Into the Abyss (28 page)

He continued a kilometre southeast long the railway tracks, his running shoes crunching on the dry, pebble-strewn bed between the rails until he reached the road leading to their house. As he neared it, Paul turned up a back alley. Dandelions winked bright yellow along wooden fences and ahead he could see his yard. Paul loved approaching the house this way. Earlier that summer he’d pulled the weeds from the overgrown backyard, plowed the unruly quack grass and planted a huge garden. Entering the yard, he proudly surveyed the neat strips of green in front of him. Bushy arrows of carrots and radishes lined the near side of the garden bed, giving way to staked rows of peas and runner beans. Paul snapped a tender bean from its stalk and popped it into his mouth. He, Sue and the kids had recently begun eating from the garden and loved it. Paul had also built an outdoor barbeque out of brick and cooked many meals there.

As he bounded happily up the steps, Paul could hear Sue’s laugh coming from the kitchen. On either side of the steps, still-green tomatoes hung on the vine, plumping in the heat radiating from the back wall of the house. He pulled open the screen door to see her on the phone, her auburn hair a lovely contrast to the pale skin of her face, her cheeks flushed pink beneath the rims of huge round glasses. Catching sight of him, Sue quickly ended her call.

“Who were you talking to?” Paul asked. Something about the look on her face sent a knife of jealousy stabbing through him. Sue sometimes chatted with Scott Thorne, one of the local RCMP officers who often came by Corona Pizza after his shift. He was handsome, with a full head of dark hair and a thick moustache, both of which looked to Paul as if they’d been combed for hours. Unlike the other RCMP officers, with whom Paul got along fine, he didn’t like Thorne. Nor did Paul appreciate Thorne’s loud mouth or the way Paul thought he talked down to women. Most of all, however,
Paul didn’t like the way he and Sue flirted whenever they were together.

Paul felt a hot rage rising.

“
He’s just a good friend,” Sue insisted, but Paul had trouble believing her.

He slammed his palm hard against the door frame, turned, and stumbled back toward his garden. This time he stomped through the beds without regard for the tender shoots.

The unusually dry summer of 1985 gave way to fall. On the west coast, one morning after another dawned cloudless and clear, but Erik could not appreciate the good weather. His weeks unfolded in soul-destroying succession as he mowed lawns in the “projects” of Vancouver’s impoverished downtown east side. He ground out the days incessantly ruminating over the details of that fateful night. As he told a reporter at the time, “I spent the whole year trying to forget about it, but
I can’t go a day without thinking about it.”

His job ended and the anniversary of the crash came and went. Flying jobs remained non-existent. Though Erik’s pilot’s licence was no longer suspended, the high-profile nature of his crash firmly closed doors before he could even get a foot in. Erik had become a pariah in the aviation industry. He submitted applications to local firefighting units in the Lower Mainland and waited, trying desperately to bury the past.

It caught up with him on October 30, 1985. Though Erik had ignored the subpoena to appear at the rescheduled provincial fatality inquiry into Wapiti Flight 402, the courts hadn’t. The inquiry opened that day in Grande Prairie, with Judge Carl Rolf presiding. When he discovered that his key witness hadn’t bothered to show up, the judge immediately ruled Erik Vogel to be in contempt of court and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Unbeknownst to Erik, the warrant was only effective in Alberta, or he may well have ended up in jail. Still, he refused to attend the inquiry and found himself constantly looking over his shoulder, shuddering every time there was an unexpected knock at his door.

Friends urged Erik to testify.

“You’re making us look bad,” one of his former flying buddies told him.

In early November, Erik got a phone call from the Burnaby Fire Department asking him to come in for an interview. Dressed smartly in a suit and tie, Erik had impressed his interviewers. It wasn’t often that they got an experienced pilot looking for work as a firefighter. When one asked Erik if he could start training immediately, Erik sat up, his face earnest and alight with hope.

“Absolutely,” Erik replied.

The interviewer in the chair across from him leaned forward and fixed him with a level stare. “Before we offer you a position,” he said, “
do you have any issues with the law?”

Erik’s mouth went dry and he felt his stomach lurch. He’d vowed not to participate in another inquiry, especially one led by people who had nothing to do with aviation, but now the matter of an outstanding warrant could cost him the chance for a new career.

