Into the Abyss

by Carol Shaben

  The judgment set a legal precedent. It was the first time in the country’s history that individuals had successfully sued the Canadian government for negligence in carrying out its regulatory duties and responsibilities.

  For a while, Erik had high hopes. Wapiti had permanently closed its doors and Erik thought the judgment would usher in a new era of aviation safety. He’d joined West Coast Air filled with a renewed sense of optimism. When Erik had started his co-pilot’s job two-and-a-half years earlier, training from the company had been excellent and the safety standards high.

  Along the docks, he could see the hunger in the eyes of the young men who fuelled the planes; all of them licenced commercial pilots waiting for their chance to get into the cockpit.

  And every few months, Erik heard or read about another small plane crash. In most, the details were eerily familiar: pilot fatigue, equipment failure, and pressure to fly in inclement weather. For years, Erik had run a one-man crusade to protect pilots by writing articles and letters, and talking to others about the industry’s woeful lack of safety. But he’d grown disillusioned and lately had started to wonder if the risk and meagre pay of his flying job was worth it. Like the trail he’d inadvertently laid through the woods behind his home, Erik realized he had created something wonderful and worth fighting for in his life: a family he loved, and a satisfying career as a firefighter.

  Erik laid his hands once more on the yoke. He’d already completed nine legs that day and felt good about his flying. The takeoffs and landings had gone smoothly. The rolling ocean swells of two days ago had flattened into calm waters; the winds were light, and the visibility limitless. He had so savoured the day that, rather than calling it quits after his eight scheduled legs, he’d offered to fly a final flight from Vancouver to one of the nearby islands and back. Now as he approached Vancouver Harbour for the last time, he took in the mountains around him and the glint of afternoon light reflecting off the windows of the downtown office towers. Erik gently pulled the power back and eased the yoke forward, bringing the plane toward the water. When he was ten feet above it, he held the controls steady and slowly pulled back the throttle levers, allowing the aircraft to settle smoothly on the surface. Then he taxied toward the dock, shut the engine down, and stepped out onto the float. On the dock, an eager young future pilot waited to tie him up. When Erik had seen his passengers off the plane, he pulled out his hardcover blue pilot’s logbook and flipped to the last page of entries. Taking a ballpoint pen from his dress shirt pocket, he entered the details of the flight: the month, day, type of aircraft and pilot’s name. Under co-pilot he wrote self. Then, under the column titled “Remarks,” Erik entered his final notation: Great last day!

  Around the time of Paul’s death, Scott Deschamps began in earnest to search for his half-sister. By then, he had confirmation that the rumours of his father’s first wife in South Africa, and the daughter they’d had together, were true.

  His eighty-two-year-old aunt knew Scott’s half-sister’s name was Joanne, and that she lived in Bulawayo. But Scott’s efforts to find a Joanne Deschamps in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, turned up nothing. However, as he struggled to find a meaningful connection halfway around the world, one arose unexpectedly under his nose. During a classical music appreciation course in Vancouver in 1996, he met Heidi Petrak, the woman with whom he would start a family of his own.

  “She had travelled the world, loved to sail, had a pilot’s licence, worked as a ski patroller,” Scott said. “Marriage wasn’t important to her, but she wanted a child.”

  The two moved in together and by 1997, Heidi was pregnant. That year, Scott took her to Rossland in search of his family’s roots.

  “When I arrived, I walked into the legion and found the oldest guy I could,” Scott recalled. “I asked him, does he know anything about the Deschamps family?”

  What happened next surprised Scott. All of the old-timers huddled together at a window and pointed to a house on a nearby hill. “That’s the old place, up there,” one of them told him, pointing to the house in which Scott’s father and grandfather had lived.

  Scott visited the town’s museum. He remembers asking the museum’s custodian, an older man named Jack McDonald, about Joe Deschamps. “I was Joe’s best friend,” he replied.

  “He knew everything about my father,” Scott said of McDonald, with whom he would form a close friendship. “The Deschamps were a founding family in Rossland. My grandfather was raised there and owned all the mills around.” Scott later told me he’d discovered that he was twelfth-generation Canadian and that his family had come from Normandy in the 1500s.

  While searching the archives at his mom’s house, Scott found an old marriage certificate of his father’s that also bore the name Rita Wren. By then Scott had not only reconnected with his dad’s sister, Jeannette, but with her children, and grandchildren. With the help of a cousin who was a genealogist, Scott began to track down Rita Wren’s daughter.

  “Within a few days we had three possibilities,” he recalled. “One of them was bang on. I wrote to her.”

  Several weeks later he received a letter from the woman, Joanne Deal. Scott had found his half-sister.

  In September 1998 Scott and his cousins pooled their money and bought Joanne an airline ticket to Canada. Reuniting with his half-sister was the only unaccomplished item on his bucket list. At age forty-two, Scott had become a father. His daughter, Jozi, was still a baby when he and Heidi drove to the Vancouver International Airport to meet Joanne’s flight. Scott vividly recalled the first moment he saw Joanne: “I looked at her and it was like looking into the face of my father, like I was looking straight at my dad. It was unbelievable! I hadn’t seen my dad since he died when I was eleven and the similarity was striking. It was profound.”

  During that visit Scott took his sister to Rossland and showed her their father’s old house and around the town where he’d grown up. “She was brave enough to come,” Scott said of his sister. “She’d never left Africa in her life; never left Bulawayo, and she came here.” Though separated by twelve years in age and entire continents, their relationship thrived. “It was grand,” he said. “We got along fabulously and became very close.”

  Scott learned from Joanne that, though Joe had pleaded, her mother had refused to leave Africa, and that their father had faithfully paid child support until Joanne’s eighteenth birthday. That knowledge dispelled the troubling questions about his dad’s character that had plagued Scott for years. He also discovered a whole other family who would fully embrace their Canadian “brother.”

  “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 final analysis, interpretation and understanding of some events really does factor down to faith. For me, exploration into this most profound experience dances at the limits of both science and the supernatural. Was what I experienced a “miracle”? I’m not sure. The spontaneous ignition of the fire could have been just a gust of wind igniting an unseen ember. The opening of the clouds over the crash site could easily have been an isolated high pressure weather “eye.” Some phenomena I may never fully understand or may never be permitted to understand. This does not mean it didn’t occur. Nor does it mean that it wasn’t a miracle—at least to me.

  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.