November 7, 2019 We Crashed into The Bog

Emil's Stinson and Rolland's Taylorcraft in a south wind

Thirty-six years ago today, November 7, 1983, two men narrowly escaped death in an airplane crash in a local swamp. This is their story as I know it, as I was in the midst of the action those many years ago. This is its unabridged paperback version. Names have been changed.
 
Rolland and Everett were cousins; Rolland being the eldest, by fifteen-some years. They enjoyed doing a great many things together, including hunting and fishing. Rolland was a gifted woodsman as had been his father, whose love of the land and all things wild he had bestowed in Rolland and his older brother, Evan; and also in which Rolland had imbued his two sons, Thomas and Harold.
 
Rolland had some hunting land that he had inherited from his folks, where his relatives gathered in number each fall; some of whom flew there, landing on the field’s mowed runway set aside as such for years. Rolland and two of his uncles, Enoch and Emil, and a cousin, Jed, had their pilot’s licenses too; it was not uncommon to see two or three airplanes parked outside the camp.
 
Deer camp was a rite of passage thing in those days so typically there were not young children running about; a person was at least a teenager, and this group, save for one, were all in their early 20s and 30s. A lot of fun was fun at camp beginning in September including partridge and/or goose hunting, as well as target shooting, woodcutting, and camp clean-up prior to the beginning of deer season in November. Eating copious amounts of great food and drinking whatever beverages there were was just a part of a state-wide deer camp initiation event which embraced the, “What happens in deer camp, stays in deer camp,” mantra.
 
 There were plenty of stories to tell and hunting magazines to read; some would play cribbage or venture a few hands of poker. All those years, the family got along famously, and I would venture we still do, though now sadly fewer in number all these many years later.
 
In 1983, there were fourteen hunters at Rolland’s camp, including Darlene, the camp cook, wife of Emil, one of Rolland’s uncles; myself, a cousin, who had purchased a quarter of land near there twelve years before; and two boyhood friends of Everett's, who were just like family, Jason and Justin Johnson.

Darlene was a generally pleasant woman until you riled her. It was then you suddenly realized you had stumbled into a hornets’ nest of pain and there was no place in the vicinity that you could escape from her wrath, but it was all because she had raised two families of boy-children, ( often including her husbands), by then, and had little to no patience with any more of them especially at deer camp. A person soon learned that “Ignorance can be fixed; stupid is forever. Get with the program or get away from me.” Oppositely, she was golden, fun-loving, and a damn good cook too.
 
I had spent a few weeks more in deer camp that year, as I had become divorced early that October and deer camp was a good place to get away from home for awhile, although it was only about ten minutes away as the raven flies. We had no children so I was alone at home too, but the increasing activity at deer camp was almost a social event in comparison.
 
The shack had been moved-in from a few miles away, living its formative years as a farm house until abandoned when farming became poor in the late 1960s. Rolland saw its potential as a deer shack and with the help of one of his cousins moved it to the hunting land and set it up on blocks. With the help of friends and family he added about twelve feet to the north end of the shack and made it into a kitchen and dining room area, with room for a rollaway bed, several chairs and a big dining table. 

A large porcelain and steel woodstove with triple-wall stovepipe up through the roof was put in, in the living room -- and normally was kept so warm that the front door and the back door were often propped open to let some of the heat out. Seeking a cooler environment, I slept on a cot along the inside of one of the uninsulated outside walls of the new addition, and awoke one morning to snow on my sleeping bag and my hair frozen to the wall, a story worthy of some hilarity in the right crowd.
 
Rolland developed a problem with alcohol in his late thirties, a malady of which he had lost control. He tried to hide it but it became more difficult as time went on. Many more simply tolerated his slide of behavior, which was easy enough as he wasn’t a nasty type of guy when in his dregs, although he could sometimes act heartless, eventually losing some friends, and later his wife of over twenty-five years, as a result.
 
On the evening of November 7, there were only six or seven of us at camp. Someone suggested Rolland go flying and look for deer west of the hunting land. Although the weather had been in the high fifties during the day and thirties at night, rather pleasant as deer seasons normally go, we all would've preferred 'tracking snow' and colder temperatures. Deer hunting had been rather poor that year and some of us wondered if there were any deer in the country at all or if we were just wasting our time hanging around in the woods.
 
Rolland wasn’t eager to go flying; he had stayed up late as had become his habit and was slow even getting out of bed mornings using his favorite excuse, “I’ve seen it rain.” So flying anywhere wasn’t something he really wanted to do either, yet he relented after a cup or two--of something he poured in it.
 
