The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  Dick Stillwagon was the first to rush to the four men who had been mowed down by the truck and assess the how seriously they were injured. All the other men ran to their friends or scrambled to find some way to help. The semi truck was jackknifed across part of the highway. Canvas packs and shredded clothes and sleeping bags were scattered across the embankment. Blood sprinkled the snow.

  “My God, my God,” Lewis said over and over again, his voice shaking.

  The flurry of action was barely controlled chaos. After confirming that everyone was alive, the first thing the men could think to do was to make sure that those injured were warm. Marr was on the ground, half his body on the road and the other half on the shoulder. His left leg was horribly crooked. He seemed well enough, though, still smiling and just asking that no one try to move him. The shock and cold seemed to be dulling the pain. Braun had also managed to survive the incident relatively unharmed, despite being dragged for a short distance beneath the pickup. His sleeping pad had been torn completely apart by some sharp piece of metal under the truck, but it looked like the cooking pot he carried on his back might’ve saved him from being more seriously injured. The pickup truck’s trajectory had continued for a ways past Braun, so he was on his stomach with some scrapes on his head that were bleeding, but he wouldn’t need to be excavated from the truck. He had a sore arm and leg, but he said the worst of it was being forced to wait in the snow and frigid wind—Stillwagon had cautioned everyone not to move any of the injured men.

  Wilson and Garcia were in much worse shape. After being thrown into the air, Wilson had landed heavily in a plowed cornfield. He was fortunate that there were several feet of snow on the ground. Had he skidded across the pavement, his injuries could have been far worse. As it was, he immediately sensed upon landing that he wasn’t in any danger of dying, but the pain was excruciating. Gorse, Kulick, and several others asked if they could do anything to help.

  “There’s a rock under my back; get it out,” he moaned. Blood dripped down a gash in his chin and his left wrist was throbbing.

  “There’s no rock,” the others told him. It was agony to sit and watch him suffering without being able to do anything to help.

  “Yes, there is, I can feel it,” he said, starting to panic, trying to find a way to move and get comfortable.

  Stillwagon looked Wilson in the eye. “Clif, there is no rock under your back, and we can’t move you. Now I need you to calm down for me. Can you calm down?”

  Wilson nodded and tried to take a deep breath. Later he learned from the doctors that what he felt digging against his back was probably a compressed vertebrae and part of his broken pelvis.

  Garcia was in the worst condition of all. He’d rolled under the pickup truck and emerged on the other side like Braun, but unlike Braun he hadn’t been protected by any of his gear. Blood leaked from his mouth, his nose, his eyes. His breath was coming in rasping gurgles. He seemed only semi-conscious and kept asking if he could go to sleep. Stillwagon told him no repeatedly. Sleep would be the worst thing. He suspected Garcia had some kind of internal injuries, and if they didn’t get him to a hospital quickly, he would die. He called Ron Hobart over and asked him to stay with the teen to keep him from falling asleep while he made sure all the other injured men were being kept warm enough. Hobart crouched next to Garcia and alternated singing songs to him and asking the teenager to count the fingers he held up. He repeatedly reached down to brush melting snow out of the younger man’s eyes.

  While they waited for ambulances to arrive, the crew members who weren’t with the injured redirected the cars that were trying to drive around the semi truck. Bardwell took four flares to mark the edges of the accident with Fialko. Hess, Kulick, and Gross were directing the cars away with no small amount of yelling and frustration. They all felt helpless and panicked. It was utterly unlike the capsizing on Washington Island. Then they’d known what to do. That was an accident they’d trained for. This wasn’t. How much longer could the injured men survive outside in the brutal cold? Where were the ambulances? They seemed to be taking forever.

  Finally one arrived from Valparaiso. Since both Braun and Marr seemed in stable condition, Garcia and Wilson were taken first, leaving the other injured men in the snow, fighting the pain of their injuries. Hobart accompanied those in the ambulance after Garcia asked him to stay with him. He prayed both the teenagers would survive the journey. It was another thirty minutes before the second ambulance arrived to whisk the two remaining injured men to Porter Memorial Hospital in Valparaiso.

