{The Wai T ing} The plane, full mostly of men and boys, fa-
thers and sons, poker buddies on a fishing trip into the exotic and remote wilderness, had crashed without hint of warning, everything ripped from its rightful place and hurled forward into a single mangled heap of living and dead. O’Keefe was still buckled in an uprooted seat,
facing forward and down, as though kneeling over a church communion rail. His head was gashed, and his legs were pinned in the grip of coolers, bags of clothing and who knew what else. He felt the weight of a body heavy on him. After a moment, perhaps two, the body stirred. It was Jim Morhard. “What’s hurting on you?” Morhard asked. “I think I’ve got broken ribs and what all
else?” O’Keefe said. Morhard slid off him, and O’Keefe glanced to
his right at Bill Phillips, whose seat had catapulted forward from the rear. No question he was dead. O’Keefe reached for a pulse, and found none. He saw someone to his left, reached down. “It’s Senator Stevens. I checked his pulse.
There is none.” Taking inventory: so far, two dead, two alive,
five unaccounted for. One was Kevin O’Keefe, his 19-year-old son,
who had been strapped into the co-pilot seat. Even from the pile of seats, bodies and gear, Sean could see the cockpit had been blown apart. Then he saw Kevin, hanging limp from a
shoulder harness still riveted to the plane’s ceil- ing. He called out to him again and again, with building desperation. “Kevin?” “Kevin?” “Kevin!” Nothing but silence.
AS pAiN STAbbED through O’Keefe’s broken body, a long-ago memory floated up. Spread across the wall was a map of Alaska, a
state so vast it equals one-quarter the size of the Lower 48, a state with more miles of river than highway, a state populated by more caribou than humans. This map was covered with hundreds of col-
ored pins, and Sean O’Keefe, then a young aide to the state’s iconic U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, paused almost 30 years ago to ask his Air National Guard escort why. “What does this represent to us?” he said. Every pin, he was told, was a plane crash. And the different colors? “Well, the green one says we found them and
we were able to locate survivors. The red ones, you can kinda use your own imagination as to what that means.”
12 ThE WAShiNgTON pOST MAgAziNE | November 28, 2010
Sean O’Keefe was one of four survivors of the August plane crash that killed former U.S. senator Ted Stevens and four others in Alaska. O’Keefe, chief executive of EADS North America, is shown at his office in Arlington in November.
But it was the memory of the pins that were
neither red nor green that returned to haunt O’Keefe, as he lay trapped in the wreckage on the isolated mountainside in the rain. Those other pins, and there were lots, were
crashes that never had been found. Each pin marked a rough guess of where the plane went down. Despite what are likely the most sophisti- cated and experienced search-and-rescue teams on the planet, the vast Alaskan wilderness swal- lows planes whole. Mountains are covered with thick forests of alder and brush. Lakes, rivers and tributaries give rise to superlatives — the most salmon, the best game. It is home to places so rugged and unspoiled they draw outdoorsmen from all over the world. But that beauty comes with conflict. It’s always man vs. nature. There are a dozen ways Alaska can kill you,
See a timeline of the crash at
washingtonpost. com/magazine.
say those who fly or fish or hunt the land. There are driving rains, frigid cold, and extreme cycles of day and night. Clouds roll in and drop so low it’s as though they’re sitting on top of the rivers.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BENJAMIN C. TANKERSLEY
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