Migraine suffers often feel a bad day coming on nor Tech, Odp Remit, Japan. Seventy five milligrams is the first and only medicine that can treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines with pain relief in his life. sixty minutes and protection that can last up to forty eight hours. Don't take your allergic to nor tech odious The most common side effects were nausea, stomach pain and indigestion for important safety prescribing patient information visit any warty, easy dotcom, nerd tech taken. role of your migraines. I'm John, unwelcome contributing rider to the New York Times magazine this

a story that I wrote for the voyages issue of the magazine in two thousand nineteen about a terrible accident that happen on a trip I had taken with two friends. It was a real privilege, almost twenty years later, to report out what happened and find some clarity about something that felt disorienting and dramatic. At the time. So here is my story: it was just a kayaking trip until it up ended our lives. The whale citing happened right away minutes into day. One. John Dave and I have just been dropped off on a room alaskan shoreline an hour and a half by boat from the closest speck of a town job. Was working as a sea kayaking guide that Summer Glacier Bay National Park,

invited us up for a seven day. Excursion during his week off is the boat. The delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off. It became unthinkably quiet on the beach and the largeness strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent. Who is a familiar phenomenon for John from the start of all its trips? A moment that people in and surely pause to soak in to me. It felt like those scenes of astronauts and having finally rattled free of the earth's atmosphere slip into the stillness of space, except we weren't in space. We were on earth. Finally, really honor we were only starting to move around again packing our gear into the kayaks. When we heard the first half of a blowhole not far off Shore John was exe,

attic seemed to him as if the animal were putting on a show swimming playfully in the cab. Diving resurfacing, then ploughing it's open mouth across the surface to feed. He took it up good omen, though I had no idea at the time he was anxious. David, I might feel intimidated about making the trip such a big pay off so quickly would get us excited and diffuse any apprehensions for Dave. The well citing had exactly the opposite effect once when he was a kid. His dad took him. Scuba diving with dolphins, there were friendly, are inspiring creatures purportedly, but they terrified Dave. Instead, we could still conjure the feeling of hanging defenceless ITALY, not water by the most definitely swirled around him less like solid objects and flashes of reflected light, or he could only move only in comparative slow motion. Ever since she had harboured a fear of large sea creatures, a niche

phobia, particularly for young man who lived in the Bronx, but a genuine ones still, and so even his Dave understood that a chance to see whales, like this was a major draw of a kayaking trip in Alaska and though he feigned being thrilled. Some second thoughts were kicking in. We were going out there. He realized The way I left me exhilarated in gleeful, like John but deeper down, I also remember feeling shaken like Dave, nothing about the animal registered to me, as playful welcoming it just appeared in the distance, then transited quickly. Past us from left to right. My uneasiness had something to do with the whales, great size and indifference, its oblivious as it passed watching. It made me feel profoundly out of place register. How large that wilderness was relative to me.

At the time I was working at a literary magazine in New York City Color, Hudson Review, picking poems out of the slush while a mailing them to an outside panel of editorial advisers. I was trying hard in my letters to impress one of them hate truth, a gruff Reverend eighty one year old poet who lived far upstate, I loved kreutz, were but was more unarmored with his persona Z, I'm in life in the woods, his intolerance for phoning us and most of all, the precision with which we are to create a common offering, including one strain of his own suffering that I related to, particularly in those years, but wouldn't have had the courage or clarity to examine. I had always been aware truth once wrote of his youth tat. The universe is sad. Everything in it. Animate were inanimate the wild creatures, the stones, the stars was enveloped in the grate.

Agnes pervaded by it. Never then, or now. If I've been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there a kind of grandeur- yes, but not beauty. The profusion. And variety of celestial lights have always frightened me. Why are they there why these, instead of others by these, instead of nothing? That was how I felt watching the well from the beach afraid that everything was accidents. Then again, maybe it's just hard to picture the start of the trip in retrospect, without amplifying some feeling a foreboding, else, curry throat, but has always stuck with me. The wilderness begins at the edge of my body at the edge of my consciousness and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace. it was MID August two thousand too, and we were twenty three. Twenty four and twenty five we'd graduated.

college together two years earlier, Dave, whom I also grew up with shot out of undergrad. Knowing he wanted to be a doctor and had just finished its first year of medical school Any similar momentum I had after graduation was instantly sapped three nights after I returned to my parents house from school. I found myself driving my father to the emergency room. Three weeks after that he died. My grief was disoriented, in total at a moment in life when everything is supposed to feel possible making any single decision became impossible. I gave in to that sadness for the better part of a year reset at home, in New Jersey, with my widowed mother sliding back to the summer job. I worked during school glumly breaking down beef at a butcher shop to towns. Over. I coped with my father listless and confusion in ways. I'm not proud of still don't understand. lot of books about Ronald Reagan. For example, even the collect

of his love letters to Nancy Ass, a lashed out at Dave who is living at home that summer to studying for the cat he withdrew awkwardly after the funeral, and I suppose I was happy to hold that against him. It triggered some longstanding jealousy. A part of me always resented how he seemed unfairly exam. From the self doubt and heaviness that I was proud to. John meanwhile, was teaching at a rustic little boarding school in Switzerland, where his mother was from the summer the graduation before starting the job he set out for Alaska, with a friend sleeping in the of their old pick up in the minuscule town of the guests, Davis, the gateway to glacier bay. He picked up. Seasonal work in the warehouse of a character accompany John, had little actual experience of seeking, but had always felt drawn to the ocean in the abstract. In color. she and another friend blotted out a paddling expedition near Glacier Bay across the border in Canada and applied for a grant from her school to fund. It The grant was set up in memory of an alumnus who died in

