11:15 P.M.
Cold. Getting colder.
PITCH BLACK NOW. Not a shred of light.
We had a flashlight, but after the crash, neither Heather nor I could find it. Most likely it had fallen to the bottom of the tail cone. If we attempted to reach it, we could easily become stuck. Nope. Not worth the risk, given our injuries.
“Dad,” Heather wondered, “how are we going to get out of here?”
“Well,” I pulled no punches, “that all depends on Tabitha.”
Because Tabitha was my flight plan.
Unlike commercial pilots or pilots carrying passengers for hire, private pilots at my level of certification are not required to file flight plans with the FAA. Of course, the safety advantage of filing a flight plan is that if you don’t make your destination, after a period of time a search party gets activated.
However, the reason I generally don’t file a flight plan is because flight plans often get changed or interrupted, and with each change, you have to resubmit the plan. For the leisure flying I did in LIMA, filing formal flight plans wasn’t very practical or necessary. Take this trip, for example. Just about every aspect of my original flight plan had gone out the window.
That being said, all along, my “flight plan” was Tabitha.
She knew our original route as well as each change. The delay departing Lodi. Weather slowing us down out of Susanville. Wheels down in Rome. Our departure time out of KREO. Our expected arrival in Nampa or Mountain Home. She also knew that our phones had limited battery power left.
We were about two hours overdue.
Expecting us, Tabitha would sit wondering for only so long. She had been on edge all day, even willing to jump into her car and retrieve us in Rome. By now she was surely starting to wonder, “What is taking them so long? Where can they be? They told me they had turned off their cell phones. Well, how will I reach them?” She was probably kicking herself for not making the drive to Rome.
The big unknown was time.
How long would it be before Tabitha took action? How long before rescuers got moving? How long could we survive out here on this mountain? Jayann’s hands were already cold as ice. Okay. What if we were stuck here for days?
My mind went over scenarios. I had to get my girls off this mountain, no matter what it took. At daylight, I would have a better sense of it.
“Won’t the ELT going off be enough of a signal to get people responding?” Heather hoped aloud.
I gave her the bad news. “No. These beacons go off all the time. If a pilot lands a plane too hard, the ELT can go off.”
In fact, emergency beacons like mine had such a high “cry wolf” rate that first responders don’t start looking until there is a known pilot down. In addition, my ELT put its signal out on 121.5 MHz frequency and did not have identification data, unlike newer models that signaled at 406 MHz. Anyone in the air looking for us would have to come within range and be listening to that 121.5 frequency to pick up our signal.
On top of everything else, search and rescue would be significantly hampered by this bad weather and mountainous terrain. Yes. Conditions were working against us, and we had a long night ahead of us. I hoped we would still be alive at dawn.
Right now, our rescue lay in Tabitha’s hands.
Silence. Extreme silence. Only the wind and Jayann mumbling prayers, “I am ready to go, Lord. You can take me.”
My dear wife would come and go. When I talked to her, she acknowledged me only in a very blurry way. All she wanted to do was sleep. I wasn’t going to sleep a wink, my worries ever present.
I had left a blood trail down the mountain. Wolves, mountain lions, bears. This was Idaho backcountry. The only way for an animal to come at us would be through the front windshield, and I would see it coming.
My biggest concern was hypothermia. Three patients with injuries in below freezing temperatures. Not good. With hypothermia, as your body temperature drops, the first thing that happens is that you start shivering. Through shivering, your body is trying to raise its temperature through the energy generated in the muscles. It does not take much fluctuation in temperature to activate shivering, which usually starts around 97 or 98 degrees, but if your body temperature continues to drop, the shivering will eventually go away.
What your body does next deals with the priority of keeping your core temperature up and vital organs functioning. It does this by shutting down your extremities, such as the capillaries in your skin, which is often why people get frostbite in their fingers and toes.
If your core temperature continues to drop, you run into real trouble, especially with your heart and blood system. Chemicals that allow the blood to clot and keep flowing freely stop functioning correctly. As you become more and more hypothermic, you find yourself wanting to sleep because the blood flow to your brain is low due to your cardiac output. In addition, sleep is a natural response to injury and exhaustion from trauma.
The problem is that if you did fall asleep, you would probably not wake up on your own. You could miss hearing rescuers seeking to find you. That was why we needed to do roll call all night, no more than 15 minutes apart. By staying awake, we would force our bodies and brains to be actively working. Heather, the one without a head injury, would have to play a key role in keeping us awake.
“Heather, you need to make sure that we don’t fall asleep.”
“Every 15 minutes, I want you to ask, ‘Dad, are you awake? Mom, are you awake?’ A grunt is not a sufficient answer. We need clear responses from each other.”
“But I am so tired. All I want to do is sleep.”
“I know, but we have to do this.”
“Okay.”
Great. Okay.
“Mom, you awake?”
A grunt.
“Mom…”
“Okay. I’m okay. Just let me sleep.”
“Dad…?”
“I am awake, Heather.”
And bleeding again. Every time I moved, my left arm and head would bleed some more. Jayann wasn’t much better. When she put weight on her arm, she felt pain in her back and shoulder, making me suspect cracked ribs. Heather, pinned in the backseat, had possibly sustained a fracture. Man, we were a sorry lot.
In the quiet, my thoughts overtook me.
For the first time in my life, I was in an emergency of my own, experiencing the pain, helplessness, need, and embarrassment. Looking back on all the people I had treated as a firefighter, we now had something in common. I was walking in their shoes, having a much better sense, from firsthand experience, of the compassion they needed.
Man. I loved being a firefighter, even when the calls were tough. Like my first mass casualty call, some 23 years ago.
