Into the Abyss (32 page)

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.

“That name, Hero, started as something good. People were proud of him. But it switched. Suddenly when they called him ‘Hero’ it was like calling somebody ‘nigger.’
I think that ate at him, to be mocked by everybody.”

He recalls Paul being a regular at the York and Park hotels, local taverns where friends would hook up every night to drink. These establishments smelled of cigarettes and stale beer, and their clientele were loggers, rig pigs and more than a few alcoholics. According to McNeil, drunks weren’t uncommon in Grande Prairie at the time. He suspected several already suffered from wet brain, a layperson’s term for a form of central nervous system damage common in long-time drinkers and manifested by a shuffling gait and often incoherent speech.

Paul wasn’t one of those. Rather, he and McNeil were among the high-functioning homeless—men who typically worked during the day and headed to the bar every night. Corona Pizza had closed its doors by then and, for Paul, work would have been sporadic.

“Guys would come to the lodge at eight in the morning looking for day labourers to do odd jobs,” McNeil recalled, “house painting,
drywall, plumbing, electrical, construction. They paid cash and generally the same handful of people would put up their hands.”

The tenor of their days was simple: work if you could, come back to the lodge for supper hour from 4:30 to 5:30, shower, and then go drinking. But there were rules. The shelter locked its doors at 11:00 p.m. and, unless a man was paying for his room at the Wapiti Lodge, his stay was temporary.

“They’d give you a few days at a time,” said McNeil, “then the trustee would come and tell you: ‘Today’s your last day; off you go.’ ”

The men would have to find another place to sleep for several days before they could come back. Sometimes they would couch surf. Elpeda Palmer remembers a night Paul showed up very drunk at her dad’s house, which was just up the street from the shelter. Teddy let him stay the night. At other times, the men would head to Muskoseepi Park, a long belt of greenway that bordered the city centre’s western flank. There they would hook up with friends who hung out in the tent city on the far side of the river. The ramshackle collection of tarps and roughly hewn platforms was affectionately known as the Queen’s Hotel and during summer it was as good a place as any to sleep. Often there was a warm fire crackling and enough cheap whiskey to make a man forget his troubles. The only problem was the cops. Every once in a while the RCMP would sweep through and clear everyone out. The men would scatter for a few days before setting up camp in a different stand of trees a little more removed from the paths that wound along the creek.

McNeil remembers seeing Paul at the park on more than one occasion. As for his troubles, they didn’t seem the kind easily drowned in a bottle.

“He was tortured,” McNeil said, adding that he couldn’t imagine the levels of despair Paul battled.

“If something like that happened to me and I tried to use that as
a springboard to change my entire life, and people rallied and raised money … and then if you didn’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, well … people would think you’re just the scum of society. It wouldn’t have mattered how many people or who they were who told Paul he was a good man, no amount of money, kudos or coverage was going to suffice because he didn’t have enough self-worth to see his own goodness.”

Grande Prairie wasn’t a particularly kind place for a man without a permanent roof over his head during the final wintry months of 1990. Temperatures hovered between -10°C and -20°C, with the mercury sometimes dropping to as low as -40°C. More than 13 centimetres of snow fell on the city that November and December, and at times the winds gusted up to 55 kilometres an hour.

No one knows for certain what happened to Paul Archambault, but McNeil has a pretty good idea. He believes that Paul and a mutual friend went drinking together one evening and were walking back along the tracks to the lodge when they parted ways. It might have been that Paul had exceeded his quota of nights at the shelter. Or he may have decided to carry on drinking awhile longer, and returned to find the doors locked.

“Because the lodge catered to drunks,” McNeil explained, “they were hard ass about it. They locked the doors at eleven o’clock and if you weren’t in by then, you didn’t get in. Most of the trustees who worked there were only a month or two into being sober, but they’d lord it over you like they’d never touched a drink in their lives.”

Paul’s younger brother Daniel Archambault, who lives in Ottawa, said he too doesn’t know when or how Paul went missing. What Daniel did know was that Paul wasn’t well toward the end of his life.

“The last time he came to visit, he had hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver,” Daniel said. Though his brother never stayed anywhere long, Daniel believes his health problems were the reason Paul took off back west.

“He always said that when he died,
he wanted to be out in the bush the way Mother Nature meant man to die.”

While the centre of Grande Prairie can hardly be considered the bush, there is a corridor of untamed land that runs along the train tracks east of where the Wapiti Lodge once stood. There the ground dips down into the gentle curve of a drainage gulch and snow lies in deep, soft folds along its edges. Sheltering the gulch is a dense thicket of willow trees, their branches a tangle of bare, gnarly brown. Spindly yellow sage grass curls around their feet. A stone’s toss to the left, twin rails lie under a fresh layer of new snow, lines of frozen steel stretching north like an unending parallelogram.