avalanche while mountaineering was meant to encourage the responsible and conscientious pursuit of wilderness expeditions safety was key, but the committee rejected John and his partners application they seemed insufficiently prepared. I heard that wasn't surprising. John grew up doing a lot of back country camping and was a competent outdoorsman, but putting together a grant application required a kind of administrative fastidiousness. He didn't know his possess. He was bright, but scatterbrained forever picking up things and putting them down both figuratively music projects, conversations but also litter we can still picture him. Hustling around the house. We shared in college hunting for his keys soldering iron having gotten in over his head rewiring some device. He was an artist one piece. I remember consisted of a half peeled banana implanted with circuitry and suspended in a jar of formaldehyde once he grew grass in her upstairs bathroom a living bath mat. He said until the turf became muddy,

and flooded the downstairs. This was Johns third Summer in Alaska and it worked his way up to leading expeditions taking out vacationing for days at a time our If, however, would venture beyond the typical circuit into a remote corner of the part that he'd never been too John had no serious concerns about our safety, but he felt he bore response Letty for our emotional well being to enjoy our selves, we would need to feel comfortable not just in the wilderness, but also with him as a leader he suspected. We wouldn't trust him entirely. We didn't we knew and before he became a profession guide and our perception of his expertise lag behind the reality. With John Dave told me, it was always unclear to what extent he thought everything through Dave remembered landing in Gustavus that night before we got under way in casually John, a lot of questions. Where we going exactly do. We have We think we need Johnson, have solid answers for all them, as we headed back to his place for a good night's sleep

Will this to wait in the yard, He was living alone for the summer in a house that an acquaintance was building in the woods. The structure was framed up, but largely Wallace and John, to be safe needed to check that no moose had wandered in after spectacular first day of paddling, we came ashore and rocky title flat about two miles from where we were dropped. John gave us is detailed tutorial about bear safety, but we set up our campsite. He taught us, for example, to holler hey bear if we heard any rustling, but also preventative a head of us when we walk through the woods. The last thing you wanted was to come across a brown bear unannounced Haber John kept hollering by way of demonstration. He said it do fully like a children Tv host greeting some down on his luck, Ursa Neighbour, at the doorway to their clubhouse. This was intentional John. I noticed that the people on his trips often resisted bellowing Haber into the building

It was essential for their safety, but it felt silly or vulnerable somehow like singing in public, so he learned to turn it into a stick spinning it into a stream of consciousness, our Haber, I'm coming into the trees, now hope you're having a fantastic evening. Mister bear. and everyone up, they were performing for their friends. Now the whole group was in on the joke. I've never seen a wild bear, though I've backpacking bear country a handful of times. I felt comfortable with the animals in the abstract but here the bears were an abstract: they breach the material plane. There were bear trails everywhere, leading from the tree, lined the water and disquieting lie close, I felt to where we were pitching our tent refer heaps of their scat. We saw trees where the animals had slashed off the bark to eat in earlier tufts of fur, from their paws still plastered and the sap I pretended. I was having fun but tat evening.

Grew increasingly petrified almost delirious. My eyes tighten scanning forbearance, the sound of the wind became bears, and so did the mossy sticks cracking under our feet. give myself a migraine and phased in and out of sleep. at sunrise, awoke feeling foolish, while John Cook pancakes, a reasoned with myself. Privately. In a note book I brought on the trip I tried to conceal. The situation is a geometry problem. Yes, some or of bears Rove this landscape. I wrote relatively tiny, independent blips going about their business randomly just like us in all that empty space and confusion a lethal collision of their moving blips and are moving blips would be an improbable coincidence.

I've been distorting those odds mistaking myself for the absolute focus of all bears attention. I wrote was embarrassing really to be afraid of bears. I concluded, is to be narcissistic. I was reminding myself that freakish horrible things are, by definition, unlikely to happen even now. My reasoning feel sound way. commercial real estate become all about signing on the line be very will connect the dots, redefined Your bottom line make everything streamlined and think twenty years down the line, consider everything I realize anything visit she be already at C B. Are you dont? U S I'm wisely Morris, I'm a culture under the New York Times where I come home to pike, ass God still processing in the broadest sense

It's a show about art and culture, but it's also about going to work. hanging out with your friends and being on the internet. Normally I do this work with the comparable Jenna Wortham, but this season Jenna is off. Writing a book I invite it's about my favorite writers in critics in human beings to coming out with me why she's gone Wesley Morris Wesley more S, sympathy! We talk about the culture that shape. Does a billboard magazine, heads with hers, Casey then the changing ways we consume it. Now I feel immense guilt for my interest, skipping impulses and why Keanu Reeves is basically a culture unto himself I mean, maybe he's an empty vessel will have a new episode for you every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts

Hmm They too, as a slug. We paddled through a spitting drizzle in an endless straight line long, the high granite walls of the coast, we talk less and less just push through the emerald chop then eventually, we gave up hauling in our boats and making in a wide crescent, shaped curve short of the site. The John originally picked out on his map. We had entered done despair They are rarely visited pocket of the national park that I've since learned, has a story. History is a hide out for solitary misanthrope in the nineteen thirty one prospector built a cabin not far from our campsite and brandished a gun at the alaskan natives who pass through. We intuited that the scenery was beautiful, but we could see very little of it through the fog. Our guide book explained that the east side of the bay, where we were, can get extremely rough during foul weather, since large waves, rolling and better.

