We had shared a great deal concerning our respective pasts. I don’t believe we ever told each other a lie. I belatedly acknowledged that we must have withheld at least as much as we shared. I know I had. Only a sociopath would offer up his entire, unedited self to a friend for inspection. A part of me felt the impulse to track down people who had known him, question them for what they remembered of him, see what details I could ferret out to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle, the pieces he had shielded from me, or simply not got around to sharing. But in a way I could not exactly articulate, I thought this might dishonor the friendship we had forged.
Or maybe I was just scared off because I had undertaken such a project on the life of my brother, sifting the wreckage of his suicide, hunting the secrets, and I didn’t want to repeat the process. Once was enough. It was too spooky, with too many booby traps lying in wait. John made so many connections, showing different versions of himself to different people. A few of them sought me out after I eulogized him in the local newspaper, to tell me he had touched them in some way. It felt appropriate to allow those connections to spark or scatter as they would, unhunted by my forensic snooping into his many facets. Just as we would scatter his ashes here and there. Just as I would one day be scattered too.
IT WOULD TAKE ME another two years, but I did eventually go poking into the story of the kids and the plane crash, and the perils appeared immediately. Everyone I talked to had a view on the what and why of it, and half the people I reached out to told me they just couldn’t talk about it. More than one person warned me against writing about it at all. It remained an emotional live wire, and even some who were willing to open up came to view me as a vulture or a voyeur, despite my effort to proceed with sensitivity. Who am I to say they were wrong? It has been the fate of more than one man to become rather too obsessed with death when, in the middle of the journey, he enters a dark wood.
A few conversations with friends and acquaintances were all it took to reveal that people’s judgments on the crash were visceral, vehement, and largely dependent on pre-existing relationships. Some believed the crash a fluke of bad weather and bad timing and bad luck, and any suggestion to the contrary a vindictive effort to isolate a scapegoat. Others believed the crash a preventable mistake because the flight itself was a preventable mistake: arranged outside a structure of oversight that might have provided some check on its improvisational nature, and instigated by men who acted more from the dictates of their own egos than from concern for the safety of other people’s children. In the messy struggle over the tragedy’s meaning, there was a tendency for people to end up crouched in postures of mutual mistrust.
Given the nature of the mission—not just the flight but the mission of the school more generally—the crash raised questions about the risks associated with experiential learning, and whether the school had the right procedures in place to manage those risks. In one of the first official statements about the crash, a school administrator insisted that the flight was “not a school-sponsored trip.” To many people, me included, those words had a funny smell to them.
The flight had been arranged on school grounds, by a teacher, in order to further a school project for which the students received a letter grade and internship credit. None of that was in dispute. To say that the flight had not been “sponsored” by the school may have been technically accurate—but one could argue that was precisely the problem.
The very nature of experiential education requires heightened vigilance. Allowing kids experiences in the world inherently carries more risk than lecturing at them in a classroom. Given the increased risk of, say, a backpacking trip in the Wilderness—an annual ritual at the school and one that had gone awry more than once, when kids got lost after separating from their chaperone or got trapped on the wrong side of the river by floodwaters—teachers and administrators had a joint obligation to weigh the dangers and seek ways to minimize them.
Risk can never be eliminated, of course, nor would we want it to be. Most experiences worth having risk something, even if it’s just our pride or our comfort. But in the realm of experiential education done by the book, it was far from ideal for one teacher to plan an outing in the morning and execute it that same afternoon, without any oversight by others, when among the risks of the outing was death.
In a different world, all the principal parties might have come together and engaged in a good-faith attempt to understand what had happened, and why, in the crash that took four lives. The school might have taken the lead, initiating an effort by which everyone involved sought to understand everyone else, and all shouldered a measure of responsibility, of varying heft. People skilled in directing such efforts—professional conflict mediators—existed in the community, but their expertise was not called upon, because we do not live in that world. We live in a world of liability insurance, “forward-thinking solutions,” and lawyers who work in an adversarial system of justice. We live in a world where to admit a mistake is to unilaterally disarm in the struggle for control of the narrative.
By appearing to distance themselves from the crash, school officials gave an impression that, as one person with long association there told me, “they didn’t want to autopsy the accident, they wanted to tweak their policies to avoid future accidents,” as if those two things could be decoupled. The three sets of parents would come to the conclusion that they had no choice but to sue, in order to ensure that painful but necessary autopsy.
In settling the case before it went to trial, aware the outcome was a foregone conclusion, the school agreed to pay the maximum allowable under state law: $750,000 split equally among the families of the children. The estate of Dr. Hochla paid an additional, undisclosed sum. The school also issued a letter of reprimand to Steve Blake; offered a formal apology to the families, acknowledging the school’s failure to vet the flight; and agreed to an examination of its risk-management policies by an outside professional.