On a cold night a man could make his way along the tracks unnoticed, his breath rising in translucent clouds before dissipating into blackness. His boots would crunch on the wind-packed snow and, in the distance, he might hear the hum of traffic or the clank of freight cars coupling and uncoupling in the railway yard a kilometre down the tracks. Above, if it were a typical northern winter night, the sky would glow with the twinkle of a million stars, and if he stared long enough into the abyss he could see the pale sweep of the Milky Way. Conceivably, if the man had had enough to drink, or didn’t have a place to sleep, or was ill or just plain heartsick, he might set himself down on the edge of that quiet thicket. Perhaps as he lay back in the snow, oblivious as he’d always been to the cold, and gazed at the edge of his own galaxy, he might contemplate his place in the universe’s vast wilderness. If he was feeling blue, he might reflect on his hard
luck and how, despite his efforts, he had failed to turn things around—to create a life that he and others could be proud of. And though everyone knew the man to be a survivor, someone who would never give up, he might for a moment surrender to the weariness he felt, close his eyes, and let sleep carry him to a happier place.

In times of heavy snowfall along the railway lines that cut through northern Alberta, locomotives mounted with snowplows roar along the buried tracks. As they do, snow flies off the rails in great white geysers that arch skyward and then curl away from the rails in big C’s. They leave snow piled thick and round in white bulging drifts running along either side of the tracks. Andrew McNeil believes that such a snowplow cleared the tracks through Grande Prairie the night Paul died, burying him in an icy grave.

Shortly after the spring melt in the following year, on May 7, 1991, a Canadian National Railways locomotive rolled slowly through the seldom-walked centre of Grande Prairie. It was after dark—10:30 at night according to the newspaper story published the next morning—when the train’s headlights illuminated a body floating in a watery ditch about fifteen metres south of the tracks. The decomposition of the body suggested it had been there a long time. Later word would surface that a red poppy—commonly worn during the days leading up to Remembrance Day on November 11 to honour Canada’s war veterans—was pinned to the lapel of the deceased’s jean jacket. A battered old wallet was tucked into a back pocket. In it was the deceased’s identification. He was Paul Richard Archambault, a man at one time lauded locally and nationally as a hero. He was thirty-three.

“Certainly when you have a body turn up, you don’t rule out a suspicious death,” RCMP Constable Ian Sanderson said at the time, “but so far
there’s been nothing to say it was foul play.”

The body was later taken to the medical examiner in Edmonton to determine the cause of death. An autopsy concluded that he had died of exposure months earlier. No one had reported him missing.

Scott Deschamps learned of Paul’s death from an Edmonton reporter who tracked him down for a comment. Still living in Vancouver, Scott was working for the Transit Police, and when he heard the news, terrible memories from his RCMP days in the unforgiving north came vividly to mind.

“In my five years in the Grande Prairie RCMP I saw lots of tangled wrecks of trucks and cars,” he recalled. “
I’d go into the bush and find these frozen remains.”

Though terribly upset by the news, Scott wasn’t surprised. “That would be the way he would go.”

Others weren’t as accepting. Elpeda remembers her mom, Donna Bougiridis, calling her in tears: “Paul’s dead.” Both women believed his death had to be the result of foul play.

“Paul was a survivor,” Donna said. “
If you ask me, someone bumped him on the head. I told the police that.”

She was teary a quarter century later when she spoke of the crude promissory note found in Paul’s wallet when his body was recovered.

“It said: ‘To Donna, I owe you $50.’ ”

In Paul’s wallet, police also found a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled another name: Sue Wink. She was still living in Saint John, New Brunswick, when the local RCMP knocked on her door. She hadn’t heard from Paul since she’d left Grande Prairie almost four years earlier, and had seen him only once before she’d moved east. That was when she’d driven past Paul as he’d been hitchhiking along the highway.

In the weeks before he died, however, she’d tried to find him.

“In October 1990, my uncle passed away,” Sue explained. “I came back to Grande Prairie for the funeral and was looking for Paul. I went into the hotel. I drove around the city. I was watching for him the whole time I was there.”

She is haunted by a terrible conviction. “If I’d been able to find him he never would have died,” she told me. “
I still dream of him.”

O
n October 2, 2000, Erik Vogel sat in the co-pilot’s seat of an airborne de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter. After a decade of effort, he’d clawed his way back into the aviation industry and now flew part-time for West Coast Air, a small float plane operation with scheduled passenger service between Vancouver’s inner harbour and the surrounding islands. Erik looked out the cockpit window and took in the stunning view. The weather was clear and crisp, the Georgia Strait glittering below him in the late afternoon sun. Ahead, the Gulf Islands were strung out like a colony of giant green amoebae, their outlines alternately craggy with rock and smooth with sand.

Erik briefly removed his hands from the controls, easing the stiffness from his fingers, which had grown arthritic. They had been progressively worsening after they were mangled in the Wapiti crash. He noticed it most acutely when trucking long distances, as he often did when he wasn’t working a shift at the fire hall. Or flying. But Erik didn’t complain about his affliction. It was a small price to pay.

As the engine’s vibration hummed through him, his chest swelled with emotion. In April he’d turned forty. He and Lee-Ann had
married and had three children: a boy and two girls. He’d named his firstborn Duncan. One day he would tell the boy about his namesake, the pilot who had appeared at Erik’s hospital bedside the day they brought him in.