I was going to go with him. It was just a ride out west, over the swamp, and back, something that was done a couple times a week if the weather suited, taking maybe 20 minutes--a half hour at the most. Rolland had gone to start the engine and do some preliminary checks, when I realized I had forgotten my camera in the shack and ran back to get it. When I got back out, the plane was taxiing down the runway with Everett in my place. I didn’t mind; there’d be another chance later on. It was no big deal.
 
It was about three or four in the afternoon when they had taken off. 
 The sky was azure blue and hardly a cloud could be seen against it; winds were light. They weren’t warmly dressed as they would've been for a normally cold November deer season; neither had worn a jacket. Rolland wore his wire-rimmed glasses, his classic red & black plaid wool cap, shirt, and pants and Sorel slip-on boots, a little over ankle-high, he always wore in camp. He carried a hunting knife on his belt, and a penlight he used when he was at work, kind of a handy little light really.
 
Everett too, was dressed for summertime, wearing blue jeans, hiking boots, a flannel shirt, a lightweight vest and a cap. As pleasant as the weather was, he probably wasn’t even wearing long-johns. I think a couple of the guys were even throwing a football around that year; there was no snow.
 
They took off effortlessly, the little red and white Taylorcraft rising above the trees at the end of the runway then banking slowly west toward the swamp. We went about our activities as commonplace; airplanes came and went there. It was normal.
 
It was soon time for us to go ‘out on post’, that is, the time in the afternoon toward evening that deer hunters go to their deer stands to await deer that are passing through the landscape to feed on the fields. Rolland and Everett hadn’t returned from their flight west in the time we expected. A couple of us joked that maybe they’d crashed, but we laughed it off saying that what they probably had done, was fly to Roseau and had landed there to stay at Rolland’s mother’s house for the night. We could imagine them going ‘uptown’ for a few drinks at the American Legion where there was usually a band during the first weekend of deer season. Yes sir, that was the most likely scenario. It just had to be, the jokers!
 
Then night came on and we were convinced that was what happened, laughing about how we were suckered into thinking they were just going to look for deer. RIGHT!
 
Two of the guys at camp had to leave for their homes near Newfolden, after supper. The rest of us were all sitting at the table--with the front door wide open like usual, when we saw car lights sweep into view and heard a car stop. Figuring it was one of the Johnson brothers who had forgotten something, some of the guys who went out to see. Then someone hollered,
“Steve! You better get out here!” owing to the fact, I was the oldest man at camp (age 32) since Rolland was gone. Why no one called for Darlene, as she was 18-years older than me, I don’t know, but I quickly went to the door, and helped get Rolland in as others were helping Everett out of the car, with him groaning in pain.
 
They were both wet to the bone. Rolland holding his left hand over his forehead, his glasses a crumpled wad of wire jammed in his breast pocket; his face, a smudge of dried blood adhered to the bridge of his nose and his cheeks. He quietly paced the floor before Darlene got him to sit down so she could get a look at the deep gash over his eye, quickly saying dismissively, “That’s too deep for me to sew up; he’s got to go the hospital. That’s bad.”
 
Turning to Everett sitting uncomfortably on the couch; others were trying to remove his wet clothes and shoes. Darlene told them to just use scissors and cut his clothes off him, so he wouldn’t have to suffer contortive twisting and turning to get them off. Everett didn’t have any visible wounds or lacerations, but complained of back and internal pain. Darlene thought he may be bleeding internally and told me to go start her van.
 
I hurriedly started Darlene’s 9-passenger Dodge van and turned the heaters up full in preparation for the long ride to Roseau Hospital. With Everett wrapped in a down blanket, and his feet in dry warm boots, we helped him into the van; silent Rolland, refusing assistance, solemnly walked in under his own power and sat in the far backseat. He didn’t speak to Everett; Everett didn’t speak to him.
 
The ride out was slow, The camp road was a minimum maintenance road full of jarring dips and bumps, although Darlene was careful of her passengers; it seemed to take forever before we reached the end of the road and were able to turn north on a smooth county road and quickly build with speed.
 
Everett replayed the flight in his head, what he could remember of it, that is. Hypothermia had played its role in shutting down his extremities including his brain it seemed; he had a visual of when the propeller bent backwards and he knew he was goin’ to die! WATER!  GRASS!  MUD! came up to meet the airplane’s dashboard to almost engulf his head, his body contorting, slamming forward, his chest wrenching upward against his seat harness restraint, his head and neck violently thrust backward to stop ...

