Thirty-One — Unmögliches Unglück

August 24, 1988 dawned cool and clear at Bullo River Station.

Back home, the Western states were ablaze, with unprecedented fires raging throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Flames were threatening a nuclear missile silo near Yellowstone National Park. In West Germany, Army Sergeant Clyde Lee Conrad was arrested for supplying NATO secrets to the dying Soviet Union. With the Presidential election just months away, George Bush Senior’s selection of Dan Quayle for his running mate was being roundly criticized.

Across the Atlantic, in Harlow, England, a tidy suburban community north of London, the Grint family welcomed that day the first of their five children. Rupert Alexander was a feisty redhead who years later would come to enjoy fame and fortune portraying Ron Weasley in the madly successful Harry Potter series of films.

At Bullo River, about as far from London as one can get, a more modest film enterprise was wrapping up, with the final day of shooting set to begin.

I expected that after breakfast in the predawn darkness we would head to the yards to begin our day processing cattle. I’m sure Charlie had the same expectation, yet we found ourselves waiting unusually long for Charlie’s appearance. When he finally emerged from the house, his instructions were customarily concise, but more pointed than usual.

“Tazzy, Erik, you blokes head straight to the yards. Fill the water tanks and see if any of the pens need hay. Don’t give it if it’s not needed. No need to trample good hay into the ground for nothing. Dave, there’s a leak in the lines going to the Bull Rush tank. Take the King. Grab some gear, dig it out and fix it. Then wait for me there.”

“What are you up to, Charlie?” I asked.

“The bloody TV guys want a mob of horses run past their camera. I’ll pull them together, then see you at the water line.”

I wasn’t disappointed at not going straight to the yard. The later than usual bedtime and extra couple of Bush Chooks added a layer to my morning fog. The prospect of a little solo work at my own pace appealed. I rolled to the workshop, grabbed the items needed for PVC pie repair, and slowly drove out along the Bull Rush water line. A large mud puddle betrayed the troubles underneath, and within twenty minutes I had the cracked pipe replaced with a watertight joint. At that point I had only to shovel the displaced mucky soil back into its hole, no more than a five-minute job.

I looked around for Charlie, expecting to see him behind a mob of horses, pushing them along the Bull Rush fence line. He was nowhere within the broad vista before me. I grabbed my shovel, then set it down, and laid back upon the King’s bench seat. I’d become accustomed to the 9 PM to 4 AM sleep schedule; my customary morning blahs were a thing of the past. The hard days made sleep easy, and the deep sleep made waking unproblematic, even for a lifelong morning grump such as I. But this morning was different from most; I needed a moment’s respite before burying the pipe.

A presence abruptly interrupted my reverie. I popped from my prone position to find myself bound within Charlie’s level gaze. The big man sat astride a motorcycle.

“You haven’t finished yet,” he said, his tone more descriptive than inquisitive.

“Christ, I think I faded out,” I said with chagrin, hopping out of the truck. “I’ll get this buttoned up right now. You ready to go?”

“No,” he said with obvious exasperation. “The bloody mongrels are all over the place. I’m going to swing around one more time and get this done; I’ll be back soon. Now — finish the job!”

Charlie’s flash of anger added insult to my mortification. To be caught laying down on the job was a complete humiliation. For months I’d scrupulously controlled those elements of my work life over which I had control—discipline, caution, dedication. I’d allowed no instance where I left something half-finished to take a nap. Though I likely dozed no more than a few minutes, the fact was undeniable. I was sleeping on the job, on a morning when, if anything, extra diligence was needed, given the unwelcome change in plans on a day filled to the gills with duties.

I watched Charlie scoot down the road, then veer into the field of knee-high grass. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Charlie on a motorcycle before this. Danielle occasionally used the station bike to distribute feed to the chickens or do other chores around the homestead. But I’d never seen Charlie on the bike. He was adamant about working horses on horseback. The need to handle the stock gently ruled out use of motorcycles, whose two-stroke screams enter anything but gently into the ears of the half-broken brumbies which constitute most of Bullo’s horse corps. I imagine he chose the motorcycle that morning as a matter of expediency. Rather than corralling then saddling a horse, he’d hopped aboard the motorbike to get this superfluous duty out of the way quickly, allowing a speedier return to the important matters of the day.

