Into the Abyss (34 page)

“It’s not about my relationship with Joanne,” he would later reflect, “but the relationship of our extended families into the future. That’s what it’s about. It’s the connectedness of that extended family.
I never had that connectedness before.”

The final piece in the puzzle of Scott’s life would not fall as easily into place. Complete comprehension of the events on the night of the crash, including the presence of the Old Man, continued to elude him. In 1999 he completed a Master’s Degree in Liberal Arts, during which he delved into the phenomena of miracles and angels. Though not religious, in a paper that would form the basis of his graduate thesis Scott wrote:

In the years since that experience, there had been only one occasion when Scott felt he might have revisited the realm of miracles. It happened one summer while sailing the remote inside passage of northern Vancouver Island. In 1992, he’d finally won the lawsuit he’d launched against Wapiti after the crash, and with the settlement, he’d purchased
Tanoo
, a twenty-eight-foot sailboat.

A gentle wind filled the sails. Scott sheeted in the main and jib and, with satisfaction, felt
Tanoo
heel and dig in. The rugged beauty of Blackfish Sound surrounded him: breathtaking snowcapped peaks and white-tipped blue waters. As his boat raced on the wind, Scott glanced astern. There, moving fast and directly toward him was the vertical six-foot-high dorsal fin of an orca. The whale’s massive black blade sliced the water, drawing rapidly nearer until it was no more than ten feet astern. Then the fin submerged. Scott held his breath. A moment later, the orca surfaced three feet off the boat’s port beam. For several long heartbeats the whale and Scott locked eyes. Then, with a huge wallop of its fluked tail, the orca dove, splashing Scott as it disappeared into the depths.

As Scott sat speechless, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Old Man had just paid him a visit in the form of the orca. And why not? The West Coast First Nations spoke of the oneness of earth’s creatures and believed that animals could supernaturally change their appearance at will to take on a human form and vice versa. All Scott knew for certain was that he was overcome with the same profound sense of peace and reassurance he had felt that long-ago winter night when life had begun anew.

My father’s efforts to begin anew would not go as smoothly. True to his word, he’d severed his political ties and moved into a modest office west of Edmonton’s city centre. Together with a few associates, he’d
launched a consulting company and set out to do what he’d done so successfully in government: bring possibilities to life. From the outset, however, the business floundered.

“He felt let down with opportunities as a private citizen,” said his former executive assistant, Lindsay Cherney, who kept in close contact with my dad after he left politics. “He tried to help others and to get ideas off the ground, but discovered that
he couldn’t do in business what he’d been able to as a Cabinet minister.”

My brother Larry also recalls that period of struggle. “His focus was on creating value rather than making money,” he said, adding that our father’s values often put him at odds with others involved in his business ventures. “When he connected with someone, his commitment was unwavering.
If things got difficult, he persevered, and when others didn’t follow through, he was disappointed.”

Within a few years, many of those upon whom my father thought he could rely had failed him, and the supporters and acquaintances who’d once clamoured for his attention had moved on. I remember visiting him once in his modest, off-the-beaten-track office. It contained a cheap-looking desk, a couple of metal and leather straight-backed office chairs, a bookshelf, a filing cabinet and a stack of unsightly cardboard boxes. The walls were depressingly unadorned. When the phone rang, he answered it himself: “Shaben World Enterprises.” He didn’t have a computer at the time, and penned his letters in a wobbly script—the result of a pronounced tremor he had developed—then faxed his correspondence to a typist who worked from home. It was crushing to witness.

The year was 1994 and my dad was financially strapped and, though he’d never admit it, deeply disillusioned. It was around that time, according to Cherney, that he began to unpack the boxes he’d brought with him when he’d left the Legislature six years earlier. Inside were old files, memorabilia from his sixteen years in politics, and pictures
of his family. As he opened the boxes and started sifting through their contents, my father also began taking stock of his life.

He reflected on the decade he’d lived since the crash. What had he done to repay God for the gift of life? Among the items he pulled from the boxes were photographs of his wife and children, and his father, Albert, who had come to Canada almost a century earlier as an immigrant Muslim boy. Albert, though he couldn’t speak English when he immigrated, had gone on to become a leader in his community. Dad realized that the values his father had instilled in him, and that still guided him—charity, tolerance, seeking consensus in decision making, even his
reluctance to charge interest on money others borrowed from him—were deeply rooted in his faith. His religion, his family and his roots in the Arab community were an essential part of him. Why then, he wondered, had he put them all aside?

On a Friday afternoon not long after that day, I recall my dad telling me he’d attended Friday prayers at Edmonton’s Al-Rashid Mosque. I was shocked, as I couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so. The mosque he visited wasn’t the understated red brick building where he’d spent his youth celebrating holy days and learning how to
dance the
dabke
in the basement. This was a gleaming modern structure with a soaring white minaret and clean, modern lines. In the time Dad had been living in High Prairie and then immersed in his political career, the Edmonton Muslim community had grown from a handful of largely Lebanese families to more than twenty thousand diverse members. There were many faces my father didn’t recognize. But many members recognized him as he entered the large open prayer area and knelt on the carpet. Sunlight filtered through the high surrounding windows and the melodious chant of the imam’s voice filled the air as my father, shoulder to shoulder with others, bent to pray. When prayers ended, many in the room came to say hello. A quiet buzz about his presence filled the mosque. Men
shook his hand, welcomed him and sought his counsel. My father felt as if he’d come home.

