Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  Erik also needed to find a way to climb from the financial hole his actions and legal battles had created. He started a second job driving a truck, working his way up from dump trucks and hospital laundry trucks to eighteen-wheelers.

  The other debt he felt he owed was to Carla and the other victims of his crash to make sure accidents like his didn’t happen again. In the years following the crash, Erik had obsessively followed news of similar small plane crashes. By late 1986, both the CASB and the Provincial Fatality Inquiry had released their findings. In addition to identifying potential safety lapses by Wapiti management, the reports each cited human factors as significant contributors to the crash. Erik began studying accident reports in which factors such as pilot fatigue and anxiety had played a role. Gradually, the answer to the question that had plagued him—why?—became clear. Pilots on smaller carriers were often overworked, exhausted, pressured, and just plain scared. Bodies were piling up as a result and no one was doing anything to prevent it.

  Erik started speaking out. He offered to talk to pilots at flight schools, warning them of potential hazards. In his two years of training at a top aviation college, his instructors had never once told him what the real world of flying was like—how in the absence of a reliable safety net, pilots were the last line of defense. And even now, no one wanted to listen. One flight school owner whom Erik approached complained that he would be bad for business. With cruel irony, student pilots he tried to talk to dismissed Erik’s advice, saying it would never happen to them.

  Erik understood. When he’d learned of Duncan Bell’s crash, he’d responded the same way. Still, he didn’t give up. Determined to make an example of himself, he published letters in aviation safety newsletters. One, titled “It Won’t Happen to Me,” detailed the effects of pilot fatigue that he now realized had led to his fatal decision making on the night of the Wapiti crash:

  an increased willingness to accept lower standards

  a breakdown in instrument scanning patterns

  mistakes made with familiar actions

  decreased attention span

  and especially, channelized attention with loss of situational awareness.

  In the process of becoming an outspoken safety advocate, Erik realized something else. He still longed to fly. So though he was climbing the ranks of a new career and driving trucks on the side, he began searching for a way back into the pilot’s seat.

  In the spring of 1989 Scott Deschamps stood amid the crush of humanity in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It was hot, and sweat dampened his chest. To his left rose the massive columned facade of the Great Hall of the People, and in front of him, the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a 38-metre-high carved stone plinth, pierced a pale blue sky. All around it, across the square’s colossal expanse, were tens of thousands of people.

  Since April 15, gatherings like this had been springing up in cities across China, sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang, a government official who’d been expelled from the Communist Party for his support of democratic reforms. In Beijing, students and workers had steadily streamed into Tiananmen Square until close to 100,000 were gathered. At first, there had been an almost concert-like atmosphere in the square. Music played and students strung colourful, painted banners from historic landmarks. But as the date of Hu’s funeral approached, the demonstrations had taken on a decidedly harder edge.

  Scott had studied Mandarin in Canada for two years leading up to his departure and now, after four months in China, was functionally fluent. Being able to speak Mandarin had heightened his enjoyment of the country’s centuries-old history and exotic culture, and engendered curiosity and excitement from the people he’d met. For most of them, he’d been one of the first Mandarin-speaking Westerners they had ever encountered.

  Here he stood, in the middle of the world’s largest central city square, in the most populous nation on the planet, witnessing a sea change in that nation’s history. He was thirty-three and considered himself completely different from the person he’d been at twenty-eight when he’d boarded that Wapiti flight. With singular and steadfast resolve over the past five years, he’d been ticking off items on his bucket list.

  After the summer he’d lived with Erik and hiked the West Coast Trail, Scott had left White Rock for the resort town of Whistler so he could ski its stunning terrain for the winter. While there, he’d continued working on his undergraduate degree, taking courses through distance education and supporting himself working as a bouncer at a local bar. In the years that followed, he’d spent plenty of time in the outdoors, taken sailing lessons and sailed extensively, learned another language, and travelled to Australia, Europe and now China. None of his recent decisions had been motivated by things that had once seemed so important to him—image, money, possessions and career. Instead, Scott was driven by something far more important: a quest for understanding.

  “I talked to psychiatrists, medical people, philosophers, priests,” Scott told me in an interview years later. “One person I spoke with dealt with terminally ill hospital patients. He told me about his experiences with patients looking up to a corner of a room and seeing an angel. It was very similar to what I had experienced. He asked his patients: ‘Why are you smiling when you’re about to die?’ I’ve researched angels, miracles, religion—all those things. Call it what you will, to me it was a spiritual presence and it gave me what I needed at the time. It was life altering.”

  Yet Scott still couldn’t comprehend who or what he had witnessed that night, or why he’d been singled out. He only knew that when it happened, he hadn’t felt frightened or alone. He had felt connected to something greater than himself. And despite all he’d accomplished since the crash, that sense of connectedness had eluded him.

  In Tiananmen Square, the chants of the crowd intensified. Scott began moving toward the perimeter. As he jostled his way forward, faces came into focus. Hundreds of faces. People with whom he had no worldly connection.

