Gina Leola Woolsey | Issue 37
Excerpt from Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner's Journey Through Disaster
Excerpt from Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner's Journey Through Disaster
September 2nd, 1998
The phone on the bedside table rings minutes before 11:00 p.m. on a rainy Wednesday night.
“I’ve just had a call from the Halifax Rescue Coordination Centre. A plane's gone down somewhere off the Aspotogan Peninsula.” It’s a woman from his office.
John and the dogs are ready for bed. Deputy and Ben, golden retrievers, flank their master, ready for the night’s watch.
“What is it?” He knows what she's going to say. She’ll say it's a small craft, or a local carrier flight.
“It’s an international flight. It’s Swissair.”
The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain. His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.
“I think there’s some room for double checking on this.”
Dr. Butt, a forensic pathologist with over thirty years of experience, lives across the bay from the peninsula, about half an hour’s drive from his office in Halifax where he leads Nova Scotia's death investigations as the Chief Medical Examiner.
He'd only returned home a short time ago, after a long day at a courthouse two hours away in New Glasgow. His testimony had been postponed and the impatient doctor was forced to wait on the sidelines for his turn to give evidence of murder. The victim, a cab driver, had been strangled with a ligature placed from behind, and asphyxiated. It was an upsetting case; a deadly robbery that netted the two young assailants a handful of loose change. The Chief ME was determined to have his moment on the stand for the murdered man, despite the waiting game.
As he drove home, a dark sky had overtaken the milky twilight. On grey fall days in Nova Scotia, the clouds crouch low over the rocky coastline, as if conspiring with the sea to swallow houses and towns. It's a different feeling than the expansive semi-circle sky of John’s hometown in Alberta, where the air is dry and the land gently dips and rises toward the far-flung horizon. The people here, they’re different too.
His office calls back. It's confirmed. A Swissair commercial plane has gone down off the Aspotogan Peninsula.
His internal alarm sounds, igniting the flow of the adrenaline rushing through limbs and vital organs. The buzzing won’t be far behind. At sixty-two, and after three decades of work in his field, John is no stranger to large-scale disasters. An international flight carrying possibly hundreds of people is proving difficult to imagine. How? Where? Why? The panic in his belly threatens, spreading its searing fingers, pushing blood from vital organs to the extremities, flushing his face and scattering his thoughts.
John drags a suitcase out of the walk-in closet and throws it open on the bed. He moves back and forth between his clothes and the bag, a repetitive motion to occupy the alarming thoughts while his brain works to find the logical next steps. I should be back in a day or three, he thinks, trying to compile a mental list of what one needs when heading off to deal with an international disaster.
Jan and Geoff, John’s best friends in Nova Scotia, live across the road. In a few days, when John runs out of clean clothes, he’ll ask Jan to bring him more. John, always dapper in his dress, gives her a list — the grey suit, the blue shirt with French cuffs, the soft yellow tie. But Jan is colour blind and her choices are mismatched attempts to follow his instructions. In the years to come, they will laugh at her fumbles, laugh at how John struggled to put together a somber but stylish outfit to address the families or the television cameras. The laughter will help them remember, and forget.
It takes him half an hour to gather his thoughts and finally zip the suitcase closed. By this time, the horrific news has travelled a circuitous route through his defense mechanisms and become true. He must keep his thoughts orderly and make the adrenaline work in his favour to stay ahead of the emotions. He never wants to hear that dreaded buzzing sound in his head again.
The dogs need minding. He calls his other neighbours, Frank and Shirley, a friendly couple right down the road. Shirley answers the phone, even though it’s after 11p.m. by now. Of course they’ll take the dogs, she tells him, don’t worry about it one bit. She soothes his jagged nerves with her reassuring voice.