Over the next few years, he would continue to attend Friday prayers, even complete the Haj—Islam’s sacred pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia—and to reflect deeply about his purpose in life. But it would be external events, rather than his religious devotion and quiet musings that would set him on his final path.

At two in the morning on Halloween night, 2000, Sol Rolingher, the incoming president of Edmonton’s Beth Shalom Synagogue, received a phone call from police. Their news was unsettling: a fire was burning inside Edmonton’s largest synagogue. Rolingher dressed quickly and rushed to the building.

“Kids were running up and down the streets in costumes.
There was a lot of yelling and partying going on,” he recalled.

The fire department had doused the fire by the time he arrived and Rolingher was content to dismiss the incident as a random act by Halloween hooligans until police discovered an unlit Molotov cocktail on the ground outside the building. The perpetrator clearly had intended to throw a second incendiary device when something had gone wrong.

Following a hunch, the police began to search local hospital emergency departments. At one of them, they found a youthful, dark-haired man with a badly burned arm. The young Arab, who spoke little English, had recently arrived in Canada from the Middle East. Police charged him and he was released on bail. He subsequently disappeared.

“All hell broke loose in the Jewish community,” Rolingher said. He went to the police who reassured him that the accused had probably fled the country, but the community was not mollified. A lawyer by
profession, Rolingher was accustomed to solving problems. This time, however, he was at a loss.

“I didn’t know Edmonton’s Muslim community,” he said, “but I did know Larry Shaben.” The two men had met at various political functions. Rolingher picked up the phone. “I don’t know where to turn,” he told my dad.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Dad promised. What my father ended up finding the following year, inside a small mosque in the city’s north, was the accused himself. Dad and other members of the Muslim community brought him to a meeting with Rolingher in June 2001. Rolingher remembers my father saying to the young man, who had grown up amid the violence and hatred in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “That may be the way they do things there, but it’s not the way we do things in Canada.” The twenty-one-year-old later apologized to the Jewish community, paid for the damages and faced charges.

“My community owes you a debt of gratitude,” Rolingher told my dad after that meeting. “You can count on me.”

Three months later, Dad would.

On September 11, 2001, two jetliners slammed into New York’s World Trade Center. My father immediately knew that the backlash against the Muslim community would be swift and devastating. As it was, the media often portrayed Muslims in a negative light and the actions of a radical few, like the misguided youth Dad had helped bring to justice, hadn’t helped. Now with a Muslim terrorist group identified as the perpetrator of an unspeakable atrocity, my father feared the worst.

Rolingher was quick to understand the repercussions.

“I can’t imagine what you’re about to go through,” he told Dad that afternoon. The two men agreed to draft a statement to release to the media the next day. To their surprise, every media outlet in the
city was interested in their announcement, which condemned the attacks and offered sympathy to the victims. In addition, the Jewish and Muslim leaders pledged to “respect each other’s faiths, traditions and institutions and continue to work together.” It concluded: “To this end those present have reached an accord to meet on a regular basis to
continue a dialogue of mutual support and peace.” The news release was signed by the presidents of both Edmonton synagogues, the president of its largest mosque, and by one private citizen, Larry Shaben. As a result of these actions, Edmonton would become one of the only major cities in Canada after 9/11 where there was no significant backlash against Muslims. My father would also discover a way to put his values into action and to fulfill his commitment to make a positive difference with the years he’d been given.

The dialogue that my father and Sol Rolingher began between their communities would rapidly spread to include the Edmonton Police Service Hate Crime Unit as well as the city’s Catholic community. The four parties soon formed the Phoenix Multi-Faith Society whose goal was fostering understanding and respect for all faiths and eliminating negative stereotypes, bias and prejudice. The initiative would be widely lauded, eventually garnering attention from the International Police Service, who later presented Edmonton’s police department with an award for its commitment to civil rights.

While interfaith dialogue was important to my father, he knew that serious dialogue was also needed within his community. From a handful of Lebanese families and a single, tiny mosque that had welcomed everyone, including Greeks, Jews and other minorities, Edmonton’s Muslim community now worshipped in half a dozen mosques across the city. Its followers, comprised of more than fifty diverse ethnic backgrounds, belonged to different sects that were at times openly hostile to one another.

My father understood that if he were to fight racism and stereotypes
against Muslims, he would first have to bring his fractured community together. In late 2001, he invited the leaders of Edmonton’s various mosques and Muslim communities to a meeting that has since become legendary. It is likely that a man of lesser stature would not have succeeded in bringing such a group of Muslims together. And it is almost certain that no one else could have gotten away with the ground rules my father imposed on the participants that day.

“Park your ego at the door,” he told them. “
Treat each other with utmost respect and resist the temptation to lecture.”

That conversation marked the start of what would become the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, an umbrella organization of Muslim groups, mosques and communities whose mission was to eliminate acts of racism against Muslims and promote a deeper understanding of Islam. Its values embodied the dream of a better society—one that embraced humility, respect, non-violence, honour, diversity, integrity, honesty, fairness, teamwork and collaboration.

These values were grounded in Islam itself and guided by the hand of a man who understood what was possible when people set aside their differences and worked collectively. It was a lesson my father had learned from his family, his faith and his fellow survivors.

I
n October 2004, Larry Shaben descended on an escalator to the arrivals area of the Vancouver International Airport. Tucked inside his shirt pocket was a folded copy of an e-mail he’d received from Erik Vogel a week earlier.
Don’t worry about recognizing us, it said, we’ll be the ones grinning like idiots.

Almost twenty years to the day after the crash of Wapiti Aviation Flight 402, Larry arranged one of the most significant meetings of his life: a reunion of the survivors.