Into the Abyss (35 page)

“It felt like something that needed to be done,” he said.

He was just shy of his seventieth birthday and sported a fringe of gray hair around his balding head. His face had softened into a kind, fleshy roundness and his olive skin was speckled with age spots. His brown eyes appeared enormous behind thick glasses and his smile was warm and easy. Larry seemed to have grown into the nickname Paul Archambault had privately given him so many years before: Mr. Magoo.

He was dressed in faded jeans and a pale blue cotton shirt, a far cry from the power suits of his days as a high-profile politician. A bulge of
stomach protruded over his cinched brown belt, testimony to his wife’s good cooking. Larry stepped gingerly from the escalator and walked toward the automatic doors that opened to the baggage claim area.

“Larry!” a voice boomed from the other side as the frosted glass doors slid open. Then he saw them—Erik Vogel and Scott Deschamps, the only other remaining survivors of that long-ago tragic night. The pilot, whom Larry remembered as being little more than a boy, was tall and still handsome. He’d filled out since those days, and the haunted look that Larry remembered was nowhere to be seen on his smiling face. He looked like a man you could trust your life to. He wore black jeans and a green polo shirt with the insignia of the Burnaby Fire Department clearly visible on his broad chest. His brown hair was cut short and he continued to sport a bushy moustache.

Standing next to him, and a full head shorter, was Scott Deschamps. Erik had picked him up at the ferry terminal earlier that day and together they had driven to the airport to meet Larry’s flight. Scott and Erik had kept in touch over the years. Not long before Scott moved away from the city, he’d called on his friend for a last-minute favour.

“I’m putting together a birthday party for my daughter and I need a pony,” Scott told him.

“When?” Erik asked.

“Tomorrow.”

The former pilot hadn’t missed a beat. “What time?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

The next day, according to Scott, Erik had pulled up at his house with a trailer carrying his pony, Peaches.

On the day of the reunion, Scott wore beige chinos and a button-down dark green shirt. Though less the Adonis than Larry remembered, at
forty-eight Scott still appeared fit and youthful. His thick auburn hair was shot through with gray and his eyes were sparkling. As promised, both men were grinning like idiots.

They approached Larry as if two days rather than two decades had passed. “There was not a trace of awkwardness,” Larry remembered.

Without hesitation, the men traded hugs instead of handshakes. Larry’s suitcase slid down the ramp and Erik plucked it deftly from the carousel. Conversation flowed easily as they made their way outside to Erik’s car. They drove to a nearby restaurant where they settled knee-to-knee around a small table. As they ordered drinks and waited for lunch, they joked about the changes time had wrought in their appearances and their lives.

“Each of us was interested in what the others had gone through and each had completely different experiences,” Larry would later recall.

By then Erik had eighteen years of firefighting under his belt and had recently achieved the rank of lieutenant with the Burnaby Fire Department. He pulled out a small, bugle-shaped brass lapel pin and gave it to Larry. It was the pin the department had given to Erik when he’d received his promotion. The gesture moved Larry greatly.

“I’ve become ‘Mr. Safety’ at the fire station,” Erik said, lightening the mood. “Most of the guys think I’m totally anal.”

He’d achieved the highest levels possible in Industrial First Aid and as a First Responder, was a certified CPR instructor with both St. John Ambulance and the Red Cross, and had trained with the Coast Guard and the Vancouver Fire Department’s fire boat program. He’d also trained in high-angle rescue, which equipped him to extricate injured or trapped victims in environments ranging from tower cranes and bridges to building shafts and steep slopes. In his off hours, Erik still drove eighteen-wheelers.

“I’m certified to drive, fly or boat anything now,” he quipped, adding, “
it never seems like enough.”

Scott had returned to law enforcement and was working with the criminal justice department. “I still do what I used to do,” he explained, “because that’s what I was trained for. But I do it differently.
I’m not the black-and-white, rigid, career-driven, typical kick-down-the-door cop that I was.”

In 2002, Scott and his family had abandoned the hectic crush of the city for the quiet coast of Vancouver Island. “I’m not grinding it out in Vancouver,” he said, describing his life as peaceful.

Scott had grown close to his half-sister over the years and the two had spoken by phone every two weeks. Not long after Joanne’s first visit to Canada, Scott had travelled to Bulawayo where he’d met his nieces and Joanne’s four half-brothers, who had taken him hunting on the African savannah. He’d since become very close to Joanne’s daughters, with whom he corresponded regularly.

A year after the survivors’ reunion, Joanne fell ill. One of her daughters called Scott and he returned to Africa, this time to be at his sister’s bedside during her final days. “I had her for five years,” he said, his voice full of gratitude. “Even better than the relationship I had with her is the relationship I have with her daughters and granddaughters. I have little grandnieces that are the same age as my own children.”

Larry had continued to dedicate himself to philanthropic and volunteer work. He was now a pillar of the Muslim community, a voice for interfaith tolerance and understanding, and a tireless champion for future generations of Muslims. He had helped raise money to build an Islamic school in Edmonton, and would later be instrumental in establishing Canada’s first academic chair in Islamic studies at the University of Alberta—a post intended to increase knowledge of Islam’s rich intellectual and cultural heritage and its relationship with other societies and faiths. Through his work with the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, he also established
an annual dinner held after Ramadan—the month of the Islamic calendar during which Muslims the world over refrain from eating and drinking during daylight hours, and focus on increasing charitable contributions to others. The dinner was not intended to feed members of the Muslim community, but instead to provide a free, family-style meal to one thousand needy residents of Edmonton’s inner city.

