Into the Abyss (30 page)

“That’s it,” Sue said, “you’ve got to go.”

Though he protested, she was resolute. Sometime shortly after, Paul left the only home he’d known in a dozen years. He remained in Grande Prairie for a time, limping into the restaurant in the mornings to open up and do the cleaning. Elpeda thought he might have been living at the York or Park hotel, both popular drinking establishments nearby with rooms above their sprawling main-floor taverns. Paul called Sue and begged her to take him back. She acquiesced, but then had to ask him to leave again.

Sometime that fall or early winter, as Corona Pizza was slipping toward the end of its days—the restaurant would close the following summer—Sue and the Bougiridis family lost track of Paul. What he did or where he drifted over the next two years is unclear. What is certain, however, is that Sue Wink left Grande Prairie for the province of New Brunswick, nearly 4,000 kilometres away, where Scott Thorne had been transferred.

One of the last times Sue recalls seeing Paul isn’t a memory she’s proud of. It was sometime in the weeks following their breakup. She was working at the bar in the sports lounge. The music was blaring, the room full of regulars, when Paul showed up. He stood uncertainly at the bottom of the stairs for a moment and looked at her. Sue lifted the arm of the record player behind the bar, stopping the music. In the abrupt quiet, conversations died and several customers turned their heads to look at Paul. In a city the size of Grande Prairie there were few secrets, and Paul and Sue’s breakup wasn’t one of them. As customers shifted uncomfortably, Sue grabbed another record from the shelf and slapped it on the turntable. Then she lowered the needle until it settled into a groove on the well-worn vinyl. The rich, leathery voice of Tina Turner filled the room. The song
she was singing: “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Across the lounge, Paul looked stricken.

“I took it off before it finished,” Sue recalled twenty-seven years later, her voice full of regret.

By the fall of 1986, my father’s political star was soaring. In May of that year, he’d won his fourth consecutive election and the new premier, Don Getty, had appointed him Minister of Economic Development and Trade, one of the most senior and coveted portfolios in government. My dad’s new position was a nod to his increasing influence. So, too, was the premier’s request that he chair two of the government’s most powerful committees: Treasury Board, and Priorities and Planning.

As his increasing responsibilities consumed him, the crash receded to the shadows. Soon, however, two incidents would bring Larry’s unsettled emotions rushing back. The first was an unexpected visit from Paul sometime that fall or early winter. Larry and Paul hadn’t spoken since before Paul’s car accident, and Dad recalled being stunned by his appearance, too lightly dressed for the weather and much the worse for wear compared to their last encounter. Paul’s hand was a mess of welts and scars, and he walked with a pronounced limp. Now twenty-nine, he’d recently arrived in Edmonton where he was temporarily staying with his brother Michael.

Dad was sad to hear the news about Paul and Sue. Though Paul tried to downplay the significance of their breakup, Dad suspected that it had hurt him deeply. “He was a guy who was in need,” my father told me. “
He needed somebody to appreciate his worth as a human being.”

In his fierce desire to make something of his life, Paul was not unlike my father. But in terms of the cards fate had dealt them, the
two men were worlds apart. Dad asked Paul if there was something in particular he needed, anything my father could do to help. Paul shook his head. At the end of their meeting, Dad reached into his wallet and pulled out fifty dollars, which he pressed into Paul’s battered hand.

“He took it,” Dad remembered, “but that’s never what he came for.”

The second incident happened just a few months later on a wintry night in early December. Dad and Mom were driving north from Edmonton to High Prairie. On April 17 of that year, after months of continued surveillance and investigation, the federal government had shut down Wapiti Aviation.
The airline had immediately launched a lawsuit against Transport Canada for damages, challenging the legality of the decision in court. Though a federal judge had restored Wapiti’s operating certificate a month later, the closure had taken a toll on the carrier’s regular passenger traffic, and service to smaller communities like High Prairie had been curtailed. As a result, Dad had been forced to revert to making the four-hour drive home from Edmonton every Friday night and then back again every Sunday afternoon.

That night, he’d been happy to have his wife’s company. As was always the case after a week’s gruelling schedule, he was exhausted, so he’d asked Mom to take the wheel. They were on an isolated stretch of highway east of High Prairie when Dad spotted a distress signal.

“
We saw a car’s lights go off and on a couple of times and from the angle of the lights, it was in the ditch,” he said.

Mom wanted to keep driving.

“Alma, stop!” she remembers Dad saying. “
Stop the car. They need help.”

As she pulled to the side of the road, Dad was surprised to see that the two stranded motorists were young men. Dad offered to take the wheel from my mom and they opened their doors to exchange seats.

“I talked to the guy for a few minutes,” Dad remembered, “and
turned to open the back door to let him in.”

Meanwhile, Mom sat uneasily in the driver’s seat watching the other man circle around to her side of the car.

Suddenly, a fist smashed into the left side of my dad’s face. The force of the blow knocked him to the pavement, shattering his glasses and sending them flying into the snow. His head exploded in pain as he felt a boot connect with his cheekbone. On the other side of the car, Mom screamed as the second man grabbed her hair and tried to pull her from the car. Her hands gripped the steering wheel in fear and then she, too, felt a fist slamming into her head. Dad somehow managed to crawl to his feet and lunge across the front seat of the car. His attacker was trying to drag him back out, but Dad was able to grab the arms of Mom’s assailant, who was now yanking her from the car by her hair. Through the haze of terror that overwhelmed her, she felt her assailant’s hands release her and heard Dad yell: “Run, Alma! Run!”