The shore line. That was happening now. The weather that blinked at us all renewed, was roiling into a storm soon the big rain started. We rushed through dinner, then loafed in our tent. Until eventually the loafing turned to sleep, A local newspaper would later described. The storm is short, but intense interest. Gustavus Creek swelled to about a foot higher than its previous record Gill ends with Gus up to fifty nine miles per hour, turned back to cruise ships and Skagway about eighty five miles north. Around two a m: we woke to discover that the wind ensuring the rain fly off our tent John sleeping bag and mine were soaked. Dave was snug and dry between us. We heard torrents of water lashing down and the waves crashing in the cove. We gotta three or four hours later.

the rain and wind no longer felt ferocious, but we're still to gnarly to paddle through. There is no question John said that we were staying. Put we cook breakfast took turns planes, in the tent. By late morning, the storm seem to have passed. We rancey we figured we take a look around. The train was crowned with thickets of all their and spruce underlined by ferns, no fear of prickly things. John pointed out Devils club three or four feet tall and leafy armoured up and down with spikes. The plant Pierce fleece and hurt like fire There were no trails we ve been trudging some time when we reached a fast moving stream, maybe ten feet wide John was surprised It wasn't on his map, most likely just a drainage bloated by the storm. We followed a downstream looking for a way across and eventually found it bridged by a hefty tree. Trunk seem like an easy crossing Johns

death and led the way David. I waited in the city fire line on the stream bank. Behind him, the creek was loud like a factory Oh, it's gears and rollers churning looking down John as there was more water than he thought That's when I heard the snap in the woods behind me My paranoia instantly understood that the many bears I thought I heard before were absolutely not bears were nothing because this sound was so unmistakable and crisp. So explicitly, Nothing I turned and Howard Haber, then waited a beat me, I said: hey bear again, I'm not sure, but I must have sky. those trees long enough to feel satisfied and safe. Because I know I was turning my head to go back to my friends. Saw the dark shape, rushing forward in my peripheral vision, when I heard must have been reads: pardon

The tree is large enough. You can apparently hear them cracking underground like gunfire. The third was seismic. the trunk crashed down right next. To me, mapping out bits of evidence later we concluded that the tree must have been about eighty feet tall, perhaps two feet in diameter with some kind of conifer spruce procedure. screamed involuntarily look out, then watch Dave a few steps directly in front of me: dive sideways and hit the ground. When I got to him it was crouching stunned, but ok, he looked up and said, go get John. It hadn't click back in. For me, three of us, the sight of Dave going down cancelled out everything else. I scramble over the creek running across the tree that just fallen shouting Johns name then spotted in the water, tangled in a snarl of shared off branches near the bank. Behind me, the cage which kept him from hurtling downstream

he did not know he'd been hit by a falling tree, it had narrowly missed his head struck. His left shoulder shearing it from his collarbone breaking many of his ribs. Later a doctor would explain that the downward force had been so powerful would probably scheme. Johns entire upper body in all the organs inside down toward his waist momentarily compressing him like a bellows for a split second, his shoulders, headed in the direction of his belly button before his torso sprang up again and heard nothing seen nothing. He was turning round to help Dave unto the log again feeling responsible for safety and the next thing I knew he was in the water. He tried to reach out his left arm, but could not make it move He could not move his legs. He felt a bolt of pain down his spine. John later described flashing through and idiosyncratic sequence of thoughts on a few milliseconds. If watching a deck of cards fanning across

table. One was an image of himself in a wheelchair Sid. behind a mixing council on a fancy recording studio. I guess It can become a recording engineer in a wheelchair. He remembered thinking you know worked in recording studio and though he played music. Yet no particular plans do Still, this vision apparently felt like an acceptable future. Freedom to resurface in the present That was when he registered me screaming his name, John Sophie shouldn't move in from his many wilderness first responders, trainings that moving a person with spinal injuries, risks, paralysis,. Then again, he also knew that most of his body was submerged in cold water, any reckon, is that he was dying of hypothermia if you didn't move, if I'm ready paralyzed. He concluded. I may as well move he somehow hoisted himself out of the stream before David

I got to him using his right arm and his chin and biting into something low me with his teeth for additional leverage. He reassess the situation better. Also, worse. He now realise that we are at least a mile inland from our camp. These body was walking. His legs just started working David I put in between us supporting his frame. He was moving faster than we expected, but uncoordinated lie. Then he crumpled between us. We tried again. John was dead. Weight, Dave notice that his breathing was shallow and his voice was low. Signs Dave knew from medical over collapse. Lung began battering John with a pep talk, telling him for He that he had to get up to get out of here. John didn't need that explained to him. He was cogent still trying to plot our next steps. In his mind, he looked down to see why this law he was resting.

was so lumpy and realise that he was in fact sitting on his left arm. The arm was slack, obviously broken his sleeve pierced up and down with Devils Club John had zero feeling in it. He founded amusing, the sensation of complete estrangement from one of his limbs John had been stressing that it was important to stay together, but this was their theory of wilderness survival. That appeared to be breaking down in practice. Someone have to get on the radio back at our camp by China, small marooned in our tent during the rainstorm. The night before John Show, how to use the device, though he did it almost as a formality, the hand held. Vhf unit was merely a line of sight. Radio. He told us meaning its range was small. It signal too weak to pass through most obstacles. You are unlikely to reach any one you couldn't see and we seen anyone since a faraway, a fishing boat early on day one.