Larry did not limit his volunteerism to his own community. He served on the boards of numerous non-profit societies working to improve the lives of the less fortunate. One of those non-profits was Homeward Trust, an organization with a mandate particularly close to his heart: ending homelessness. So instrumental were Larry’s efforts to create safe, secure and affordable housing for Alberta’s homeless that the organization would later create an award in his memory. Called the Larry Shaben Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Housing Sector, the annual award now recognizes individuals “highly committed to working in the housing sector,
who promote or develop housing or related services and who are passionate about what they do.”

By the time the food arrived, talk at the reunion had turned from the present to the long night the men had shared two decades earlier.

“You never sat down the whole time,” Erik asked Larry. “Why?”

“My tailbone was sore.” Larry did not say broken, as if such specifics were somehow trivial.

Erik and Scott reminded him of how he’d wanted to walk out of the bush that night, and how it had taken Paul’s physical restraint and every bit of persuasion they possessed to stop him. They could now laugh at the fact that Larry wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving if he’d left the crash site that night.

Scott recalled the stream of colourful jokes Paul had rattled off to entertain them during their ordeal. Though they did not speak of his death, the tragic end of the man who had helped keep them all alive hovered on the edge of the reunion. Paul was the one who had the shortest distance to fall and the farthest to climb. His spectacular rise to heroism had given each of them hope during the difficult years in which they all struggled; proof that something truly good could come of a terrible tragedy. Now the survivors knew that each of their lives was both a journey of discovery and privilege. Between them there was also an unspoken understanding of the lucky fact that they sat here together.

Toward the end of the meal, Larry reminded Erik and Scott of the question he’d asked in the darkest hour of the night, when the survivors thought the rescue planes had abandoned them: “What would you wish for if you could have anything in the world right now?”

For Erik, it had been a cold drink, for Larry, a hot bath. He recalled that Paul had wanted a joint. That recollection made them laugh.

Scott didn’t remember his wish that night, but Larry recalled it for him. “You said, ‘
I would like to take my wife in my arms and apologize to her and tell her yes, we can have a child.’ ”

Scott, who now had two children who were more important to him than anything else in the world, knew that the night of the crash had been a rebirth. “My whole life changed in an instant,” he said. “When I get unfocused, or fuzzy in my priorities, or stressed, disappointed or out of sorts, I just have to take my mind back to that time and things become clear. Clarity of thought comes when you’re lying on a mountain, dying. That’s when you’re honest, authentically pure in your thoughts.
Not too many people have that experience.”

Erik and Larry understood. In their own ways, they had both continued to honour the experience. Every October 19, Erik would take the day off work. Larry would send an e-mail to his fellow survivors
letting them know he was thinking about them and reminding them how lucky they were to be alive.

“Every year on that day I wonder what good I’ve accomplished in the extra years I’ve been given,” Larry said.

For each survivor this was the indelible mark of that night—not one to be found in the groove of scars on Larry’s shins where the metal of the seat had cut into his flesh, or the bump on Scott’s head that never went away, or Erik’s arthritic hands. The true mark of that tragedy was who they had become and how they lived their lives each and every day.

Conversation dropped off as the waitress arrived to clear the dishes. Larry’s coffee cup clattered against the table as his now unsteady hands set it down.

“This was a good idea,” he said. “We should do it again.”

Erik seconded the suggestion. Although he didn’t admit it at the time, he’d been nervous about the reunion. “It was much more comfortable talking about it than I imagined it would be,” he wrote in an e-mail to Larry two days later.

The twenty-year reunion of the plane crash would be the last time the three men would meet. Four years later, before they had an opportunity to make good on their promise to reunite, Larry Shaben, at the age of seventy-three, died of cancer. Two days before his death, Erik wrote him a final e-mail:

Every October 19, on the anniversary of the crash of Wapiti Aviation Flight 402, Erik Vogel continues to take the day off work. He e-mails Scott Deschamps and, if the day is warm and sunny, he thinks not just of the tragedy, but also of its survivors, their transfigured lives, and that memorable reunion twenty years later. That late-autumn day, when Erik, Larry and Scott finally emerged from the restaurant, the sky was a bright, brittle blue, and the sunlight was warm on their faces. Just out of sight and not far to the west was the Vancouver airport. Above the hum of city traffic, Erik could just make out the distinct pitch of powerful engines starting up. Slowly they revved to life, the sound growing from a whisper to a whine, and finally to a roar as an airplane thundered down the runway, lifted from the ground and took flight.

Diane K. Osbon,
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, 24.

1
“In the words of Campbell”: Diane K. Osbon,
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, 22.

2
“A major investigative report on Canadian aviation incidents between 2000 and 2005”: Robert Cribb, Fred Vallance-Jones, Tamsin McMahon, “Collision Course,”
Toronto Star
, June 3, 2006.

Epigraph: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, as translated from
Epistolae Morales ad Lucilum, (Moral Letters or Epistles to Lucilius)
, letter 70, number 14.

1
“any passengers headed for High Prairie”: Interview with Larry Shaben, October 10, 2004.

2
“I’ll tell you what … if we can’t land”: Ibid.

3
“Gordon had planned to take the bus”: Interview with Bob Nazar, June 11, 2012. Nazar drove Gordon Peever to Edmonton the day of the crash.

4
“Watch me”: Interview with Scott Deschamps, December 5, 2007.

5
“if there is any trouble, the full force of the RCMP will be on you”: Ibid.

6
“ ‘Wapiti 402,’ a voice squawked into his headset”: D. L. Abbott, Aviation Safety Bureau, Investigation Division, Edmonton Municipal Air Traffic Control tower tape recording, November 6, 1984, 2.