Shirley is an angel. This isn’t the first time she’s come to his aid. When he moved across the country, from Calgary to Halifax, Shirley greeted him with neighbourly warmth. In Alberta, it’s customary to invite newcomers into your home for a meal or a cup of cheer. John finds the people on this coast friendly and earnest, but somehow not welcoming. He has trouble feeling connected to new people who don’t extend dinner invitations or host parties. Shirley seemed different, and she invited him and his dogs into her life right away. It didn’t take long for them to discover their shared friends. As it turns out, Shirley and her husband, Frank, lived in Alberta too, and they have common acquaintances back in Calgary.
With Jan and Geoff across the road, plus Frank and Shirley close by, John feels reasonably content in his seaside saltbox. Their three houses sit atop a small spit of land across the bay from the Aspotogan Peninsula. John's picture window overlooks St. Margaret's Bay and the arm of land that hugs the shoreline opposite. Had the neighbours been scrutinizing the dark sky that night in the minutes before impact, they might have seen the doomed aircraft on its final trajectory into the ocean.
After the call to Shirley, John checks the dogs off his mental list. Time to pass on the news. He needs to rally the troops and call the commander. His staff consists of one highly competent administrative assistant named Linda, two Nurse Investigators, and one part-time file clerk. He starts with Linda.
***
A loud noise rips through the still air above the house. Trinkets and framed family photos shake on wooden shelves around the perimeter of the living room. Linda, a stout, middle-aged, working mom, and her giant-sized husband are spending a few minutes with the TV and their teenage daughter before heading up to bed.
“Oh my heavens! Do you hear that plane? Next they’ll be landing in our living room,” Linda says. She has to be up early the next morning to attend a workshop in Liverpool with her boss and several RCMP members. It’s her job to keep things going, to smooth out the rough edges of Dr. Butt’s communication style, and to keep him cooperating, especially when the RCMP are involved. She needs her rest.
The parents leave their daughter with the TV and head up to bed, both fast asleep within minutes, the sound of the too-close plane quickly forgotten. Sometime after 11pm, the ringing phone wakes her.
“There's a plane down somewhere off the Aspotogan Peninsula,” says Dr. Butt.
“What do you mean? Like, in the water?” Linda is groggy.
“I don't know exactly, but I believe so.”
“What kind of plane?” Linda enters her short period of denial. Surely, if it’s true, it must be a small plane. It must be a manageable tragedy. How can it be anything else?
“A big passenger plane. A Swissair plane.” John stabs at her disbelief.
“Oh my heavens!”
“You have to meet me at the office right away. You’ll have to get up and come in right now. I need to call Emergency Measures. You’ll need to call the RCMP and coordinate with them. We’ll have to gather up…”
“Ok, listen,” she says, interrupting his flurry of instructions, “I’m hanging up the phone and I’m coming to meet you at the office.”
“Or, I should call the RCMP. You call Emergency Measures. We’ll need to coordinate with everyone.” John continues his rapid fire.
“Listen,” she interrupts him again. “Now, listen. I’m going to hang up so I can get dressed and I’ll be on my way.”
Linda knows how to deal with her boss. She respects him for his intelligence and everything he’s done to bring the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner’s office to its current state of efficiency. Before Dr. Butt, there were so many problems. Now everything is done the same — all the investigations, all the paperwork, all the files throughout the province are part of one, unified system. The Medical Examiner relies on rural family doctors and hospital pathologists to visit distant crime scenes and do lab work. Before Dr. Butt, the ME office often waited over a year for pathology results. Government funding was minimal and Linda worked alone with the previous Chief ME. Dr. Butt changed all that.
Other aspects of her boss aren’t so admirable, in Linda’s opinion. He’s a micro manager who worries over everything. He needs to be in control and it causes a great deal of friction between the Medical Examiner’s Office and some of the RCMP. He's often fighting with one colleague or another, and Linda is called on to make things OK. The toughest test of her skill is about to start.
Linda’s daughter bounds up the stairs to her parents' room. “Mom, mom! It’s on TV. A passenger plane went down off Peggy’s Cove!”