There was a moment of discussion, or maybe just an exchange of looks between me and Dave. I told Dave he should go. I didn't trust myself to fund way back. I also knew that I lacked the courage to try whether I was being sensible recurrently, I still don't know. Besides I took for granted the day would make it he was more capable, in my mind, less likely to cinch himself and indecisive knots. Recently, though, Dave told me, you probably had no idea how much in my own head, I was. I know that You growing up definitely felt in secure about things. I think you did me and thought tat. Is everything figured out, but I had said much anxiety. He brought up the tremor used to having his hands. I knew about it in high school. We waited tables together and I occasionally had to carry out Dave supporters. We wouldn't spill, but I guess I thought of the tremors strictly physiological. I couldn't see the vulnerability causing it now is due,

printed away from me and John swatting Devils Club from his path with the Reverend Sleeve of his reign jacket. His nerves rose up rattled him, he worried he wouldn't be able to find the radio once he got back how to turn it on what if he broke the radio for closing. Whatever marginal chance we had of getting help. There were lots of ways to screw this up day realised more occurred to him ass. He ran. He found the radio. He turned it on then having These problems encountered another. He hadn't anticipated. What is the appropriate thing? You're supposed to say, remember thinking On tv, you see a lot of people saying May day and so David the open water and started broadcasting into the Fog Mayday Mayday, Even in that moment, though, alone each in the middle of nowhere felt slightly self conscious about it. This is so goddamn cliche. He thought Back in the woods kneeling

for John. I was having the same problem. I didn't know what to say He was lying near a log on his injured side, his beard and glasses flecked with dirt tendrils of law. You seem to be on the brink of losing consciousness at no time with the possibility of Johns dying, surface concretely in any of our minds. Still I knew I was supposed to keep talking to him the tether into the world with my voice. Somehow I said advancing platitudes, we're gonna get out of here soon and so forth, but I can feel myself treading Or even blundering, at one point to a long, winded apology worried I'd overstayed. My welcome that one Christmas with his family. I was afraid that the helplessness in my voice might be counter productive, unsettling John. Instead of studying him, it was a tremendous silence to fill what can a person say I had to literature professors in college who meet us memorize, poems you never knew in some lines of verse would come in handy. They claimed one like debris,

Is that, while traveling through Ireland, he found that if you'd spat out some Yeats at a pub he could drink for free? This is how I wound up reciting a love poem to John. It was the shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop a lyric point about the enormity of time which turn startlingly intimate at the end, when Bishop offers to shampoo her lovers, silvering hair come let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny, like the moon After that, I imagine, I also did some w h on a fair amount of autumn back than this? Van Ryan and meter is always easiest memorize. Looking up at the stars, I know quite well for all they care. I can go to which is why I had a lot of Robert Frost at my disposal, is well stopping by war, and the snow evening. The road not taken for the most part are trafficked and hits John I would spend about an hour and a half together alone on the forest floor.

I ran through everything in my quiver k, Ryan Aeroplanes, Michael Donnie, padding each with little prefatory remarks. While John said, nothing just signalled with his eyes were produced a sound. Whenever I checked I felt like a radio dj playing records. Middle of the night unsure. If anyone was listening, and here's one about owls by Richard Wilbur? I would tell John and off we go. I must have also done at least one by Hayden crews, my curmudgeon Le Pen, but the literary magazine periods poems didn't, learn. So some memory saying, but I worked hard to nail one of my favorites in which he describes stopping to notice a deer standing in apple thick, then realizing the northern lights are flaring overhead, hey and the animal pass a moment and stillness together, we are proud to be afraid. He writes proud to share the silent magnetic storm that destroys the stars relative to that boundless vile.

if the above, then he and the deer are momentarily. Allied, though still not entirely connected quote a glimpse, an acknowledgment. It is enough, and never enough that's what I said to my friend powerlessly tenting my jacket over his face when it started to rain. The title of the poem is, I know I remember, but how can I help? You The coastguard cutter Mustang wasn't where it was supposed to be the one in ten foot. Patrol boat normally spend its time coursing through the Gulf of Alaska. Inspecting halibut fishing vessels were circulating as a terrorist deterrent near the oil terminals. At Valdez

It was home port it in Seward hundreds of miles from Glacier Bay, but the crew is transiting to Juno for training. When a few days earlier, there were smacked by the same storm that later port inland over us. We had gotten absolutely pummelled John Roberts, a petty officer on the Mustang told me recently for two days, the boat swished around and fifteen foot plus sees many on the crew had been hunkered in the master, vomiting while Robertson, a couple of his shipmates, did their best to cover everyone's watches. Finally, the Mustang slipped into glacier bay to find some protection, the weather started to ease that afternoon, as Roberts piloted the Mustang EAST toward Dundas Bay, his pallid crew maids were finally staggering back up to the bridge Asking where the hell they were now when Dave's made a call came through the signal and mustangs radio is thin. Faint barely

going into range. Another of the ships petty officers, Ayman, Mccoy Explain to me that in retrospect the connection feels mindboggling Glacier Bay National Park extends over more than five thousand square miles. Our signal would have covered two or three miles at most and yet a boat coastguard, but no happened. passing through that exceedingly small window at precisely the right time. No, if nine times out of ten you played out over again and outcome would be the same. Mccormick said a moment earlier or later seconds potentially, and we might have slipped out of alignment, moving vote would have cruised crews that range on coupling from us forever.

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come on man. I'm tired. He said aloud wearily to the receiver in front of him. Roberts waited for a moment per protocol on the off chance that the coastguard Central Communication Centre in Juno and pick up the call. Instead, then, he turned and asked his watch commander to pull out all the standardized search and rescue paperwork. Was stealing himself re summoning whose professionalism- I guess we're doing this. He said, rob it was the crew member on the Mustang, with the most current medical training had completed in tee certification the following month as he started firing. Questions Dave on the radio. He didn't like the answers that he heard coming back, the shallowness of Johns breathing the likelihood of a punctured lung, more fundamental Roberts remembered anytime, a tree falls on somebody a good. He was also unsettled to learn the Dave, and I both lived in New York City, a red flag. He had found when someone winds up in trouble in the wilderness

We were one hundred nautical miles from the nearest hospital a half day trip, even in ideal conditions. The Mustang requested that the coastguard AIR Station in Sitka send a helicopter, but the immediate plan was for Roberts and three crew mates to peel toward sure in this ship Zodiac, in tracking down David found the flare and Johns emergency kid. Now, a to twenty the Zodiac under way. The coastguard asked him to fire it. He was still in front of our campsite facing the water. You never shot off a flare before the aim straight up, then watched as the bright tracer rose and art somewhere, far behind him deep in the woods he was uncertain, whether this counted as a success. He started scanning the fog in front of him, but the Zodiac never appeared someone the Mustang caught sight of the flare near the end of its arc emitted.