Without thinking, she did just that. She ducked under the arms of the man Dad held and dashed onto the road. She began running down the centerline of the dark, snowy highway, hysterically waving her arms at oncoming traffic.

“No one was stopping,” Mom recalled. She shudders at the memory of hearing her assailant’s even, reasoned voice behind her as the first motorist slowed for her.

“
Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s drunk.”

As the motorist sped up again, Mom looked over her shoulder at the young man, and beyond him, to her car. Inside she could see the dark silhouette of his accomplice hammering a fist repeatedly downward, but no sign of her husband. A cold certainty came over her that if she didn’t get a grip on herself, Larry would not survive. Taking a long, choking breath, she managed to calm herself, stepping once more toward oncoming traffic.

This time when a car slowed and its driver rolled down his window, my mom spoke to him with as much clarity as her heaving voice could manage.

“I’m Alma Shaben,” she told him, enunciating her last name, which was well known in the region.

More cars had now begun to slow along the highway. Though vast, the north was still a small community, and she hoped someone in one of the vehicles would recognize the name of their elected government representative.

“My husband, Larry Shaben, is in the car,” she said, louder this time. “Someone’s killing him.”

“That’s Larry’s wife!” she heard a man yell from an open truck window and relief flooded through her. It was short lived. As soon as the truck’s door opened, Mom’s assailant took off. With horror, she watched him reach the driver’s side of their car and jump behind the wheel. He floored the accelerator and the car shot off down the highway, Dad still inside.

My father was in deep trouble. Not only had his attacker kicked him repeatedly, he’d pushed his head and shoulders between the seats, pinning his arms so Dad couldn’t fight back. The young man had then tried to light Dad’s hair on fire and had bitten his hand with such force that a large gash lay open across his knuckles. Dad had fought blindly, using every ounce of his strength to throw off the young man. Fear gripped him as he felt the car begin to move.

“I knew that if they drove down the highway with me, that would be it,” he told me. “I’d be dead.”

With his upper body immobilized, Dad raised his feet and jammed them into the steering wheel, bringing his heels down hard. He heard the driver swear as the car began swerving, and then felt a series of
jarring jolts as it left the highway and careened into the snow-filled ditch. That’s when my father remembers the men
really
getting angry. Both piled on top of him and were beating him senseless when a group of truck drivers pulled them off.

As my father recuperated in the hospital over the following days, he thought long and hard about his life, and how God had spared him for the second time in twenty-six months. It was that sense of unfathomable providence that would eventually set him on an entirely new path.

Hi Erik
,

Just a short note to let you know that I am still behind you in every way. I am doing just fine and so are dad and all the kids. How is everything with you? I hope things are looking good for your future. Things will soon slow down and then you can get on with your life. This you well deserve
.

I hope you and your girlfriend are doing okay. Lord only knows you two and all your family are very special people and you all deserve a better life than what you have been dealt. I wanted to let you know I still care about what happens to you. Whatever you do, don’t give up hope. I still want to fly as one of your crew when you become a captain
.

Don’t you blame yourself for anything because everything happens for a reason. Just you keep that in mind. Well, I have to go. The plane will be in in about twenty-five minutes. You tell your dad for me that he has a very valuable son that he should be proud of
.

Take care and remember we are all hoping for you and will never stop hoping. Caring for you as a brother, and wishing you all the best
,

Carla Blaskovits

Erik put the letter back into its envelope and placed it inside an old flight bag that he had been filling with newspaper clippings and legal documents since the crash. Carla’s letter meant the world to him. She had been so young on the day she and her sister had rushed into the Slave Lake airport to discover that their mother, Patricia, had been killed in the crash. Carla had since found work with an airline and Erik couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s death had something to do with that decision. He had first met Carla during the CASB inquiry and she had stayed in touch. Erik was humbled by her capacity for forgiveness, particularly when Erik couldn’t forgive himself.

The question he still couldn’t answer, years later, was
why
he had descended below a safe altitude before the needle of his ADF swung, indicating he was over the airport. Not a day went by that he didn’t think about it, and his continuing legal battles didn’t make things any easier. In 1989 Erik was subpoenaed to appear as a witness in a lawsuit against Transport Canada filed by Sally Swanson and Virginia Peever, who were suing the federal government for negligence. The widows’ claim, in part, alleged that for five years prior to the accident, the Canadian government had known Wapiti was repeatedly violating safety regulations, yet had failed to act. Erik had also been named in a
defamation lawsuit by Wapiti Aviation against the CBC for a documentary on the crash in which Erik, along with several other former Wapiti pilots, had participated.

These legal claims dogged him as he tried to settle into his new career as a firefighter. He would later become single-minded when it came to safety, and to saving lives, but on one occasion during his early firefighting days, his determination not to be the one to let anything bad happen on his watch may have clouded his judgment.

The incident happened during a house fire. When firefighters arrived at the scene, the homeowner was unaccounted for and thick, black smoke billowed out of the building. Adrenaline was pumping
through Erik as he entered the front door. Unbeknownst to the crew, a fire was raging in the basement and a flashover—the most dangerous time of a fire when heated combustible gasses inside a structure suddenly ignite—was imminent. The firefighter behind Erik recognized the danger and bailed out, but Erik—though he’d been taught that his own safety was paramount—was so focused on saving possible victims that he crawled deeper into the house. Outside, the fire truck’s air horn sounded once, then a second time—a signal to get out—but Erik didn’t hear it above the roar of the fire. He could feel the heat of flames below his hands and knees and through his turnout gear, and was at risk of being caught in the flashover, when another firefighter grabbed him from behind and pulled him out.

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.