I repacked the soil, all the while muttering over my ill-timed lazy interlude. When the job was complete, I returned the tools to the bed of the pickup truck and looked around for Charlie. As before, he was nowhere to be seen within the wide horizon. I contemplated driving back to the homestead but elected not to. It was enough that I’d already shown myself a lazy bastard; no call to be a disobedient one as well.

After a brief interlude—during which I stayed wide awake—a vehicle approached from the direction of the homestead. As it neared, I saw Danielle at the wheel. She had a concerned look on her face.

“Have you seen Charlie?” she asked with urgent concern.

“Yeah, he was here maybe fifteen or twenty minutes ago. Why? What’s up?”

“Get in.”

I climbed in with Danielle. Her demeanor set me on edge—brows furrowed, sitting upright, her hands gripping the wheel tightly.  “The film crew has been waiting for the horses for an hour. He’s not answering his radio,” she explained. “Tony is going up in his chopper to help look.”

“Well, Charlie told me the horses weren’t cooperating. He’s probably still running them down.” As I looked around, I saw an object in the sky. “There’s a chopper to the left.”

“I see it. Is he moving? It looks like he’s sitting,” Danielle answered her own question as she pressed her face to the windscreen. The young woman left the dirt track and pointed the truck in the direction of the hovering helicopter. Tall brown grasses rose above the height of the truck’s wheels. When we left the track, we were a quarter mile from where the helicopter hovered. As we got closer Danielle and I could sense some activity on the ground. Though still hundreds of yards distant, we both realized with a simultaneous terror that it was Murray Lee in the field, engaged in a vigorous resuscitation. Her head and shoulders rose and fell above the horizon created by the intervening grasses.

“My God!” Danielle turned to me with a stricken look. “Do you know anything?!”

Every previous time I’d been asked that question at Bullo, my answer was an unqualified “Heck no. I don’t know anything.” I’d long since given up on the idea of contributing meaningful knowledge to the life of Bullo River.

But on the issue of first-aid, I do know something. I’m an Eagle Scout, and the Boy Scouts emphasize first-aid training. I took the training seriously, had committed myself to staying focused in whatever dramatic situations I might someday encounter, helping to calm others, tending to the injured.

So to Danielle’s plaintive question I was finally at Bullo able to answer, “Yes, I know a little bit!”

As we drew near, I threw open my door and was out before the car stopped rolling. I ran to join Murray Lee and her beloved Charlie, alone in a sea of grass. The helicopter above animated the surrounding grasses in a way discordant with the inert Charlie. The Bullo patriarch lay upon his back, his eyes closed, his limbs akimbo. His face was tinged icy blue. Murray Lee kneeled alongside him, leaning heavily with her hands upon his chest.

“Help me!” cried Sara’s eldest daughter as I neared. “Help me, please! Make him breathe! Make him breathe!!”

“Yes, he needs air!” I checked his neck for a pulse, felt none.

I gently tilted the big man’s head backwards to clear his airway. I took a deep breath, then placed my mouth upon his and exhaled into his lungs. His chest rose, then fell under Marlee’s hands.

“Now give him ten compressions,” I said, forcing a calm voice from my stricken being. There was no way I was going to screw this up; remaining calm for myself and those around me became my guiding focus.

Marlee attempted several chest compressions, but her technique was lacking. “Here, Marlee, it’s like this.” With a relaxed manner artificial to its core I demonstrated how she should place her hands over his sternum and drive the force of her small body onto Charlie’s chest. Danielle joined us, kneeling alongside Charlie with a look of inexpressible anguish. As I bent down to give Charlie another breath Marlee spoke up.

“I’ll do that! I’ll breathe! You do this!”

We changed positions. I had Danielle put her fingers across Charlie’s wrist to feel for a pulse. Marlee tipped Charlie’s head back as I had, then breathed a long breath into the stricken man’s body. I kneeled alongside Charlie at his waist. When Marlee’s breath left Charlie, I began a dozen deep chest compressions.

“I feel something!” squealed Danielle on my first push. “I feel a pulse!”

For an instant, a ray of hope shone upon the unfathomably bleak moment. I imagined Charlie stirring, regaining his senses, shaking it off, getting about his day. A fleeting voice within whispered the promise of a hallowed place for me in the life of Bullo River Station. “Save Charlie,” it said, “and you’ll have saved the world.”

