Renewing my faith in written words

Idon’t often say kind words about the modern mass media. As dollars get tighter, publishers can no longer afford to have a writer spend days, weeks, even months, researching the nooks and crannies of a complex story.

But this week is an exception. This week three stories renewed my faith in the written word.

The first came from Maclean’s online. (I don’t know if it will appear in the print version.)

Shannon Gormley wrote about the cave rescue in Thailand, last July. It seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?

But instead of a dry recounting of wet facts, Shannon

Gormley searched the personalities involved, got inside their emotions, enabled us to feel their fear in the absolute blackness deep inside that mountain.

The small group of strangers, charged with an impossible task, to bring a dozen children and one adult, none of whom know how to dive or even swim, through three kilometres of flooded cave in zero visibility and rushing currents.

Dr. Harry, charged with a task no doctor had ever done before, sedating the boys and their coach just enough that they could be dragged through the murky water to safety without struggling. Or dying. Whose own father died while Harry was underground.

Jim Warny, added to the team too late for the lesson on how to administer a second dose of anesthetic if the rescue took a little too long and the sedated patient started to struggle, having to tranquilize his care package not once but twice when the supposedly comatose victim grabbed Jim’s air pipe in the bottom of a flooded channel as Jim felt his way along the invisible lifeline until he could pass his care package along the rescue team near the entrance, discovering only after he got to safety that he had been dragging not a small boy but the boys’ full grown coach.

You cannot read this story (https://www.macleans.ca/thai-cave-rescue-heroes/) without getting emotionally involved.

The second story, in the on-line newspaper, The Tyee, told of a father and daughter trapped on Saturna Island by the great windstorm last December (https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2019/01/28/Ref uge-WithDad/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=e mail&utm_campaign=280119).

The father had deliberately built his house far from the ferry terminal, where he could look out at the waves battering themselves into flying spray on the rocks below. But when the winds rose, when salt foam dripped down his windows, when the house trembled, when the power failed, father and daughter tried to escape to the ferry terminal.

They couldn’t. Trees fell around them. Before them. Behind them. They couldn’t get to safety; they couldn’t get back.

Then the islanders showed up. With chainsaws.

Sofia Osborne tells the story without poor-me histrionics. Without moralizing. But the story packs an emotional punch as strong as that December gale.

And few stories could pack the emotional punch of the impact statements made by the families and friends of the Humboldt Broncos victims, last summer.

Russell Herold hasn’t been able to bury his son’s ashes yet. Evenings, he sits with his son’s urn in his lap, talking to him, “like I did when he was a baby.”

Chris Joseph removed his son’s socks at the funeral home. He carried them in his pants pocket ever since. He held them for the driver of the semi-trailer, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, to see. “I can’t even smell him anymore,” he lamented.

Yes, there was bitterness. Andrea Joseph called Sidhu a monster. “I despise you for taking my baby away,” she sobbed. “You don’t deserve my forgiveness.”

Others struggled to forgive. Forgiveness is not easy. It’s not wiping the slate clear, banishing the pain, declaring closure.

“I want to tell you that I forgive you,” Christina Haugan, wife of team coach Darcy Haugan, told Sidhu. “I have been forgiven when I didn’t deserve it, so I will do the same.”

And Marilyn Cross, mother of the team’s assistant coach, spoke directly to Sidhu. “I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive,” she said. “But when I look at you, I see a young man not much older than our son Mark.

“I grieve for the guilt you must carry for the rest of your life. I grieve for the loss your family will experience. I grieve for the loss of your freedom and future.

“I don’t hate you. I hope you make every effort to do good, wherever you go, to make the world a better place, just like our son Mark did.”

Sidhu had been sitting silently. That was the moment he began to cry.

So did I.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist.