After the crash, hope for clarity
Author re-creates famous plane crash her father lived through
In the evening of Oct. 19, 1984, a small Piper Navajo plane crashed in the frozen wilderness outside of High Prairie, Alta. Six of its passengers died in the wreckage, including longtime Alberta NDP opposition leader Grant Notley. The four survivors, meanwhile, spent 15 hours huddled around a small fire in sub-zero temperatures before finally being rescued; among them was Larry Shaben, the province’s housing minister.
Those few details were enough to get the story picked up in newspapers around the world — including the Jerusalem Post, where Shaben’s 22-year-old daughter, Carol, came across a tiny, 50-word story. The crash had happened a full two days earlier. “We were going to call,” her mother tells her, “but it’s been crazy and, well ... we didn’t want to worry you.”
The younger Shaben’s initial shock of discovery kicked off a fascination with the tragedy that has culminated in Into the Abyss, an account of the crash and its aftermath.
There’s certainly a lot of historical significance tangled up in the event. Larry Shaben was Canada’s first Muslim cabinet minister, and later became a leading voice for civility and interfaith dialogue in the wake of 9/11. Notley’s daughter Rachel is now also an MLA for the Alberta NDP (I used to live in her riding). And the crash itself would later help set a legal precedent, as the first time citizens successfully sued the federal government for negligence of its regulatory duties.
The circumstances of the crash, too, are undeniably compelling. The identities of the four survivors are divided along stereotypical lines almost too good to be true: a pilot (Erik Vogel), a politician (Larry Shaben), a cop (Scott Deschamps) and the prisoner he was escorting into custody (Paul Archambault). And it’s Archambault alone who’s in good enough shape to build and sustain the fire that would keep them all alive — by a stroke of sheer luck, he’d convinced Deschamps to go against protocol and remove his handcuffs during the flight.
But then, surprisingly, nothing much happens. The crash doesn’t break down social barriers and let these men see one another for who they really are, as you might expect, because the stereotypes don’t line up. Larry Shaben was never a hoity-toity, out-oftouch aristocrat; Deschamps and Archambault already saw eye to eye with one another before they boarded the plane. All four men are uniformly polite and supportive — wonderfully Canadian traits that nonetheless seldom make for gripping drama. Nobody even gets mad at Vogel when he eventually admits he was exhausted and overworked behind the wheel; they’re all instantly assuaged with promises of chocolate chip cookies from his flight bag.
To make up for this lack of tension, Shaben pads the narrative with a whole lot of peripheral bombast. Epigraphs from Seneca, Da Vinci and Joseph Campbell appear alongside single-word chapter titles like “Buried,” “Missing” and “Abort.” A quick glance at Part IV — home to “Hero,” “Fate,” “Atonement” and “Return,” among others — may have you wondering whether you’ve stumbled into a how-to manual for aspiring screenwriters by mistake. The Jon Krakauer-esque title is also no accident.
The tone of Into the Abyss is similarly overreaching. When Larry speaks, his voice is “deep with emotion.” Erik doesn’t just try to remember something: “a wisp of something forgotten feathered the edge of his consciousness.” Earlier, we’re told he “was banking flying hours like bonus points in a pinball game.” What this means, I have no idea. Quickly? Cumulatively? Is there an Addams Family theme, somehow?
Sometimes, this method even distorts the facts of the case. When the military’s air search-and-rescue team joins the search, for instance, Shaben writes that they had “the colossal task of covering more than 10 million square kilometres of land, as well as the world’s longest coastal waters extending offshore to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.” Well, OK, but presumably they weren’t sending planes up to Baffin Island, or out to New Brunswick, for this particular mission. In fact, the very next page pinpoints the crash site to “between 30 and 40 kilometres south of High Prairie.” Such misleading does the book no favours, and diminishes the real scope of the tragedy.
My biggest complaint, though, is more of a missed opportunity. As Larry’s daughter, Shaben has a unique perspective on the crash that gets hinted at, but never put to proper use. The author has said she didn’t want the book to become a memoir, but by far the most interesting part of the book is the introduction, where Shaben touches on her relationship with her father and how difficult it was to assemble the material, including getting her hands on a handwritten manuscript that Archambault wrote before his untimely death in 1991. (Larry died of cancer in 2008, during the book’s early stages.)
In fact, by not fully embracing her subjectivity, Shaben’s proximity to her subject matter starts to look more like bias. There’s a long section on Larry’s life and accomplishments post-crash that feels almost suspiciously celebratory — especially compared to the realistically checkered portraits she paints of the other three men.
So sometimes Shaben slips into the first person, and Larry becomes “Dad.” Mostly she keeps her distance. Not only is this flip-flopping confusing, but at one point it also leads to an identity crisis, as Shaben has to awkwardly treat herself as just another character. At one point she writes: “Carol, (Larry’s) second-born, (was) working as a journalist in the Middle East.”
Now that just won’t do. Even an author can’t exist in two places at once.