6:42 A.M.
Sunday morning. God’s day.
MINUTES AGO, THE HELICOPTER overhead had hovered, confirming that they had found us.
Slowly, I got up off my knees, broken bones, bloodied face, having no words, only emotions inside. Jayann, Heather, and I were going to be rescued, a bit worse for wear, but alive and otherwise in good shape.
I walked back to LIMA, not surprised that the helicopter didn’t land near us. The terrain, now becoming clear in the approaching daylight, was significantly steep. Comprised of shale and sagebrush, I saw no level clearing, nothing on which a helicopter could land safely.
The relief I felt was beyond anything I had ever experienced in my life. Seeing Heather and Jayann’s faces, having hope, I got back into the passenger side of the plane and somehow managed to lock the door back on, even with my busted arm.
We sat there in silence, tears in our eyes, perhaps in shock that we had actually been discovered and that help was on the way.
As only she could, Jayann gave me a solid, “awake” look, while trying to keep her eyes open. You could tell what a sight she was seeing, something out of a horror movie. I showed her my arm, the wrist swollen and black. “I think I broke it,” I said, almost with a laugh.
She smiled. Yes. You could see it in her eyes. My woman of faith had known all along that someway, somehow, God was going to get us off this mountain. Jayann had been right, and I could not have been more grateful.
“Hold on, honey,” I reassured her. “You will be getting warm soon.”
“How long is it going to take?” Heather asked, still shivering from the cold.
I had no clue what to answer. “I don’t know. We are in the middle of nowhere. They might have to hike in or use horseback.” I was being realistic, trying not to get our hopes up only to be disappointed if the rescue took longer than we hoped.
Minute by minute, the sun rose up in the sky with clouds rolling in. We sat there in silence, our world so very quiet, listening, waiting, and wishing our help would come soon, very soon.
“Did you hear that?” I asked the girls, “Did you hear that?”
“I thought I heard it too.”
“Yes!”
A whistle. Often used in search and rescue. We heard it blowing again and again. I yelled. The whistle began to blow in fast succession, meaning that the person had heard me shouting. Jayann, Heather, and I continued to call out. The whistle got closer and closer until we heard a man shouting, “I see you!”
A wave of gratitude hit me. All those decades as a firefighter, I had been the guy coming to rescue someone else. This time, a complete stranger had come to rescue my family and me. I was never so glad.
He was dressed exactly like you would expect of a pilot. Walking around the front of the plane, looking through the windshield, he asked with a look of concern on his face, “Are you all still here?”
“Yes. We are all here. We are just very cold.”
He smiled, clearly surprised at what he was seeing. Without a moment’s hesitation, Scott, the pilot, gave us the jacket off his back along with some blankets. At first I refused, “No. I am covered in blood.” Talk about an understatement. The right side of my face was a solid sheet of coagulated blood, my eye socket stuck shut. Every time I moved, I bled some more from my arm or leg. “I don’t want to get blood on your jacket.”
He laughed, as if to say, “Are you kidding me, buddy?” But insisted, saying, “Take it. I can get another one. Besides, I don’t need a jacket because I just finished climbing down the mountain for at least a mile.”
We took the jacket and blankets as two more people, medical personnel, Stan and Karen, reached the crash site and began what I knew all too well, their assessment of our injuries.
I was feeling things I had never felt in my entire life. Although as a firefighter I had seen and dealt with a lot of terrible things in the line of duty, I never once wanted to be anything but a firefighter.
Still, at this moment, I was never so glad not to be one anymore. Scott, Stan, and Karen, and I imagined many more who had risked their necks to find us, had come to our rescue. No longer was it my job to be the first responder. Letting go, letting the trauma off my shoulders, I had little left inside of me except “thank you.”
Scott took a walk around LIMA. “I have been doing this for a long time and have never pulled a live pilot out of the mountains. Certainly not a whole plane full of people.” Then, looking at the direction we had traveled, he added, “I’m not sure how you managed this, but you are my hero.”
I appreciated his words, but I wished I felt differently. From where I was sitting, I was the man who almost killed his wife and daughter. I was no hero, no, not in my eyes.