Into the Abyss (22 page)

“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:

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.