For the parents, it hadn’t been about vengeance. They cared about the school. They believed in experiential education. Even after the accident, the Mahls intended to enroll the youngest of their three sons there. Above all, they wanted an assurance that the experiences he would be offered had been carefully thought through ahead of time.
In my reading of the depositions generated by the lawsuit, the fundamental question appeared to revolve around a case of mission-completion bias that started long before Dr. Hochla tried to land his plane. The mission took on a sense of urgency for several reasons, including denial by the Forest Service of the eco-monitors’ other attempts to see the burn—but mostly because it was the very last day of the school year. With time to mull it over, assess the risks involved, and consider various options, school personnel might have chosen a charter company that specialized in such trips. That would have offered them the assurance of a plane and a pilot subjected to—in the words of the commercial pilot Don Lewis—rigorous maintenance requirements, training standards, proficiency requirements, a mandatory drug testing program, and safety management system, the gold standard for taking private citizens on sight-seeing missions.
Even if they had opted to use Dr. Hochla and his plane, it would have been vastly preferable for more than one person to oversee the details of the flight. Dr. Hochla and Steve Blake had promised the parents they would cancel if the weather turned bad, which it did. Steve Blake deferred to Dr. Hochla’s judgment that the weather was good enough; Dr. Hochla was the pilot, after all. But involving others with a less personal attachment to the pilot might have prevented the plane from ever leaving the ground with those kids aboard.
I dreaded reaching out to Blake, a feeling reinforced when the first three people I asked refused to share his phone number with me. Those closest to him formed a protective circle after the crash, so I only heard about him secondhand, and anyway I feared I knew too well his situation, for I had once lived it myself: that of the man who had found himself guilty of a crime of neglect and was living out a sentence that
denied him a parole into happiness.
Four weeks before her death, Ella Myers wrote in her eco-monitor journal: This year Steve taught me probably one of the most important lessons there is without even really meaning to. I came to realize from observation that Steve is a truly happy person. This is something quite rare indeed. He doesn’t look for external happiness in the products we buy, or the people we surround ourselves with, nor the place where we are… No, it’s a happiness that extends from within, and this happiness, though very hard to find, is often the most fulfilling.
Since this realization, I’ve made it a priority to stop my endless searching for external happiness and realize that I’m alive… experiencing the insanity of a reality shaped by the ones within it.
This is perhaps one of the greatest lessons of all. Thank you Steve.
Those words echoed others I had heard about just how much Blake had been respected and loved by his students.
When I did finally call and schedule a visit, Blake graciously welcomed me into his home for a beautiful dinner of roasted chicken and salad with homemade mozzarella, courtesy of his wife, Denise. Afterward he led me on a hike out his back door, into the foothills of the Pinos Altos Range, that place of death and solace both. He told me that he alone took responsibility for the decision to put the kids on that plane, and that it still haunted him every single day. “You go through life thinking you’re a force for good, a net positive in the world, working with students, mentoring them, and then one day you wake up and realize you might never get back to zero,” he said. He had grappled with the sort of regret most of us cannot imagine, been on a journey whose contours we can only guess. His dreams, at least the ones he remembered, could not stop replaying images of airplanes.
If I had been John I’d have given him a hug, but we both knew the reason I was there. For the sake of a partial accounting of events in the life of the place we called home, I was going to expose to a community of readers the one decision in his own life he wished he could undo. I felt terrible about this, but he made no complaint—and even appeared to view our awkward meeting as the potential beginning of a friendship, not merely a one-off dictated by my sense of professional courtesy. “Nothing you write can make me feel worse than I already have,” he said. “Tell the story your own way and let the chips fall where they will. And come back any time. I’m always up for a hike.”
RATHER THAN ATTEMPT to resurrect John with words, I resolved to cultivate my connections with the living, and perhaps to our mutual surprise, much of that energy flowed toward Teresa and was returned in kind. For both of us the two years after John’s death would be filled with trials both physical and, for lack of a better word, spiritual, and through it all we were never out of touch—indeed only grew closer as friends. She tore up her knee in a way that laid her low for months and led her to seek out a series of extremely uncomfortable injections of her own platelet-rich blood plasma in order to stimulate a healing response and avoid surgery, an effort that merely delayed the inevitable. The Cessna turned out to require complicated and expensive maintenance to make it sale-ready. And just to make life extra interesting, the engine in the GT40 blew up while a prospective buyer took it for a spin.
She handled all of this with her customary wry good humor, which is more than I can say for myself during my ordeals. As she bushwacked her way through a thicket of doctor’s appointments and mechanic’s consultations, becoming acquainted with all that was damaged in her own body and in John’s toys, I embarked, the winter after John’s death, on a 3,200-mile book tour by car, during which I broke the record for the saddest event in the history of bookstore events: a half-dozen people weeping in their folding chairs at a chain store in Las Cruces, New Mexico. For reasons both contextual and aesthetic—dreary mall anchor store, metal folding chairs arrayed in pitiful rows of three—I chose, on that particular night, to avoid reading one of the funny bits from my book about life in the shadow of my brother’s suicide. Instead I went all in on the heavy stuff and got what I deserved: six people in tears and a new standard for the most lugubrious event in the annals of memoir marketing. A makeshift memorial or perhaps a single scented candle should mark the spot.