They directed the crew and the Zodiac toward it, steering them far away from Dave to the opposite side of the little peninsula we camped on, and yet this was lucky. They wound up coming ashore, much closer to where I was waiting in the woods with John soon report I was reciting was interrupted by whistles blowing and voices calling Actually three shapes wearing hard hats and Orange rain rushed toward us out of the trees. Roberts was especially improve of a reassuringly large Boston area native with a booming voice. He knelt and took Johns vitals the information was troubling. His pulse was sixty beats per minute, his breathing fast and shallow. They put his neck. Grace and ease them under a kind of truncated, backboard, called a Miller Board to move him out to the beach Dave had returned by then he and I crouched at one end of the board near John feet as someone, presumably Roberts bellowed account of three to lift.

later that night lying down to sleep in a bed and breakfast in Gustavus, stunned into pleaded. and warm Dave, and I would talk and talk reviewing. Tire ordeal we drooped into a long silence, coasting toward sleep. When Dave spoke up with one last August, nation when we are getting ready to lift John and the backward. He said it occurred to him that this was one of those crisis moments you hear about like when mothers are suddenly able to lift a car off their baby Dave expected. We are going to have superhuman strength did not have superhuman strength on Roberts command. The men raise John two way site swiftly and seemingly perfectly well as though their arms and deltoid were hydraulic, then in one motion they took off downhill with negligible help from us. This can't be accurate, but I remember the sensation of being almost dragged like chill

in in the sled, a National geographic television crew was embedded at the Coastguards Aerostation Sitka Filming instalment of a thrill ride. Reality series: the network had sent crews to other coastguard stations around the country. To, though this assignment appeared to hold the most dramatic potential, Aerostation Sitka was unique. Its pilots were responsible for twelve thousand miles of coastline, a sprawling treacherous wilderness riven with Fjords inlets and glaciers, often buffet by implacably horrible weather Or people who went into the back country Alaska had a way of getting themselves into different magnitude of trouble too, as Roberts put it when stuff happens in Alaska, it's big still. This was the tv crews eighth day in Sitka and as the show's producer Annabel Hester explained.

Having calls with my bosses at headquarters, saying nothing is happening, we're scrambling to come up with plan B. Then the mustangs call came in at one forty two, What type of injuries are we looking at asked the dispatcher? She was taking the call behind a semicircular counter. Like the reception desk at a mid level corporate branch office, she had a frame snapshot of a parakeet to brighten your workspace and a photograph of a dog with a heart. That said, I will whew the camera man stood conspicuously beside her holding tense, tight, shot, probable, broken ribs, definite, broken arm said the man. on the other, and then his voice, faltered seemed to give up And whatever else would happen to you if a tree fell on you, he added the dispatcher retrieved. The appropriate paperwork and scribbled tree fell on person on one she read the current whether allowed thirty knots wind, three hundred ceiling, heavy rain and one mile viz

that would soon be revised. The ceiling a dropped to an hundred feet entering the weather conditions on one of the coastguard incident reports, someone would right in a kind of nihilistic, catch, all extremely terrible. The coastguards policy was to deploy a helicopter within thirty minutes of the initial request, but the air stations operations officer, Commander Carl Baldassarre, informed, Everyone that this mission would take longer to plan Baldessari was a twenty five year veteran of the coastguard, a fast move. Sinewy man and a blouse flight suit with a tidy moustache and spiky. Here His role at the station was that of a firehouse chief. He was responsible, safety of everyone working there, which meant making judicial decisions about what warranted sending them hurtling through the sky. That calculus got naughty and conditions like is that there was a baseline volatility to flying in Alaska at all the coastguard didn't let its helicopter pilot

fly led out of Sitka, no matter how much experience they had another error stations until they practice difficult landings at specific locations region and gather egos battered a little by logging, a full winter in the state Visibility in Alaska was frequently poor conditions change quickly. One pilot told me about blindly tunneling through fog in the dark, when his co pilot got caged, the man lived design momentarily from his instruments and without any view, all references were horizon to latch onto found it impossible to reorient himself lost all sense of direction and was filled by Verde during much of the year was also cold enough with sufficient moisture near that is sending to clear the region's many minor mountains or even just flying through a cloud risk. The aircraft's icing up to me

gave this: the coastguard had laid out virtual track lines across the entirety of their range, the grid of GPS points in a network of paths connecting them long, which pilots, chart a course and fly at a relatively low altitude. Confident they weren't going to smash into among the system was in comprehensive. The track lines got the pilots close to their destination, but ultimately they had to do. verge from this gps superhighway. In fly the remaining distance, the old fashioned way with their radar and eyes it was like taking. Exit off the interstate except there might be at wall in front of you. Wherever you chose to get off, it was possible. The pilots would travel very. are a half mile away from ever needed their help only to discover that the last leg was too risky and be forced to turn back. While the sorry gathered the two pilots on duty that afternoon and the stations, flight surgeon, then unroll. The large paper map he pointed to our location, explaining