  The two truck drivers were doing their best to stay out of the way. Alvin Lilly, who had been driving the pickup truck, was uninjured, as was William Black, the semi driver. Although both felt terrible about the accident, neither received any citations from the police officers who arrived shortly afterward. The men on the expedition weren’t supposed to be walking on the narrow, two-lane highway, the police told the two truck drivers.4

  The liaison team got the call in their hotel room. Jan answered. It was a police officer, a stranger, who told them there’d been an accident. The officer didn’t offer many details, but men had definitely been injured. As the team rushed to the small highway to find the men, all the women except Jan were crying. Crying won’t help anyone, she thought. She had to stay calm. She had no idea whether her husband was among the injured, how serious the accident had been, and whether anyone was dead. As they neared the site of the accident, they were stopped by a police barricade.

  “We need to get through; we’re with the men,” she told the officers. They were allowed to pass and drove on, where they were met by the sight of the wreckage. Some of the gear was still scattered around the pickup truck and there was blood in the snow. But none of the men were there anymore. Jan asked where the injured crew members had been taken and sped off to the Valparaiso hospital, fifteen miles away.

  When they arrived, Jan caught sight of Reid on the phone, looking shaken. It was the first time she knew he was unharmed. One weight off her chest. The first bit of relief seeped into the numbness that she’d been operating under since the phone call. But there were still the four young men who’d been injured, all of whom were undergoing evaluations at the hospital or, in Garcia’s case, emergency surgery. She, too, began calling families and friends, using the phone tree they’d created before the start of the expedition so that loved ones could have quick access to news of the expedition. The goal now was to make them all aware of what had happened before the media started announcing the accident, and to get everyone who wanted to come to the hospital. Jan made it through nearly all the phone calls calmly, explaining what had happened and where the injured teenagers were now. Her composure lasted until she reached her mother. Then she was sobbing hysterically. No matter how professional and in control of the situation she’d wanted to be as head of the liaison team, talking to her mom made her feel like a child again, wondering how something so awful could have happened.

  The ambulance ride to the hospital had been torture. Wilson had been strapped down on a backboard, in immense pain, listening to Garcia labor for every breath. It sounded like he was choking to death, drowning in his own blood. When they arrived at the hospital, they were both immediately rushed into the emergency room, Garcia for surgery and Wilson for tests to determine what was broken and if he had any internal injuries. As hospital staff were cutting off his clothes, Wilson was handed a phone to talk to his mom.

  “I think I might have broken my wrist,” he told her, trying to minimize the shock. He was right, but it was among the most minor of his injuries. He also had compressed vertebrae in his lower back, impact fractures in his femurs, a laceration on his chin from being hit by the hood ornament, and a crushed pelvis. No one had any hope that he or Garcia would be getting back in the canoes again, assuming Garcia survived.

  A little later, after being put in casts and pumped full of pain medicine, Wilson was wheeled into a room with Marr, who was wearing a cast that stretched from his toes
to his hip. The tibia and fibula of his left leg were broken. He’d be out of commission for weeks, if not months.

  Braun alone had escaped relatively unscathed. He had shallow lacerations on his head, a contusion on his leg, and a dislocated collarbone. His left arm was up in a sling, and he was already wandering around the hospital in his voyageur getup, looking dazed and in shock. The doctors were releasing him. He’d have to stay with the liaison team for several days.

