent a month on medical leave in White Rock trying to take stock. Soon after that he told a reporter, “All of a sudden I was reborn a healthy twenty-eight-year-old with my whole life ahead of me. That experience definitely changed my outlook in the sense that I now have a greater appreciation of life.”

  Yet Scott didn’t know how to make sense of it all. In December, after the RCMP had denied his request for a transfer to the west coast, he’d returned to duty in Grande Prairie. The reality of being back at his job chafed at him. He’d initially coped by immersing himself in preparation for his inquiry testimony. He’d resurrected the laundry list of safety equipment he’d asked Erik about the night of the crash, which the plane hadn’t carried: flares, a first aid kit, an axe—anything that would have eased the physical ordeal he and the others had endured. But he kept coming back to the questions he couldn’t answer: What had he experienced on that snowy hillside as
he lay dying? What caused the apparition of the Old Man? Why had he been visible only to him?

  Scott was certain he wasn’t going to find the answers policing the streets of Grande Prairie. The day after his testimony at the CASB inquiry, he announced his decision to quit the RCMP.

  “During the crash I spent fourteen hours lying in the snow unable to move,” he told reporters outside Conference Room A. “That environment facilitated a time of reflection which prompted my decision. I’ve always wanted to go to university ever since I can remember and I’ve never done it. I was always working. Now I realize that life is so fragile. People talk about the right to life. I don’t talk about the right to life; I talk about the privilege it is to live because any one of us can be killed at any time. It is so easy and it happens so quick. So if you haven’t done the things that you’ve always wanted to do, it’s time to do them.”

  Several months after he made that statement, Scott found himself sitting in an office at a deserted Canada–US border crossing examining the passports of people with immigration issues. He’d landed the job as an immigration officer a week after returning to White Rock. During the two-month training period that had followed, he’d enrolled in a distance education program for a Bachelor of General Studies at Alberta’s Athabasca University. But still, none of these changes were enough to dispel his sense of urgency that life was passing him by.

  Scott momentarily closed his eyes, shutting out the glare of fluorescent lights from the ceiling above him. Outside, sparse streams of car headlights flared into night. It was past midnight and he felt restless. Constrained. He watched a set of headlights grow brighter until a car pulled up to the window of a nearby booth and the officer inside briefly checked the driver’s passport before waving him on. As the car’s red tail lights receded down the dark stretch of highway, Scott wondered: What am I doing wasting my time here?

  The truth was that he’d never had a deliberate plan for his life. After high school, he’d knocked on the door of a local youth detention center and they’d hired him on the spot. At the time, Scott had been proud of the fact that, at eighteen, he’d been the youngest corrections officer they’d ever hired. Because of his wilderness experience, he was soon asked to take young offenders into the bush to teach them essential life skills. Five years later, when Scott applied to the RCMP, the choice was more a matter of natural progression than passion. It suddenly occurred to him that his decision to become an immigration officer had been a mistake.

  Scott didn’t want to waste any more time sitting around doing insignificant things. He needed answers. He needed understanding that would make life feel purposeful again. Scott immediately began typing up a notice of resignation, which he laid on his boss’s desk at the end of his shift that night.

  Without the distraction of a job, Scott’s once well-ordered world began to unravel. The worst casualty was his marriage. He and Mary had been so young when they got together, their decision so impulsive. While the first few years of their marriage had been fine, it had been hard to maintain their relationship after Mary had left Grande Prairie for her job on the coast. Scott had hoped that quitting the RCMP and moving back to White Rock would solve things. But he’d been naïve. His experience the night of the crash had changed him profoundly and it seemed to him there was no going back—to his RCMP career, his unexamined life, or his relationship. A short time after leaving his immigration job, Scott ended his marriage.

  Though more than six months had passed since the accident, its reverberations continued to rock him. Those close to him were puzzled, expecting the young man who had always been grounded, reasonable and methodical to just get over it. But it wasn’t that simple. Questions—big questions—weighed on him. What was the vision he’d witnessed? Was it a miracle? A sign from the Creator? He had touched the face of death before the Old Man pulled him back from the brink. How could he get over it?

  According to the American psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton, the sense of being personally adrift is not uncommon among survivors of atrocious events. Having a near-death experience, survivors can close down and remain numb and incapacitated, or they can confront what has happened, opening out to a greater appreciation of life sharpened by the experience of survival. Though Scott didn’t fully understand it, he was being propelled toward the latter. Before he could begin a quest for greater wisdom, spirituality and understanding, however, he first had to deal with the decidedly earthly reality of being unemployed, single and homeless. Scott could think of only one person who could fully understand his state of mind. So in the spring of 1985, Scott Deschamps moved in with Erik Vogel.