  In truth, other than his mother, Pauline, there weren’t many people in his life with whom Scott had close connections. One of the goals he’d inked on his bucket list was having children, but he was glad he and Mary hadn’t leaped into parenthood after the crash.

  “It would have been a disaster,” Scott later told me, “because I was too busy trying to figure out what I needed.”

  When it came to his dad’s relatives, Scott had little contact, but he did have questions. Ever since he was young, Scott had heard whisperings of a family secret. Scott’s father, Joe, had run an air force base in Zimbabwe during the Second World War; it was rumoured that he had married a woman there and had a child with her. After the war, Joe had apparently abandoned them when he returned to Canada. If the rumours about a second family were to be believed, Scott’s father was not the man everyone said he’d been. It also meant that Scott had a half-sibling somewhere in Africa.

  His father had been raised in Rossland, a picturesque town in the mountainous Kootenay region of southern British Columbia. The only one of his father’s siblings still alive who might know something of his past was his sister, Jeanette, now in her eighties. He resolved to go see his aunt when he got back to Canada.

  Shouts of protest filled the air as Scott walked the perimeter road flanking the west side of the square. A small white truck rolled slowly south, the non-stop drone of a female voice blaring from a loudspeaker. At first the words were drowned out by shouts from the crowd behind him. But as the truck drew nearer, Scott understood the woman’s words perfectly: “Get off the Square,” she urged. “Go back home.”

  No one has a clear picture of where Paul Archambault lived or how he survived in the years following his breakup with Sue, but accounts from people he was in contact with suggest that he drifted around northern Alberta. One of those people was reporter Byron Christopher, who’d covered the crash, Paul’s subsequent court hearing, and the CASB inquiry in Grande Prairie. The two men became friends and saw each other on a number of occasions. During the brief
time Paul lived in Edmonton, Byron invited him to dinner at his home in Spruce Grove, a small town 20 kilometres west of the city. Byron and his wife, Hardis, had also invited two other people to join them that night—Vivian and Jack Murrell. The young couple had endured unimaginable torment. More than a decade earlier, their six-year-old daughter, Tania, had been abducted during her two-block walk home from school. She was never found.

  “Later that night, Paul slipped his glass of Baileys liqueur down to our cocker spaniel, who eats anything except dog food,” Byron recalled. “Well, the dog got so drunk she weaved her way out of the kitchen with a sort of pleasant look on her face. Paul howled with laugher. We all laughed so hard that tears ran down our cheeks. God, that was funny. The women came in from the living room saying, ‘What’s going on in here?’ Paul said, ‘That damn dog just stole my drink.’ ”

  It was the most Byron had ever seen the Murrells laugh in the years he’d known them.

  On another occasion, it was Paul’s serious side the reporter remembered.

  “One night Paul told Hardis and me about the time he had spent in prison. How he had hated prison. Paul talked for three hours, but it seemed like twenty minutes. That talk made quite an impression on me. Paul was the first guy I’d ever met who had spent any time in jail. Paul was basically a good guy and he made me realize there were probably thousands of Paul Archambaults behind bars. He changed the way I looked at prisoners.”

  Another person Paul made a lasting impression on was Irene Jorgensen, a cook with whom he worked at a drilling rig camp during the winter of 1989. The camp was located in the remote wilderness four hours’ drive northwest of Grande Prairie. Irene clearly recalled the first time she laid eyes on Paul, who’d been hired as a camp helper.

  “On the way to Milligan Hills, away out in no man’s land, we stopped for a ten-minute lunch break. Paul ordered a coffee and my helper and myself each ordered a sandwich and soup. When the food arrived the portions were huge, but also there was something about Paul. Maybe the sadness in his eyes. I’m really not sure. Anyways, I just said: ‘This is too much for me to eat in ten minutes.’ So I gave him my huge bowl of soup and half my sandwich. He was no doubt very hungry, as it was gone in no time.”

  In her eighteen years working in camps, Jorgensen had met a lot of people, but Paul stood out in her memory.

  “Paul was a good worker,” she said, “always doing something. One day he peeled and sliced a half a box of apples. He didn’t want them wasted, so asked me if I’d make pies out of them. It wasn’t his job. He just did it.”

  Irene also spoke of Paul’s loyalty. “If you treated him good, he’d die for you,” she said, “but if you crossed him, look out.” Like Byron Christopher, she had heard many of Paul’s stories.

  “When he felt like talking, he’d tell you about all sorts of things,” Jorgensen recalled.

  “He said if he spilled a glass of milk as a child he got a real beating. He could never please his stepdad. I don’t know what it was about Paul Archambault,” Irene said, “but once you met him, you would never forget him. I believe he had a heart of gold that had been badly damaged in his young life.”

  My father lost touch with Paul again after his second visit, and I know he fretted that he couldn’t do more to help him. But Dad was preoccupied with challenges of his own. The province’s economic climate hadn’t improved, and his days were an endless barrage of long meetings and difficult decisions. The way the government was making those decisions had begun to trouble him. The style of politics, too, was changing. Honour, mutual respect, fairness and transparency—qualities that my father had heartily embraced—were giving way to partisanship and political quid pro quos.