I’m quite certain I have never wanted anything in life so much as that. Nor was anything ever more true.

But as I continued to compress and Marlee continued to breathe and the chopper hovered and the sun shone and the flies, as ever, buzzed, it became excruciatingly apparent there was to be no salvation.

Everything in first-aid training teaches the responder to continue their actions until help arrives. Within that instruction lies the presumption some manner of help is on its way. But at Bullo there were to be no ambulance sirens in the distance, no police, no firefighters. We were all he had. And we were not enough.

Philosophers say we humans live within multiple dimensions of time. There is the obvious, the current moment, time as described by the big hand and the little hand. But there also walks with us a more amorphous experience of time. Our living memories bring the past into the moment. Our dreams and aspirations, the agreements we make with time to sacrifice now for a greater good to come, make the future a living part of our day as well.

As the deadweight reality of Charlie’s mortal end came over me, I—we, likely—segued from the explicit experience of time into unbounded dimensions. I have no idea how long we worked on Charlie’s lifeless body, willing the incomprehensible to become sensible. It may have been fifteen minutes. It may have been an hour. At some crossroad within the fervor of our desperate exertions an understanding began to take shape among the living that nothing was to come of our efforts, that Charlie, inert, stood apart. My compressions slowed, became less deep. Marlee’s breaths became shallower. She’d been kneeling over him, but the crushing weight of reality at some point drove her back onto her heels. Danielle released the big man’s arm onto the dirt. I withdrew and sat numbly, waiting to wake from this nightmare. The effort was for naught. Charlie was gone.

At some point the chopper had flown off. The blue sky above remained, impassively looking down upon the calamity; a motorcycle on its side, a good man strewn upon the ground, three others, their own life forces at low ebb, seated around him, their eyes to the ground.

At some point within the unmetered moments a truck arrived. I believe it carried the chopper pilot and one of the film crew. We three men lifted Charlie off the ground to lay him in the bed of the ute.

“No!” cried Marlee. “Inside! Inside!”

Our somber crew looked at each other with understanding. Marlee could not bear seeing her Charlie splayed in the bed of a pickup, no different from a killer. We gently if awkwardly slid him into a seated position onto the bench seat of the cab. Marlee sat next to Charlie with I on his right, at the wheel. The distraught young woman numbly asked me to drive slowly to avoid jostling him. The three of us, shoulder to shoulder, carried Charlie on his final journey home.

As we neared the homestead, I saw Sara standing outside, anxiously looking our direction. She saw Charlie seated between me and Marlee and quite reasonably assumed he had seated himself there. She ran towards the truck with a look of immense hopefulness and relief. But as she neared my window, I shook my head. She looked past and perceived in Charlie’s color the truth of the situation. The kindly woman staggered backwards to a set of steps, upon which she collapsed, and dissolved into a vision of racking sorrow.

The balance of that day—and, in fact, the rest of the time I spent at Bullo — existed within the nebulous hollow of unstructured time. At some point, we moved Charlie into his bedroom. Marlee followed him in, the last I saw of her for I don’t know how long. At some point the police arrived, placed Charlie in a body bag, and carried him to his final chopper ride. I helped, holding the frontiersman by one of his strong arms. At some point several of Charlie’s relatives arrived. Both his mother and father lived to see this dreadful day, along with two brothers and a sister. At some point the film crew quietly packed their bags and at some point they departed upon a charter plane. At some point the cursed day ended, and another began.

Danielle, a tower of strength amidst the body blow of Charlie’s death, led the boys and I as we undertook processing the cattle in the yards. At some point we started and at some point we finished and at some point I did some fencing and at some point I cried with Dick and at some point I patched a flat tire and at some point I sat silently with Stumpie and at some point I shared with Sara a long hug and at some point I was able to lay down at night without reliving the perverse absurdity of that unfathomable afternoon. Exactly when those various moments occurred, I cannot say, existing as they did within the kaleidoscope of arctic fog and searing pain which characterized the emotional life of Bullo River in the aftermath of Charlie’s death.

The structure of reality itself had collapsed, had become muddled into an intractable knot of meaninglessness and ridiculousness and filleted emotion. The man who embodied the best of the life I had come to so admire was gone; we, the living, seemed no more than fallen leaves swirling pointlessly in the wake of his passing.