“Nothing I can’t clear up,” he said.

Erik returned to Grande Prairie in December 1985 to testify at the fatality inquiry. This time, however, his mission wasn’t to change the course of aviation safety, but to change his own life.

“I should not have been out that night,” Erik admitted in a media interview at the time. “The flight shouldn’t have left. I cut a corner, which I shouldn’t have done. I’m not proud of it. I know what I did was stupid. I was exhausted. I was tired. I was in a hurry.
I just did it.”

Erik unflinchingly accepted responsibility for his actions. When he finished his testimony and boarded a plane to fly out of Grande Prairie, he still carried a heavy burden of guilt, but for the first time since the crash, Erik felt like he might finally have a chance to begin again.

T
hough my father seemed to have put the crash behind him by the time I returned to Canada in late 1985, I knew it weighed on his mind. On more than one occasion he pondered his last-minute decision to give up his usual co-pilot’s seat after boarding Flight 402. What had prompted it? Why had he lived when others—colleagues, neighbours and constituents—had died? Was there divine intervention at play? These questions undoubtedly plagued him when he returned to the sombre atmosphere in the government chambers of the Alberta Legislature where Grant Notley’s high-backed leather chair sat empty. Colleagues don’t recall Dad talking much about the crash, but said he seemed unsettled for some time after it.

In spite of his highly visible public life, my dad was in many ways an intensely private man, seldom sharing his innermost feelings with anyone. He spoke little of the passengers who had died, but I know the question
Why not me?
surfaced every weekend back in High Prairie when he passed by the Peever home or saw Gordon’s widow, Virginia, or one of their children. He called Sandra Notley and Virginia Peever after the crash, but did not share details of those
conversations. Still, I had to wonder. Did the inexplicable reality of having survived strip the weight from his words of condolence, stretching them thin?

After his release from hospital, Dad also travelled north to the First Nations reserve of Atikameg to visit Elaine Noskeye’s husband and fourteen children. A devoted family man, Dad must have noticed that her absence filled every corner of their modest home, the uncertainty of a future without a wife and mother reflecting itself darkly in fifteen pairs of eyes.

The crash certainly cast a shadow on the periphery of his days and nights. For months afterward, my mom said, he awoke to nightmares and was haunted by the deaths of the other passengers—those he knew and those he didn’t. Randy Wright, his executive assistant, recalled a day the following spring when authorities delivered a box to his office at the Legislature. In it were possessions that had been retrieved from the crash site after the snow melted.

“Mr. Shaben asked me to look at it,” Randy told me. “
He couldn’t bring himself to examine the contents of that box.”

Nor did my dad seem eager to examine any debris the crash may have left within him. He hurled himself back into his political life. That included flying on Wapiti Aviation to and from High Prairie most weekends. Within a month of the accident the airline had been besieged with negative media, and locals had begun to call it
What-a-pity
. Dad knew Wapiti badly needed a public vote of confidence. He admitted being terrified to fly again, but he also understood how critical the airline’s passenger service was to people in the isolated communities of northern Alberta. He and Grant had fought hard for that service and Dad wasn’t going to turn his back on it. He confided to Randy that there was another, more private reason. “
I had to prove to myself that I hadn’t lost my nerve.” So, as was his way, stoically and with little fanfare, Dad got back on a plane.

He demonstrated the same unwavering approach to political service. Regardless of any turmoil or uncertainties he experienced, outwardly he appeared patient, purposeful and exquisitely rational. He was devoted to his constituents and worked hard, especially for the disadvantaged, Métis and First Nations communities in his riding, improving infrastructure and ensuring they had drinking water, new roads and schools, and improved television transmission. Minister of Housing at the time, he tackled a faltering government program that provided new homes for needy rural Albertans, including off-reserve Métis and Treaty families. The program had been beset with problems such as vandalism and property damage, theft of construction equipment and late or delinquent mortgage repayment. Dad supported a monumental change to the program: offering construction skills and training to eligible housing recipients, then engaging them in building their own homes. Almost immediately, theft and vandalism ceased, upkeep dramatically improved and mortgage payments arrived on time and without interruption. As an added benefit, the residents’ newly acquired skills resulted in improved employment opportunities.