That's probably one of the loudly is places we fly in and out of this any pass right here is the workplace. We could possibly go any in passes a slim channel in the center of the icy straight, the long, interconnected system of what ways stretching through glacier Bay conditions in the icy straight can be bad three hundred days of the year, while the sorry recently told me, wind, rain and storm surges, all pushed through it fast from the open ocean but any impasse is Ameriky hole at the centre of the street a mile wide opening between a few, and but it I ll ends in a rocky point where all that, whether speeds up the only way for the pilots reaches would be to fly straight through it. Nothing in the National geographic footage at this point feels reassuring. The flight surgeon holds his hand over his mouth bites. His lip, the cope Chris Ferguson, only a few months into his posting unalaska mills, around fidgets with his ear, its

is Baldassarre needs convincing. He was an eager to and his men up. If you didn't, have to and wasn't they would make it all the way there. If you did it's kind of funny, he tells the pilots pointing at the map. You ve got a boat right here, lying on his backward like a pearl of driftwood John was conscious and cognisant pain but he'd started to feel somehow buffered from his body uninterested in connecting with the world beyond it He would later describe himself as a thinking blob. It was a passive experience, you didn't know what was happening but could tell our momentum installed. It was confused felt impatient in his mind, the three of US solved the impossible problem. We managed to get help. This was supposed to be the simple part. whenever one rushed into the hospital instead is mission deteriorated within ten minutes of reaching the beach John throughout

I've never seen anything like it, the kind of dark purple gristle. I took up my will cap to wipe his face and he reached a second time straight into my I got that all over me. John Roberts told me recently he'd seen vomit like that before it meant John, had ingested a fair amount of blood and signalled internal injuries. I made Roberts anxious He had been on the Mustang for two and a half years at that point, but had spent the previous four years in palm beach busy, but less extreme posting. when involved rescuing, weaken boaters from relatively close to shore, and where Roberts pointed out the waters warm and won't necessarily kill you. If you go in.

Moreover, the bulk of the Coastguards training is for maritime rescues, rescues on land counter intuitive, as it sounds, Roberts comfort level and confidence had dropped significantly, whence he hopped off the Zodiac and set foot on the beach. He reported back to the Mustang that John had thrown up then soon radioed again explaining the John was going into shock. He kept giving in requesting updates trying to gauge how long this might take and eventually started erecting a makeshift shelter but of plastic. Cheating and medical tape, hoping to keep John out of the room out of your shot of Us Roberts explained to his crew, made Ayman Mccormick what the vomit meant the possibility of John dying here under their kara was real and one, point in the National geographic footage. As Roberts

walls are relayed to the air station in Sitka. You can see where the dispatcher clearly writes on her form. E n t does not feel comfortable by this time. The air station's flight surgeon had received enough information to be alarmed sounds like he's, got a pretty sick. If it can just injury, he told ball the sorry. While the Surrey understood they would need to launch a helicopter but warn the Mustang that the aircraft might not make it through the weather. Ultimately would be the pilots call once they veered off their last track line and tried to shoot through Indian ass, they would go and give it a look while explained over the radio, but the outlook was if he, the guys on the beach he said, must be prepared to get John back on their cutter and HOLLAND to a hospital themselves. As they could one evening this winter. My phone rang, never Carl Baldassarre Laundry from the coastguard. He was teaching av she at a community college in Oregon where had left a voicemail message. Earlier that day,

I meanwhile had metamorphosed into a forty year old Father of two and fumbled to explain the boldest. that is thrilled as I was to have tracked him down. I was at the moment racing to finish: resulting from my daughter's before gymnastics practice and would have to call him back without missing a beat baldassarre. Blared orders at me, joking, but still sounding as instinctively ensure as he did in the National geographic footage. You said you want to start constantly, but slowly I didn't expect any of the coastguards been. I was called coin to remember that day however dramatic it remained for me, I assumed it would have been obscured and a year's long wash of more sensational incidents, but everyone I spoke to, did remember it immediately and enjoy till while had been involved in hundreds of rescue operations during its thirty year career and yet ass. I stood at the store when the phone that evening, he told me the money. I listened to your voice mail. I knew exactly the case. It was almost

it was yesterday. There was something about the supreme freakish nor of the accident that left a lasting impact and for those who came assured, the experience was also marked by a feeling of suddenly escalating chaos and the pressure to surmounted, Mccormick told me that ours was a story. He retold endlessly, often to the younger coastguards when he was eventually tasked with training in. It was a lesson about not taking situations that look impossible at face value He said when things start to go wrong, don't panic or lose sight of what resources you ve got, keep working the problem until its absolute in even Mccormick added if it means deviating from official policy Mccormick was not supposed to be landing in inflatable boat on an unforgivable iraqi alaskan shoreline, for example, but very was anyway beaching. The zodiac is gingerly as he could, so that Robert and the other men could low John on board

They slid. Amene on his side, like a folder into a filing cabinet, is John put it and started motoring through the chop very cautiously back to the Mustang about a mile away. as relieved as John had been when the coastguard first arrived. He also felt instantaneously, more vulnerable, strapped the backward his neck and the collar. He surrendered control of his body, however imperfect that control, he was being hauled around as an object. Now with no abuse, I need a wriggle or shift positions to manage his pain or even to turn his head and see what was happening. He was helpless entirely dependent on the upright people operating around him, those voices he could hear discussing him on the far side of some Ghazi divide, about ten minutes into the trip on the Zodiac John heard. One of those voices say: oh shit, we're losing air a section of the Zodiac sponsoring the inflatable fender that wrapped around the boat had punctured. One side was completely.

Deflated it's a it's. A big deal Mccormick recently explained to me sounding surprised that I had to ask the sponsors and increases the boats. Buoyancy instability is was keeping water from cresting over the side under normal conditions, a zodiac with a broken sponsor would have to be taken out of service automatically Instead, Mccormick found the puncture and wedge the nozzle of a small pump inside then steering the boat with one hand operating the throttle with the other. He started working the with his foot, essentially doing leg presses to keep the fender partly inflated. The ride was already bumpy and for, if sees now Mccormick began, tracing slow zigzagging course doing what he could to tempt down the turbulence in the violence to John Spy. As well as to guard against the possibility of the injured man suddenly bounding over the side on his backward.