  Moving day was grey and drizzly as Scott and Erik hauled Scott’s meagre belongings into Erik’s 800-square-foot bungalow, which he’d purchased during the two years he spent driving a bus before joining Wapiti. The house, located on Habgood Street just blocks from White Rock’s waterfront, was tiny, but fortunately for Erik, Scott had abandoned many of his material possessions along with his former life. However, he had hung on to one substantial piece of furniture, a massive, homemade butcher-block table. The two men strained under the weight of it as they dragged the solid slab of wood on legs into the cramped kitchen of Erik’s home.

  As the spring of 1985 rolled into a hot, dry restless summer, Scott and Erik found themselves hiking Canada’s rugged West Coast Trail. The 75-kilometre stretch of wilderness along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island—part of a treacherous coastline known to mariners as the Graveyard of the Pacific—is one of North America’s most gruelling treks. Ragged submerged rocks and giant, rolling breakers extend almost 30 kilometres offshore and, when combined with frequent and fierce storms, have been the demise of hundreds of large ships and tankers. Some say there is a wrecked ship for every mile of coast along the Graveyard of the Pacific.

  A stiff wind whipped large waves onto the southern stretch of that remote coastline as Scott and Erik trudged along its rocky shore. A strong and seasoned hiker, Scott had allotted just five days to traverse the entire West Coast Trail, a journey that typically took seven. It was late on the fourth day as the two men picked their way across a slippery sandstone rock shelf, their bodies straining under the weight of 27-pound backpacks. Offshore, one of a dozen shipwrecks they’d seen lay like a rusting corpse in the waning light.

  During the first three days, Scott and Erik had covered more than half the distance between Port Renfrew and the trail’s northern terminus in the tiny fishing village of Bamfield. Along the arduous trail, they’d encountered dozens of perilous coastal surge channels, hauled themselves high over running water in rudimentary cable cars, slogged through boggy, old-growth rainforest, crossed steep canyons on rickety foot bridges, and climbed up and down sheer green ravines on countless rough-hewn, wooden ladders. They’d encountered slugs the size of bananas and hoisted their food into trees each night to avoid attracting bears or cougars. But they had also witnessed spectacular vistas. The black dorsal fins of orcas cut the waves off the Pacific coast and eagles circled above, their white heads clearly visible against the blue sky. Sea lions lumbered clumsily on rocky offshore shelves, and tide pools teemed with life. The wild log-strewn beaches humbled them and the mossy glow of sunlight filtering through the forest’s giant, ancient foliage seemed otherworldly.

  For Scott, returning to the wilderness was like a homecoming. As a youngster, he had spent a lot of time in the bush with his dad, an avid outdoorsman. One of the few legacies Joseph Deschamps had left his son was a love of the outdoors. The two had spent many hours hunting and fishing together in the wilds surrounding their Delta home, and after his dad died, Scott had found a rare sense of connection and belonging in these untamed places that he had experienced nowhere else.

  It had been Scott’s idea to hike the West Coast Trail. He’d persuaded Erik that the two of them, carrying only light packs, could easily complete the trek. Erik had relented only after Scott promised him they wouldn’t starve. Contrary to his promise, Scott had packed
just a small shoebox-sized supply of food, and had jogged long stretches of the route, forcing Erik to keep up a punishing pace. Now, as they hiked a misty stretch of beach, their feet stuttering along the shell-strewn sand, Scott suddenly realized his priorities were very clear. He would search for an understanding of the miracle that had occurred the night of the crash, and he would complete the bucket list that he’d begun as he lay dying on that snowy hillside. He thought about what had seemed vitally important to him that night—getting a university degree, travelling, sailing the west coast, learning another language, running a marathon and just spending time outdoors doing things like this that made him feel vital and alive. As he strode on, the bucket list unfurled, solidified, one goal after the next, until it included all the things Scott wanted out of life.

  Though weary, Scott felt lightness return to his step when he and Erik finally rounded a long point of land and saw their campsite ahead. The sweeping curve of beach was strewn with enormous logs, and wisps of campfire smoke spiralled into the air. Offshore, the sun was melting like a fuzzy orange lozenge into the Pacific Ocean mist, and the gentle cascade of Tsusiat Falls whispered in the distance. Exhausted but happy, the two men reached the surprisingly busy campsite and dropped their packs on the sand. Other hikers had already claimed the higher ground, and after enjoying a wash in the falls’ cool water, Erik and Scott pitched their tent close to the shore.

  That night, as several hikers gathered together around a vigorous campfire, Scott shared his story of survival. The faces of those around the fire glowed with incredulity as he recounted the plane crash and long night in the wilderness. Beside him, Erik slumped grimly, but Scott didn’t seem to notice. Pointing to Erik, he concluded his tale with more good humour than he’d felt in many months: “This is the pilot who flew the plane.”