  Lewis was stuck in a waiting room while Garcia was in the operation room. All the parents of the injured were now racing to the hospital. The drive from their hometowns in northern Illinois would take only about two hours. While Lewis waited for their arrival and the inevitable barrage of questions from them and from the media, he struggled to maintain the optimism he’d always had in the face of dilemmas. Lewis was familiar with the challenges of recovering from traumatic injuries. He’d been run over by a car his senior year of high school and spent the last few months of the school year at home in casts. It had been an incessant struggle not to be overwhelmed by the pain. He wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone, but he had learned from it, learned to be patient during the healing process. But this was different. The lessons he’d learned would do no good to the men who were injured now.

  Never far from Lewis’s thoughts were several facts. First, he was responsible for the safety of each of these young men in a way that La Salle had never been for his crew members. Whether or not the crew members would have agreed with Lewis’s assessment of his position was a moot point. Lewis felt the responsibility, so it was real. La Salle’s voyageurs were paid for their troubles and were well aware of the dangers of paddling out into the unmapped wilderness. Lewis’s students had been aware of the risks as well, and their parents had signed release forms, but none of them ever seriously considered the fact that they might die along the way.

  The second thought that Lewis couldn’t shake was that two of the four injured teenagers had, at one point, almost not been a part of the expedition. Braun was initially an alternate and joined the main group after another member had dropped out. If the other student hadn’t left, Braun would’ve been with the liaison team the entire time, coordinating meetings and working safely behind the scenes. And then there was Wilson, who had come to Lewis early in the trip, when the weather was still warm and the air full of the droning of mosquitoes, to complain that he just couldn’t get along with one of the other students in his canoe. Wilson wanted to quit because he knew he wouldn’t last in such close quarters for the nine-month trip.

  “If you quit, it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life,” Lewis had told him. He suggested Wilson redirect the flame of his frustration into paddling, because his canoe had been lagging behind. The teenager agreed and never again mentioned leaving the expedition. But what if he had left? Could you compare those two regrets—not going through with the expedition and not being in hellish pain with numerous broken bones and a lengthy recovery ahead? Had Lewis made the right decision, or was the entire expedition as crazy as some people said?

  “History is the most dangerous product the chemistry of the intellect has concocted . . . It produces dreams and drunkenness,” wrote French essayist Paul Valéry. “It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution.”5 Had the idea for the expedition been a delirium of grandeur? Had they all been too swept away by the possibility of living like La Salle? No matter how much humans hope to learn from history, how much they long to revel in its trappings and reanimate it in the present, the past is permanently lost. No amount of extravagant costumes or reenacted events can resurrect the precise social, political, economic, and personal conditions of an earlier era. But something in our nature seems to persuade us otherwise, to push us to strive for a connection with the people who have gone before us.

  In tale upon tale of time travel into the past, travelers put themselves at risk of being discovered as outsiders, or killed by diseases that have been eradicated in their era, or forever lost to their family and friends—but that doesn’t stop them from delighting in the experience. Time travel, with all its dangers, is still a coveted ability. But what of those travelers who go forward in time, who want to educate people of the future? What about men who purport to represent the 17th century and come for a visit in the late 20th? The future holds its own dangers. There were no cars, trucks, or roads in La Salle’s time.

  The tension between striving to live in the past and interacting with the present had never before been so poignant for the members of La Salle: Expedition II. It was chance that brought the pickup truck and the semi into a collision course, but it was the crew’s determination to push forward despite everything, as the original voyageurs would have done, that brought them to the windy Indiana road where they became a distracting apparition for drivers. Who, if anyone, was to blame for what had happened?

  After the second ambulance had arrived to pick up Braun and Marr, the uninjured men were shuttled to a nearby diner and plied with hot cocoa, tea, and pie on the house, while a stranger offered to buy them hamburgers. The food and warmth helped physically after spending so long in the bitter cold, but no one seemed able to mentally process the day’s events. Grief and anger and confusion were starting to pervade the shock that they’d all felt in the first moments after the accident. Now they could do nothing to help. They simply had to wait. The adult crew members dazedly tried to organize the evening in a way that would allow the teenagers—and themselves—some time to reflect on the disaster away from a crowd of sympathizers and reporters. Stillwagon arranged for their gear to be stored in an empty classroom at the school just next door. Ken Lewis asked whether they should keep their commitment for a performance in the evening and was told in no uncertain terms that the crew could absolutely not be asked to perform, given the circumstances. He went to contact the community leaders who’d arranged the event to explain the situation and give his regrets that they couldn’t be there. Cox asked around to find out if the crew could stay somewhere private with a phone, and they were ushered into an empty room in Hebron High School. Hanging over all of them was the knowledge that Garcia still might die, that he might already be dead and they just hadn’t heard yet.