I thought of the missionaries and their recent visit. I remembered Charlie’s response to their question “what will become of you when you die?” Charlie told them he would become fertilizer, but now that that eventuality had become preposterous reality Charlie’s prediction was shown to be far too humble. I’m certain that a just God has a more righteous destiny for folks such as Charlie Ahlers. And I believe my sense is ratified by the Bible which those missionaries held high that afternoon.

The Good Book says the meek shall inherit this earth. That encapsulation makes no sense. No; those who we moderns think meek shall not inherit the earth. Moses himself is characterized in the Bible by the Hebrew word “anav”, the same word as those “who shall inherit the earth”. It’s fair to presume “anav” means something other than “meek”; it’s highly unlikely the Lord would choose as His messenger a hapless dweeb.

No; the English word ’meek’ is a poor translation of the Hebrew concept of ‘anav’. We don’t have a single word in English analogous to ‘anav’. A proper description requires a full phrase, something akin to “he who can use his sword well but chooses to keep it sheathed.”

That makes much more sense, that the book which defines goodness in this world would offer the future to those individuals who are profoundly capable, fierce even, yet direct their strength towards enriching the common good instead of plundering it. The discipline to cultivate deep capabilities, then a life spent sharing those abilities with community—that sounds more deserving of eternal honor than the submissive timidity characteristic of ‘meek’.

By this higher standard, Charlie Ahlers would be at the front of the line for salvation, regardless of his philosophical take on the matter while he walked the earth. He considered philosophical flights of fancy a wasteful distraction from practical matters at hand. There was no wasted space with Charlie, no unnecessary fuel burned. His mechanical walk, devoid of any swagger, the utilitarian thatch he wore as a hairstyle, his brevity of speech, his uncomplaining willingness to take on everything and anything required to complete a mission—everything about Charlie was stripped of abstraction, artifice, or conceit.

That he was killed in the service of a supercilious TV show, an activity so familiar to me and so welcomed by me, caused me pain. When I brought myself to his world, I became a better man. When my world intruded upon his, it cost him his life.

At some point I drove back out to the death scene. The motorcycle was gone. Someone, perhaps Uncle Dick, retrieved it and stashed it behind the work shed. Upon a nearby termite mound, a hump perhaps eighteen inches tall, a scuff mark confirmed the fatal interaction. Charlie had hit the anthill, and was thrown from the bike.

In an act of pointless retribution I kicked the mound repeatedly, yet barely managed to crack the adobe. I retrieved an iron bar from the truck and smashed the protuberance into large chunks, sending hordes of innocent termites scrambling for cover. When I rolled over the chunks with the ute, scattering the critters within, I likely seeded several new colonies, but I found some feckless satisfaction in erasing the object of Charlie’s demise.

When Charlie hit the mound, he was likely going thirty-five miles per hour. I later learned from Danielle that termite mounds had only recently begun appearing in that section of the property. So with the tall grass and the unexpected mound and, likely, his mind more on the real work which needed to be accomplished, rather than the celluloid endeavor which he was supporting, he’d driven carelessly into the block of insect mortar. He might have broken his neck immediately upon contact. He may have survived flying over the handlebars and landed fatally. Either way his death was almost certainly quick, painless, and, as with all death, immutably, agonizingly final.

Given his injury, there was nothing our first aid could have offered him on that day. I was as peripheral to his needs in death as I’d been in life. The pulse Danielle felt was merely a vestigial flow caused by my initial deep chest compression.

As I was working to save him with the chest compressions I’d heard a distinct crack. I feared I might have broken his rib, sent a shard of bone through his heart. I lived with that unimaginable specter until we received confirmation a neck fracture was the cause of his demise. The possibility that I may somehow have taken his life while exercising the one skill I’d been able to offer Bullo with any authority was too excruciating to contemplate. And when it proved to be the product of my overwrought mind, I confess I dropped to my knees, tears of resurrected self-worth spilling forth.

No, I had not saved Charlie, but neither had I killed him. If I had, if he’d simply been unconscious and I’d managed to finish him off, there’s no chance I’d be telling this story now. It’s hard to imagine myself in that circumstance as anything other than a rootless wanderer, numbing the truth with the dedication of an addict, my spirit evaporating under the bright light of self-contempt, my pointless days dissolving from one Hell into the next.

Men have taken their own lives to ease lesser burdens.