Robertson. On the other coastguards, men on the zodiac leaned over John to shield him from the splash, the pain was heinous John seem to be passing out. Roberts talk to him held his hand, Roberts felt crushed. He told me he was torturing this guy in order to save him when they finally reached the Mustang, rather than hoist John off the Zodiac, they swung the ship's crane around and simply lifted the entire boat out of the water level with the deck and then carried him aboard to keep from joggling him anymore, Mccormick eventually returned for me and Dave Our later we were reunited with John in the mustangs Athwartships passageway. A cramped steel hallway, like the space between two cars of a tree, John was still battened to the backward wedged up to keep the weight of his body on his less painful side. They cut off his clothes, though he murmured

Lee not too. He was wearing a brand new Patagonia Jacketed barred from a friend, then swaddle him in a hypothermia, blanket they even I know and rubbed his feet. The The copter was going to make it. I don't remember there being a grand announcement not sure we were ever made aware of the possibility that it wouldn't now the crew got busy, but tying known anything that can be blown off by the road or wash her stashing it in the mess. I also don't remember, hearing helicopter when it finally arrived instead. I remember only a heavy door to our left swinging open to reveal seen from an action movie. The silhouette of a man in a blue flight two feet planted shoulder with apart to steady himself as the ship rocked side

Is the cable he'd been lowered on drew back into the ocean spray and far behind him? I'm flight surgeon, Rust Bowman, he said and stepped inside Bowman took Johns. Vitals gave him several successive shots of morphine. Soon, everyone was working to squeeze him back through the narrow doorway and onto the deck. Where the helicopter name age, sixty J Hawk, was idling overhead. Until recently, the story I told about the accident unfolded in two basic acts: the tree fell instantly. Easily unleashing a kind of unfathomable chaos, and then the coastguard appeared just as swiftly regard that chaos into order. It was like watching footage of exploding object then, watching run in reverse the manoeuvre the coastguard was readying to execute. Now on, the deck of the Mustang would be the climax of that progression. The helicopter hovered thirty year.

Forty feet over the boat nearing its speed and trajectory, while both vehicles moved slowly forward looks like you're heading for rain squall, the Copilot Chris Ferguson radioed, the Mustang at one point and ass, the ship to adjust its course to keep them in his forgiving, whether as possible. Soon the flight mechanic was calling out instructions to tuck the aircraft into alignment forward and right thirty forward in right. Twenty forward and right ten, then, finally, speaking in the flight recordings with an almost galling air of imperturbability, the lead helicopter pilot rich Macintyre radio, the flight mechanic to begin the hoist The whole procedure, from our vantage point, seemed seamless and routine in a way it was after the agonized deliberation at the ears station, the pilots exited off their gps route.

Into fairly manageable conditions around Indian pass. The winds were workable. The water was an excessively choppy ultimately scooping job. and off the deck of the Mustang, would resemble a standard exercise at the pilots drilled in their trainings, not too damn it down. The co pilot Chris Ferguson told me, plucking, someone with a spinal injury, offer moving boat and hoisting them into moving helicopter is a pretty and thing to do. But we normalize what is a normal. few moments earlier, as the men scurried around John and his backward packaging and fastening him for the hoist John worried that the second he got airborne, he would start twirling uncontrollably like the feathery end of a cat toy and potentially flak his head on the equipped on deck, but now he was levitating smoothly. A solitary model, bale of a man perfectly parallel to the ground Dave, and I watched it happen

our friend rising steadily away from us and probably to safety, is John floated hire. You could hear the Coastguards men on the Mustang beneath him begin to cheer. You felt it was. to open his eyes when he did he saw someone hunched in the open cargo door of the helicopter, pointing a television cameras. John, was rushed into surgery at the hospital in Sitka that evening, it punctured both lungs one to the point of collapse, sustain multiple fractures on aid of his ribs broken several vertebrae shattered his left, shoulder blade and snapped his break. Your plexus nurse, his spleen had been macerated into countless flex after awakening from surgery? John was disappointed that the doctors had swept those shards into a bag and thoroughness lean in the trash he to get a look at it, maybe even keep it presents in a jar alongside is cyborg banana once back and guest

Davis Dave, and I realized that we would need to call John's parents in Switzerland. I didn't have to push the job on Dave this time. He was adamant. He felt he would need to face conversations like these. If he was going to be a doctor Jones Father picked up and after absorbing the news he paused and caught Dave off guard. Thank you. He said solemnly. You guys saved my son's life Dave's stomach dropped. I remember thinking about it. He told me recently and realising yeah, I guess logistically we did. I had the same reaction when Dave hung up the phone and clearly shaken real it is conversation to me until that moment. The idea that we save Johns life had never occurred to us, possibly because the idea that John might have died still Hoddan occurred to us. We had sera sense of accomplishment or even asian,

see in our minds. All we did was avoid screwing up until the real help could arrive and save him. But John hadn't absorbed the story that way from the instant he willed self out of the water. He felt all of us, locking into that same seamless flow of order steadily displacing ass. The dave- and I only experience once the coastguard arrived, It was amazing to him how the three of us managed to generate solutions for each successive them. Even my reciting, those poems which to me it always. like a moment of utter helplessness, became in Johns telling a perfect emblem of that streak of certain deepest problem. Solving you conveyed a calmness he told me recently. I remember being this nice moment, he added that if he ever has to spend two hours dying on a remote forest floor again having me there to recite poetry would be one of his top ways to do it. the feeling of inevitability. That day became only more pronounced for John Ass time passed and the entire,