“It was about restoring peoples’ pride and sense of responsibility,” he told me.

Sometime in the summer of 1985, Dad had a surprise visit from Paul Archambault. Paul had been in Edmonton to see his brother Michael and decided to pop in to the Alberta Legislature. I imagine Paul standing awestruck—as I had been when I first visited my dad there—in front of the turn-of-the-century stone building’s soaring bell-shaped dome and stately columned wings. Inside the main doors, the Legislature is even more impressive, with an intimidating rotunda made almost entirely of gleaming white marble. The floor shines like
ice as sober-faced men and women in dark suits rush across it, the click of their heels echoing in the expansive space.

In the middle of the rotunda is an enormous circular fountain, and the sound of cascading water is everywhere. Paul’s mouth must have hung open as he craned to look at the ornate balconies perched atop massive marble pillars that rise more than a hundred feet toward a pale blue ceiling high above. Until that moment it’s likely that he hadn’t thought of Dad as anything other than a fellow survivor. Now Paul probably wondered uncertainly if it was right to just drop in on him.

“Call me,” Dad had said, and Paul had done so on several occasions. Their talks had been easy and filled with banter. When they’d met again in person at the inquiry, Dad had given him his business card and invited Paul to visit him anytime he was in Edmonton.

Paul made his way up to the fourth floor’s wide mezzanine overlooking the lobby, circling it until he found the wing of offices he was looking for. The door marked 403, large and made of solid dark wood, hid a suite of offices assigned to the Minister of Housing and his staff. Paul pushed it open and entered a spacious outer chamber with several desks and a small seating area. An attractive dark-haired woman looked up at him.

“Yes?” she asked, a note of wariness in her voice.

“I’m here to see Larry,” Paul said.

Her eyebrows shot up. In his office and at the Legislature, everyone except his elected colleagues called him
Mister
Shaben or
Minister
Shaben or
The Honourable
Larry Shaben.

“Is he expecting you?”

“Sure.”

Upon hearing Paul’s response, two other women sitting at nearby desks looked up. As Paul began shifting his weight nervously from one foot to another, a lanky redhead about his own age, neatly dressed
in a suit and tie, emerged from an office door. Randy Wright. The receptionist cast him a quick, questioning look.

“He told me to drop in any time,” Paul said.

“What’s your name, please?” the woman asked.

“Paul Archambault.”

Now all eyes were overtly on him in surprise and recognition, but Paul was probably too uncomfortable to notice.

“Please take a seat, Mr. Archambault,” the receptionist said kindly. “I’ll let Mr. Shaben know you’re here.”

Paul dropped stiffly into a chair, absently fiddling with the loose watchstrap around his wrist, as he was in the habit of doing when uncomfortable or distracted. Then a door at the end of the chamber opened and my father emerged. Randy recalls how his face lit up when he saw Paul. Dad came over to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He asked the receptionist to hold his calls before guiding Paul into his private office and closing the door.
Not many people had that kind of one-on-one access.

Dad remembered that first visit as an especially happy one. Paul clutched his now-finished manuscript. Dad was surprised at the size of it, half-an-inch thick, dozens of handwritten pages in neat block letters. On the title page were the words:
They Called Me a Hero
.

“You should let me read it,” Dad said, full of curiosity.

“No.” Paul looked sheepish. “I’m still working on it.”

Talk had then turned to happy news. Despite their sometimes tumultuous relationship, Paul and Sue had gotten engaged.

Dad was overjoyed. He’d met Sue briefly during the CASB inquiry the previous spring, and saw immediately that Paul was smitten with her. Paul’s stunning reversal of fortune heartened him. So many of my father’s days were shadowed by difficulty. The recent collapse of the oil and gas industry, on which Alberta relied, had brought crushing hardships to the people he’d been elected to serve. Just after he’d
been appointed to the Cabinet in 1982, the bottom had fallen out of the housing market as interest rates soared to more than twenty percent. People who had flocked to the province to service the booming oil industry found themselves unable to pay mortgages they’d secured with five-percent down payments. Many simply left. Houses were abandoned and scores of commercial properties lay empty.