I was a brand-new firefighter at Elk Grove, only a year and a half into the service. We were working two people to an engine, and my partner was brand new, just like me, having come out of the volunteer ranks. Every day, given that we were both at the same rank, we created a highly sophisticated method to determine who would drive the engine and who would be in charge.
We flipped a coin.
That day I won. He was driving. I was the guy in charge. Little did I have a clue what that day would bring. The disaster magnet was working.
The accident happened in the middle of the afternoon on a crystal clear California day. Four high school students getting out of school were driving a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. Having fun or being impatient, no one knows. Approaching railroad tracks at a small crest in the road, their vision impaired for seconds, they swerved into the other lane and hit a Toyota head-on.
I will never forget rolling to the accident, my partner and I the first to arrive on the scene. Each of the four teenagers in the Rabbit had been ejected. The five people in the Toyota were severely injured. I had seen some fatal accidents but nothing like this. Nine patients. Some dead. Others mangled, similar to Jayann and me, with broken bones and bleeding but conscious and alert.
I was a new firefighter, just starting out. But when my feet hit the pavement, my training kicked into gear, with mass casualty incidents (MCI) going through my mind like projector slides. My voice was very calm and systematic.
Safety first. In less than 30 seconds, my partner and I checked for fuel leaks, downed power lines, traffic, and oncoming trains. I put out an order to stop everything riding those railroad tracks. Then we did triage, assessing every patient. Of the nine patients, four were conscious and alert. The rest were dead or in bad shape. Finishing triage, I put out a call for ambulances and two more engines to help with patient packaging and transport. In less than 20 minutes, the patients were off to the hospital.
For our part, the incident was thankfully over but not its impact.
The rest of our 24-hour shift, my partner and I did not say one word to each other. At one point, we simply pulled office chairs outside the station and watched the sunset, again, not saying a word. I know we were having thoughts that day, wondering when we had idealistically said, “Oh, Mom, I want to be a fireman.”
Was that still true anymore? Calls like that made you wonder.
Our battalion chief checked on us the next day, making sure that the stress was not getting the better of us. He gave me a compliment I never forgot: “Although you have been with the department for only a year and a half, your voice was calm and clear the whole way through.”
I thought that MCI would be the worst of my career.
Nope. Fifteen years ago, a believed-to-be ex-con got out of jail, returned to the Sacramento area, and got his hands on a gun. He went to his girlfriend’s house, only to be met by her new boyfriend.
Bam. Shot the boyfriend in the chest. Walking over the dead body, he shot his girlfriend. If that wasn’t enough, he then went upstairs and shot his two sons, both in the head, one at a time. For whatever reason, he let the boyfriend’s daughter escape and then shot himself.
I was part of the first medical team to arrive on scene. As our captain assessed patients, four firefighters started doing CPR. I ended up upstairs doing CPR on one of the boys. Such little kids. Four or five years old. Blood. Body parts destroyed. Worse than any Hollywood movie.
The father had taken a pillow and put it over the head of each boy so that he wouldn’t see him as he shot him in cold blood. That meant that the second boy, three to four feet away, actually saw what was coming. If the father was going to shoot himself, why didn’t he start there? Coward.
None of the five survived.
This kind of call can actually ruin a person’s career. This one did. The college intern riding with us threw in the towel after that incident, and I didn’t blame her in the least. Bad calls. They imprint memories that you will never forget. The outside world sees firefighters responding in our big red trucks, but they don’t understand the day to day.
Firefighters deal with death regularly, often hearing from loved ones or bystanders, “Why can’t you do more? Please work faster. Please save them.”
Sure. It impacts us. When bad calls happen, especially with children, we lean on each other. We are human. I have seen fire guys cry. The ones who are totally callous—nothing seeming to faze them—are the ones who often don’t last.
Statistically, because of the physical and psychological stress inherent in our profession, firefighters lose about ten years of life expectancy. At the station we might look calm, but we are always anticipating the alarm going off. When it does, our adrenaline goes off, the body going from zero to a hundred miles per hour.
Exposure to heat, radiation, and chemicals take their toll. A house fire can get up to 1200 degrees. Then, taking all your gear off, you walk out into 30-degree weather. Yeah. It’s tough on the body.
Ever think of quitting? Nah. Never.
The good calls make all the difference. Like the one a year ago. A CPR call. Which 90 percent of the time does not have a positive outcome.
We showed up on the scene and discovered an elderly gentleman dead from a heart attack. In his late seventies, reasonably healthy, he was down on the kitchen floor still warm. We put a tube down his throat and started CPR but got no signs of viability, his 40-year-old son saying to us, “Please save him,” while he yelled at his dad, “Stay with me!”
All of a sudden, the old man’s hands moved! Surprised us. Then they reached up toward the tube. What a shock. His eyes opened. He became responsive. Amazing. We had actually gotten him back to life!
It was one of the most remarkable and bizarre things I had ever seen in my career.
The guy was gone but he had come back, hands moving around, nodding as best as he could to us. Even though he was elderly, the man still had life yet to live. Maybe to be there for his son. Clearly, it was not his time to go.
Good calls. We love the ones that blow us away. Like the one with a construction worker many years ago.
The poor guy had gotten run over by a paddle truck, a monster-sized tractor with huge tires used at construction sites to make the ground level.
When we arrived, the man was in very critical condition. The paddle truck had backed over him, crushing him up to his waist. Compartment syndrome. Our crew of three and medical squad with paramedics did their best. Being a support person, I helped to guide in the medical helicopter used to transport the patient.
Leaving the call, we were sure he was going to die. Well, proving us wrong, eight months later, using a walker, the guy walked into the station with his wife. They had come to thank us for saving his life.
Surprised us all. Nothing short of a miracle. He was still on this earth for some reason. Some purpose. Some person.
And so were we.
So, I would not give up hope. Jayann, Heather, and I would get off this mountain alive.