. . . then his body went to ‘auto-pilot,’ some unconscious physical reaction to leave the fuselage before it caught fire or exploded. And pushing the fuselage door open with all his adrenaline infused might--it scraped roughly along the ground, for the landing gear had twisted off and broken away. He fell onto wet, onto water, into twists of bog grass and laid there winded, on a greenish moving surface that undulated beneath him like a lake, and he rolled away, in his dull numb being, away from the plane, from danger, knowing Rolland was dead. When he heard Rolland, moan. 

Rolland was alive! Fuck!
He couldn’t let him die. The plane was going to explode.
 
And somehow strength returned from where consciousness had gone; the bleariness of cognition defying logic; struggling across the uneven bobbing surface of the floating bog, Everett opened the fuselage door and found Rolland slumped against the yoke, with blood streaming down his face. Unfastening the seat harness, he grasped Rolland under his armpits and with all the strength he had, pulled him backwards from the plane -- then passed out.
 
It was unknown how long they laid there, like that; Rolland atop Everett, before Rolland regained consciousness; his effects leaving him sober, bloodied and shaken. He was all too aware of their chilling reality as to where they were cold and wet in November, with darkness swiftly falling around them. The evening stars twinkling just above the horizon, the setting sun’s faint yellow glow in descent. Cold would descend on them and kill them there; they had to get moving; they had to get out. Awakening Everett roughly, he hoisted the younger man to his feet, shouting at him in an attempt to arouse him into consciousness. 

Both men were in relatively good physical shape from their outdoors activities before the accident; Everett a pretty good outdoorsmen in his own right, but now they were both disabled and somewhat disoriented; Everett moreso than Rolland. But there was no time to waste, hypothermia was wildly plunging across the bog toward them, rapidly gaining on them in their slow combined struggle to traverse a landscape so totally alien to human travel.
 
I’ve long stated that had this happened to someone else; people unfamiliar with the area, without even the basics for survival, searchers would have found their bodies only by seeing all the gathering ravens and eagles come spring. But Rolland had grown up in that area; Everett had hunted it too, coming up through deer camp events as a young hunter among family, amid the stories, the long treks ‘out west’ ahead of closing darkness.
 
So using the stars to guide them, Rolland headed northeast toward the grade, holding the penlight in his teeth to light their way, he half-carried Everett, forcing him to walk against his terrible pain. They crossed beaver-dammed streams, slip-sliding the criss-cross puzzles of beaver-hewn sticks and crooked branches, wading through cold black water then to quickly keep on the move, though their feet were numb with cold.
 
One ditch was completely full of water and created a dilemma to them that required they cross a narrow walking bridge just beneath the water’s surface, one by one, and not together. Everett told Rolland to go on and get help for them, but Rolland knew that Everett would likely succumb to the cold before he could return. 

Using his hunting knife, Rolland hacked a couple small saplings out for he and Everett to use as a balance beam of sorts and went on ahead of him and crossed the ditch, extending his sapling back to aid Everett.
 
Icy water feels like it replaces all the blood in your body with minute shards of glass, so it must have felt as the two doggedly grappled with one another to stand up and keep walking, behaving as though drunk, delirious in their pain.
 
Rolland knew where he had to go, gambling that his longtime friend would be in his hunting camp north of the grade, down in the woods, past the boat, and the old opera house someone had moved in there and left to rot for reasons lost to anyone living today. His old friend, Warren, had been a rounder too in his day, and the two of them went far back in their boyhood hijinks; if Rolland could only get the two of them there Warren would give them a ride back to camp and not ask any questions.
 
Hope against hope, Warren would be there, and all by himself.
 
Stumbling, Rolland and Everett went down off the grade; Rolland falling at one point, dragging Everett down with him. They both groaned, grumbled and swore in pain, gasping; drooling, their noses running, their clothes stiff with ice, feeling barely alive when Warren’s camp light shimmered through the popple trees and drove them on.
 
Warren said, Rolland made Everett do all the talking, as he could, grasping a cup of hot coffee like it was to be his last; Warren worrying the cup too hot for such cold blue hands. He could make out they needed a ride to their camp; Rolland standing in a corner shadow not saying a word, that it looked like blood on his face, but that nobody was offering explanation as to what had happened to them -- and Warren knew enough not to ask. He offered coffee to Rolland too, but all he wanted to do was stand close to the woodstove; so Warren threw in a couple more cobs, then went out to start his car.