I could have shrugged off this indignity without any permanent injury to my psyche, but real injury was added to insult when I suffered a debilitating hip condition as a result of driving a distance equal to that of San Diego to New York in a cramped rental car on my suicide book tour. Immediately after it was over, I found that any sort of movement of my lower body induced a feeling like drywall screws were being turned very slowly in my groin. Unable to walk without pain, much less hike with a pack on my back, I rode to my lookout that spring on a horse, spent one month there, then rode back out when it became clear I was not going to heal spontaneously.
I spent the rest of the season on Signal Peak, since it was reachable by vehicle. On the one-year anniversary of John’s death, once again performing my corrupt imitation of him, I felt angry and disconsolate, like a shell of a man—and the one man who would have listened and understood was gone forever.
That winter I underwent two surgeries of my own, first on the left hip, then the right, to repair a torn labrum and remove a bone spur in each. The operations laid me up for months and forced me to miss a summer in a fire tower for the first time in fifteen years.
Aside from Mónica’s, Teresa’s words of commiseration and encouragement were about the only ones that penetrated my fugue of self-pity, perhaps because she was so honest about her own struggles. Finally cleaned out John’s wallet yesterday after 21 months of keeping it around, she wrote me in an email. His license to fly, his credit card, a code to some gate scribbled on a scrap of paper. I’ll keep it a bit longer because the leather is embossed with his body print. I still feel him as a shadow partner. We sit companionably in the hot tub together with the snow all around. I don’t feel a need to speak to him out loud and break the silence of the dark sky, rosy in the east from the town lights. He talks to me through the heat of the water, and I see him when I look up from my book to trace the white line of snow down an oak branch that he arranged so gracefully with his pruning. I also came across some pictures from a time when we went hiking and found some closely spaced piles of bear shit. I think we counted 25 piles. I tilted my pants down, exposing my butt over one pile, claiming it as my achievement, a scrap of TP in my hand. He could barely hold himself together to snap the shot, and I can barely hold myself together when I think of it.
Teresa not only hung in with me as I wrestled with chronic pain of the sort that resurrected the idea of a goodbye kiss with the mouth of my shotgun, she also indulged my half-serious jokes about the impulse toward self-murder. “You might want to try sacrificing a chicken first,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, procreate and offer up your firstborn. And if that doesn’t work, a hose from the exhaust pipe through the rear window of your truck is a lot less messy than a 12-gauge.”
Once I finally felt well enough to travel again—after a year of being housebound—Teresa was there with an offer to drive me out into the mountains, to visit old haunts and reconnect with places that sustained us. We talked for hours as we meandered in the Mercedes Sprinter van she had lived in for twelve years prior to meeting John. Among other stories, she told me how she had become the first seasonal Forest Service employee ever to win a whistleblower case against her superiors through the White House Office of Special Counsel. It was a case she felt compelled to pursue after some clueless ranger on the Boise National Forest tried to have the guy-wire cables removed from her lookout. This was to be done for aesthetic reasons, an asinine idea that would have weakened the structural integrity of the wind-battered tower where she lived and worked at the edge of a steep cliff. She raised a stink to prevent a dangerous mistake and was fired for it. Like John, she was unafraid of confronting misguided authority, consequences be damned.
A bracing directness defined her demeanor, but if you listened carefully you learned that she
often communicated on more than one level at once. Two days before my second hip surgery, for instance, she sent me a brief note and a link to a scientific paper. Well, if it ain’t one thing it’s your mother. I know you are girding your loins for the upcoming event, but I thought you might be interested in this. Buena suerte. Break a leg. But I guess you already did that, didn’t you? Unbreak it, then.
The paper, published in the journal BMC Biology, detailed the discovery and classification of a group of organic compounds known by the common name “karrikins.” The name was derived from an indigenous word for smoke, karrik, used by the Aboriginal Noongar people of western Australia. These compounds, made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, were produced when plant sugars burned. Vaporized and transported in smoke, the compounds eventually bound with surface soil particles. The first subsequent rains helped them percolate into the ground, bringing them into contact with long dormant seeds, which responded to the signal by germinating en masse.
The discovery of karrikins provided yet more evidence of a fact long known: that in the words of the study’s authors, plants have not only learned to live with fire, but also to exploit it. And not just fire—also the chemical properties of smoke. This represented a surprising and, to my mind, beautiful addition to our understanding of nature’s ways of communication. It also gave new meaning to the phrase “smoke signal.”
A Song for the River Page 12
