Into the Abyss (33 page)

Superficially, Erik Vogel’s life seemed not unlike that of many other men who had attained a comfortable middle-class existence. He and his family lived on a modest acreage in Langley, a suburb forty-five minutes’ drive east of Vancouver. Their house, a sprawling beige rancher, lay at the end of a narrow country lane along which was an understated sign, a small rectangle of metal with green block letters that read:
This Street Is Proudly Maintained by the Vogel Family
. Weathered fence posts and barbed wire lined one side of the road like rustic stanchions, and a grassy, water-filled ditch ran along the other.

At the entrance to the property was a second sign, large and hand painted, advertising pony rides. A gravel drive bisected a thin stand of trees, beyond which lay a sprawling lawn studded with a jungle gym, an enormous black trampoline and several picnic tables. In the distance at the end of the drive stood a little red barn. Every weekend from April through October, the Vogel property was overrun with birthday party participants. Erik had traded, bartered and built the place to entertain kids. He’d also constructed chicken coops that he’d populated not only with chickens, but several turkeys and a peacock. The main attraction, however, was Peaches, the Vogel’s coffee-coloured pony. During birthday parties, Erik led Peaches and her excited riders one by one along a trail through the trees on the southeast corner of the property. The trail, which started by accident, had become a labour of love.

“I used to come in here to empty the buckets from the stall,” Erik explained. “I stomped down some of the brush and just kept going farther and farther into the trees to dump them. Then, one day I’m
walking in here and
I realize that I’ve been making a trail. So I figured why not just keep going.”

Erik could recall every storm that had blown across the property, the fences and trees they’d felled. He’d repaired or cleared away most of the damage, but one massive downed tree still remained, its enormous root system exposed to show the kids.

The trail was a wonderland of strange and interesting knickknacks and artifacts Erik had collected over the years. There were ceramic gnomes with floppy hats and bulbous noses, an old fire hose on a metal stand retrieved from a building before its demolition, an ancient, wooden wheelbarrow, and even a plastic pig wearing a polka-dot bikini.

What someone walking alongside Erik through his idyllic acreage might not understand was that he’d been working three jobs, even offering the pony parties, to make enough money to hang on to the farm. There was his primary job with the Burnaby Fire Department, and the second, driving a long-haul truck route every couple of weeks. But the third had been his first love—flying.

At first, Erik had simply kept up his pilot’s certification and hours, begging, borrowing and—when absolutely necessary—paying for time in the cockpit, flying small planes at nearby airfields. Erik had shared with Scott his dream to fly again, and it was Scott who eventually connected Erik with his first paid flying position since the crash. Scott told him about a friend at Tundra Helicopters who was looking for a fixed wing pilot to shuttle chopper pilots and equipment to job sites. The company leased a Cessna 206, but had no one qualified to fly it. Erik flew sporadically for Tundra for a year, and then began volunteering with CASARA, Canada’s Civil Air Search and Rescue Association.

“It was payback for me,” Erik wrote of his five years with CASARA. “You find out fast that
locating a small plane is nearly impossible in the bush if there is no ELT.”

Though initially trained as a spotter on a Hercules, Erik later got
permission from Tundra to use its C-206 to fly a four-man CASARA crew and their equipment on search-and-rescue missions. That privilege—deemed too costly by the company—would later end, as did shortly after, his job. His desire to spend time in the cockpit, however, only intensified. For a short time he flew as a crop duster, and finally, just before his thirty-eighth birthday, Erik had landed a co-pilot position with West Coast Air, a scheduled commercial carrier. Though small and relatively new, WCA was thriving on the brisk commuter traffic between the downtown harbours of Vancouver and Victoria, and to larger surrounding island communities. Erik loved it.

The opportunity had come his way through a former flying buddy who recommended him to the company’s chief pilot. Though Erik was hired as a co-pilot, he and the pilot took turns at the controls. On the days he was scheduled to fly, Erik would leave the house early, driving across the Lower Mainland to downtown Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, where the airline’s modest terminal and docks were located. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and navy tie, he’d head down to the dock to greet his passengers. Often they were politicians travelling back and forth between Vancouver and the provincial Legislature in Victoria.

The days were long, sometimes lasting fourteen hours, and the pay was poor. On a typical shift, Erik might fly anywhere from three to eight legs and get paid a total of $135 a day. Erik didn’t tell Lee-Ann about his rock-bottom wages. At the time, the two of them were struggling to make ends meet and Erik worried that if his wife knew how little he earned, she’d make him give up his co-pilot’s position. For Erik, the job wasn’t about money. It was about the joy of flying. In the remarks column of his pilot’s logbook, Erik repeatedly wrote: “Great day!” It was also about being a safer, wiser pilot than the young man who’d succumbed to pressure, fatigue and fear. It was about making things right.

When it came to aviation safety, a lot had gone right since the Wapiti crash. On February 6, 1990, the Federal Court of Canada ruled in the case of
Swanson and Peever v. Canada
, finding that the Crown was one-third liable for the fatalities. In his forty-seven-page statement, Justice Allison Walsh wrote:

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 drew the yoke back, 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.”