story of our rescue receded into a pro lie to the rest of his life. The surgery and sit girl was only the first of half a dozen new would take several years for him to regain sixty per cent of the use of his arm risk. In hand as the nerves gradually regrew. Along is injured side. He wasn't good enough shaped to go back to Alaska the summer after the accident, repairing boats in the company's warehouse and occasionally helping out at the bed and breakfast, but he struggled he could repair kayaks but needed help lifting them. He was unable to wrestle the mattress corners into the fitted. She when he made the beds, after that he started working at a recording studio in Portland, just as he envision, while stuck in the water. He found it his own audio, mastering company spleen less, mastering eventually John,

seemed to have recovered from the accident without any conspicuous disabilities, but his life has been quietly corroded by chronic pain and almost equally by the stresses of navigating the doctors medications on their side effects. it should, but two years after the accident he learned he had PTSD the trauma wasn't the falling tree, but his experience of powerlessness as a perpetual patient and the american medical system. It manifested as a kind of unbearable empathy for anyone who has suffered. John found himself shouting doctors on his own behalf, but also on behalf of strangers and waiting rooms, who were in being seen. he would hear interviews with natural disaster victims or the homeless and pr and have to pull his car over their continued to be other. True. relations to more mundane ones. A few times here he still re breaks a rib out of nowhere once or twice John told me. All it's taken is an especially affection and hug from his wife.

John found early on that he could cordon off this suffering, both in his own mind and in conversation but making jokes about the accident itself. And sticking to the happy ending of our rescue, a trick that got much easier after the National Geographic Show aired later that year, Mission Rescue final frontier, the programme, called the soundtrack was our heart thwacking since drums and shredding guitar, a foreboding KEN Burns affected, snapshot of Dave and John looking joyful before trip gave way to a worrying reenactment of someone else's legs cast in the role of Dave's legs sprinting through the blurry woods for our radio, a melodramatic, narrator pondered the fate of Kayak or John Cores

Initially the sloppiness or the production felt like a blessing. The show de personalized the accident giving us all a shorthand to convey how dramatic that day had been without confronting had destabilizing and senseless. It might have felt at a party. You could lay out the basics, Tree fell on John then say: National Geographic even made a tv special about it and ever would go wide eyed, but then move on. Figuring. You would unspool the real story some other time. but we never realized the degree to which that teaches shorthand started to obscure the real story, then gradually to replace it unembarrassed. Met that, though John and I remain close- I didn't know the extent to which has continued to suffer for the last seventeen years until talking to him for several hours. In order to write this account The morning after the accident David, I travelled back to done this bay to pack up our campsite collect the kayaks. We abandon the previous

I think we were shuttled there from Gus Davis by the same boat captain who dropped us off three days earlier. Forbidding the taciturn commercial fisherman named Doug Ogilvy the tide in the cove was way out when we arrived, it was as Ogilvy put. It such ass beach. The approach was so shallow, but he had to drop anchor a hundred yards or more from shore. He asked if we had waiters. We did not so ogled, put on his climbed down the ladder untold Dave get on his back, then stoical ie, like an ox or an old timers, strong man calling a safe. He trudged through the thigh Highwater drop Dave on the gravel Beach lurch back in hauled me the same way as if I were a man size, infant in a papoose Dave told me. He'd had a strange feeling on the ride out, as if

We discover that an even more massive tree had fallen on our tent since we last slept there and that all three of us would have been crushed and killed if we spend another night and undisturbed this plan, that is, he half expected to find evidence that the accident had been fortuitous somehow that there was a reason for redemptive value behind my mother had the same instinct when I called her the night before the phone. I strained size for her. She was only two years into a cruelly premature widowhood and I was new at being over protective son of a widow but John was going to be all right and that Dave and I were safe. She told me that my dad must have been up there looking out for us. Somehow I resented all the supernatural thinking if it comforted other people find, but I'd somehow known right away that I did

I need a reason for the accident. It was senseless but straightforward as unequivocal a fact. As my father's death had been a tree fell in the woods it might not have, but it did John could have died, but he didn't other possibilities spiraled infinitely outward from there. No apparently, I wasn't too interested in contemplating them the strange as it sounds. It was years before. I realized that the tree could have hit me and only after a friend pointed this out. As I told the story around a fire one night There was only a few weeks ago on the phone with John that occurred to me that the tree could have hit all three of us. We were standing in a single file line after all, waiting to cross the Creek Now we all made a wound up, clobbered and scattered in that river dying slowly and watching each other die. It's also probably true that I helped preclude these possibilities by being so feverishly paranoid about bear

Prs wheeling around at the sound of the snapping roots. That's what allowed me to see the tree coming just barely and scream that infinitesimal heads up for do. And so the real meaning of the accident, if I felt compelled to find one might be that validated my most exaggerated fears, but instead it somehow helped cleanse me of them. There is comfort for me in accepting the arbitrariness of what, regarding it as a spasm of random damage in time and space that, just as randomly a small number of human beings, got the opportunity to repair we were more capable than I had understood. We were also far more helpless on the ride. Back to his Davis, with our dear I pictured myself again as a small blip in empty space. The ride was rough, jumpy is Ogilvy, impatiently pounded is both through the last vestigial wave energy. The storm,

David. I had to hold on to plant ourselves on the bench behind him, but there was a moment when I felt so safe, but I loosen my grip lean slightly into the motion. the boat and closing my eyes felt myself lift off to see this. Laurie was written in narrated by John Llewellyn Stilson Amours, where is from the New York Times and other publications on your smartphone down, item on the app store or the place store. In autumn: that's a! U dm dot com for more details fly fast, than you think. With the jet blue plus Card Ben Watch, your vacate plans take off, you can earn of decision.

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