  “It wasn’t long after the crash that what I was doing became a difficult thing,” Dad told me. “I quit enjoying being in politics. A lot of it had to do with problems that were the same issues over and over and over again. People should have been looking after themselves, not expecting government to do it.”

  As the end of his fourth term in office approached, Dad wrestled with one of the most difficult decisions of his life: should he step down? Don Getty, after a single term as premier, had already announced his intention to retire. Suggestions surfaced that Dad run for the top job, but according to Lindsay Cherney, his executive assistant at the time, Dad felt the government needed new blood.

  “If I really believe that,” he told her, “why would I hang on?”

  My brother Larry remembers similar sentiments.

  “The biggest trap in politics,” he recalls Dad saying, “is thinking it’s about you. You do your job and are treated like a VIP. People roll out the red carpet for you. But the minute you start pretending that you’re the reason and not your position, you’re lost.”

  “He still wanted to contribute,” Cherney said. “He told me ‘I’ve only got so many more years when I can give something back to the community and if I stay here in government, I’ll lose the opportunity to go back out and work in the private sector.’ ”

  By the time the government set an election date for March 20, 1989, Dad decided that after sixteen years in politics, and at the apex of his career, he would call it quits. That election date was his birthday. He would be fifty-five.

  There were offers of political appointments—plum posts in crown corporations and overseas political offices. True to his vow not to hang on, Dad turned them down and began thinking about a way to chart his own course. As Minister of Economic Development and Trade, he’d encountered many individuals with innovative products who lacked the necessary capital and management experience to make them work. He was excited about the prospect of helping these people and their ventures succeed, and was optimistic that his future in business would be robust.

  Meanwhile, Scott’s vow to pursue a life driven by dreams and accomplishments rather than money and possessions had hit a decidedly material snag. He was broke. When he returned from China, he’d rented an apartment near the ocean in Vancouver’s diverse, densely populated west end. He still hadn’t accomplished two of the most important things on his list. At thirty-four he was no closer to creating a family of his own. He also hadn’t found his half-sister. However, in the late summer of 1990, someone found him.

  Early one Sunday morning, Scott heard his apartment buzzer ring.

  “Who is it?” he answered on the intercom.

  “Paul.”

  “Paul who?”

  “Paul from Grande Prairie” came the reply.

  Scott buzzed him in. When he opened the door, he was delighted to see his former prisoner and saviour standing on the threshold.

  “He had found my name in the phone book,” Scott explained. “He’d just gotten hired as a carnie with a local midway. He’d aged. He’d broken his leg in a zillion pieces in a car accident. He had this big, bad limp. He didn’t have any clothes, but he didn’t ask for anything from me.”

  Scott took his old friend out for a meal, and remembers Paul having the same devilish sense of humour that Scott had enjoyed that long day and night they’d spent together six years earlier. “He was a pleasure to be with; a little bit coarse and rude and stinky, but he was my friend.”

  Scott also remembers Paul being upset because he didn’t have a pair of boots to wear—a requirement for his job on the midway. Scott took him out and bought him a pair of work boots and some work clothes. Later, the two men headed to a local bar where, according to Scott, “Paul told more of his stupid jokes. And then, away he went.”

  Scott laughed as he recalled that brief encounter. “I told him to look me up if he was in town. He said goodbye, and that was it.”

  It would be the last time Scott, or any of the survivors, would see or hear from Paul.

  Andrew McNeil stands well over six feet tall and has the kind of rakish good looks that wouldn’t seem out of place on the set of a Western movie. His thick, once-brown hair is cut short and shot with grey, and his eyes are a deep smoky blue. Dark stubble shadows his prominent
jaw, and his lips, when in repose, draw a thin, stern line that seems to say: “Don’t mess with me.”

  McNeil owns Alberta Pipefinders Inc., a small, thriving oil pipeline service company in Grande Prairie, and lives in a trim, cream and white bungalow that boasts the nicest lawn on the block. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, he was homeless.

  At that time, the Wapiti Lodge was the closest Andrew McNeil came to having a permanent roof over his head. The dilapidated two-storey stucco building was a men’s shelter just a few minutes’ walk northeast of the city centre along the railroad tracks near the hospital. Built as a nurses’ dormitory in the 1940s, the drab, flat-roofed lodge was also where Andrew first met Paul Archambault in the late summer of 1989. The men, who became drinking buddies, connected through a mutual friend who was a full-time resident in the shelter.

  McNeil clearly remembers the first time he met Paul, introduced by his friend as a hero.

  “What?” McNeil recalls asking.

  “He’s a hero,” his friend told him. “You know, he saved those people in the plane crash.”

  McNeil did know. “I remember when it all went down in 1984,” he said. “I thought Paul was amazing. He put his life on the line to save another man.”

  By the time he met Paul, others were calling him by his nickname, Hero, but most of them didn’t share McNeil’s sense of amazement.