Within minutes, clear in her mission and direction, Linda is dressed and heading toward Halifax.
*
Robert Conrad wakes to the sound of the nightly news on his living room television. He must have fallen asleep. The regular broadcast has been interrupted and a voice cuts through his semiconscious haze. A commercial airliner is down in the St. Margaret’s Bay area, somewhere near his home.
Bob Conrad has raised his family on the backs of tuna he's fished from the waters of St. Margaret's Bay. It is his extended yard, his home, and his workplace. The house that shelters him from the wild seasonal shifts of coastal atmosphere rests next to the shore of the bay. Waves lapping on the rocks can be heard from his kitchen table.
People must be out there right now, lost in the dark water, clinging to life. The need to find the crash site, to find survivors and pull them from the sea, takes Bob hostage. Within minutes, he is kneeling at the bedside, telling his wife that a plane has crashed into water nearby and he needs to take the boat out and help however possible.
“But, Bob, what about our rule?”
“No, no. It'll take you too long to be ready. I can’t wait. Listen on the VHF and you’ll know what’s happening. You’ll know I’m OK.”
Bob rushes out the door and down the road to North West Cove, a thumbprint notch of shelter on the jagged edge of the peninsula where his boat is moored. At the dock, journalists hover, pecking at the other fishermen who've felt the same pull to help. The reporters with their camera crews want rides out to the crash site. Bob sets off without passengers, despite the rule he never go out by himself, and despite requests from the boat-less reporters on the dock. For some reason, he needs to do this alone.
*
David Wilkins, an ophthalmologist from California, and his wife, fly from their home in Loma Linda to Seattle for a visit with friends. They’ve already said goodbye to their youngest child, nineteen-year-old Monte, at the airport when he left to attend university in France. He’s flying to New York, then transferring to a flight bound for Geneva where he’ll spend a little time on his way to school. It's bittersweet. The kids have all left the nest and the parents accept their new freedom with equal measures of nostalgic longing and entitled excitement. They’re a happy and devout family ready for the next stage of independent togetherness.
*
John loads the car with his carefully packed bags. The sky is overcast and a thin rain blackens the pavement. The air smells of moldering leaves and wet stone. At the end of the driveway, he turns left onto Norvista Lane, away from his friends and beloved dogs. The drive to the main road leading to the city is hilly and narrow with twists and turns that trace the shape of the landscape. Scrubby underbrush and thin trees cling to the shoulders of the pavement. At the intersection of the coastal country road and the highway, he wonders which way to go. The instinct to head toward the crash site, where he imagines soon-to-be heroes are charging to the rescue, pulls at John. But what help could he give there? And where? I don't even know where the bloody thing went down! Better to be sensible, he decides, and turns the car toward town, his office, and the disaster manual he wrote years ago.
CBC Award-winning author Gina Leola Woolsey writes about people striving to find love, self-acceptance, and belonging in an ever-changing world. She left her corporate career mid-life to pursue an education in creative writing, earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of King’s College. Currently, her time is split between her home in downtown Montréal, her birthplace in small-town Alberta, and her previous hometown, Vancouver.
Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner's journey through disaster by Gina Leola Woolsey Guernica Editions, 2023
On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through Dr. John Butt's makeshift morgue in Hangar B at the Shearwater military base. The Chief Medical Examiner faced the most challenging and grisly task of his career. Five years prior to the plane crash, John had lost his prestigious job as Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner. After 14 years of marriage, John began to think of himself as gay, but remained closeted professionally. Then, after serving a handful of years as Nova Scotia's Chief Medical Examiner, the devastating crash in Nova Scotia cracked his carefully constructed façade. Fifteen Thousand Pieces explores one man's journey to accept his true nature and find his place in the world. Chapters alternate between the fast-paced story of the crash, and the history of the man in the making. It is both fast-paced and introspective; gruesome and touching. Ultimately, it is the story of how death teaches us to live.
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