  Once inside the high school, the men dispersed to talk in small groups or be alone with their thoughts. Hess went off into a corner by himself, imagining what his mom would’ve done if he’d been among the injured. He started crying as he thought of the men in the hospital, thanked God he was still alive and unharmed, then prayed that everyone would survive. Others contemplated the vagaries of chance. Randy Foster normally walked with Marr and Garcia, but had been mad at them over something stupid in the morning and decided to walk ahead. If he’d been trekking with them as usual, he’d be in the hospital, too, maybe on the operating table like Garcia.

  Lieberman and Kulick rehashed the incident, forcing themselves to relive what had happened like drawing poison from a wound. They’d received word that Wilson was in the clear, though pretty beat up. Apparently he was also annoyed that the doctors had shaved part of his beard off to stitch up the cut on his chin—a detail that reassured his friends that he was okay. Bill Watts said he saw the normally laid-back Doug Sohn approaching the truck “with fire in his eyes” before realizing he couldn’t do anything with his anger and turning around.

  Parents and family members poured in from Illinois to provide comfort and support. Surprisingly enough, everyone was unanimous in their insistence that the expedition had to continue. Even parents who had expressed reservations from the beginning believed the men should go on. They’d come too far and suffered too much to give up now. The real question was whether the men themselves would want to push on, knowing as they now did that their lives could be at stake.

  Word finally came from the hospital that Garcia had survived surgery. His spleen had ruptured upon impact with the truck, a relatively c
ommon injury in car accidents. If he’d arrived at the hospital just a little later, he could easily have died. His spleen was removed in the operating room, and he had other injuries to contend with as well. His right arm and hand were badly broken. It would be an arduous convalescence, but the doctors were cautiously optimistic and listed him in stable condition on the critical list for the night. The relief everyone felt was palpable, and some of the tension leaked out of the gymnasium where all the men had gathered.

  After everyone had had some time to be alone, a meeting was called to take a vote on where they would spend the night. Stillwagon suggested that they should stay indoors, violating one of the expedition’s cardinal rules. It would be their first night indoors since their departure in August. But he didn’t want the men to have to worry about staying warm and erecting a shelter on top of everything else. Most of the crew agreed with him: the vote was 16-1, Ken being the only dissenter.

  Once the decision had been made, the muzzleloaders they’d stayed with the night before arrived to serve them bread and stew for dinner. Support from people who had followed the men’s progress across North America was pouring in at an almost overwhelming rate. The phone rang nonstop with calls from all over the country. Someone even called from the Yukon Territory, having heard about the accident from Ralph Frese in Chicago. They wanted to know if they could help. The media was just as interested in talking to the crew about what had happened. Reporters from the Chicago Tribune, the Benton Harbor Herald-Palladium, and local radio stations called or visited to inquire about the men’s condition. Within the next few days the expedition would appear on the front pages of a half-dozen newspapers and in numerous regional broadcasts. All the reporters and supporters of the expedition asked the same question: Would they continue? It was a question that would have to wait for the morning to be answered. For now they all needed rest and time to recover. Though they had chosen to spend the night in the high school gym, the men were uncomfortable and struggled to sleep in the heated room. It felt suffocating after so many nights outdoors. “No one had a very good sleep inside, the air felt dry and as though there wasn’t enough of it,” Kulick wrote in his journal the next day.