{The Wai T ing}
and sometimes not responding until the third or fourth time his name was called. “We’ve got to soldier through this,” O’Keefe
said. “Tough it out,” he told himself, even as he
struggled to breathe. “Tough it out.” It would take almost 60 stitches to close the
gash where his forehead slammed down; his ankle was broken and his left hip was dislocated. But at that moment, he was oblivious to the
injuries most likely to kill him. One kidney had been nicked. He was bleeding
from within. And C1 — the half-dollar-sized verte- bra at the base of his skull — was cracked in four places. If it busted, his spinal cord would, too.
The docTor who would keep them alive had shared their lunch table. Bowman practices medicine in Anchorage.
When the weather was improved, she and her husband had opted for a fun flight in their own plane and sent the fishing crew on their way. Now, as they flew over the wreckage and saw
the flutter of arms waving from below, she said: “I’ve got to be on the ground.” So Tom Tucker, who had just dropped Bob
Himschoot on the mountain, spun his helicopter around to meet Bowman and Duncan on a tiny airstrip. They transferred everything useful to the chopper, and minutes later she was plunging through the woods toward the crash. “Where ya been? Why’d it take so long to get
here?” O’Keefe teased, his humor intact despite trouble breathing. When she reached Morhard’s side, he asked
whether he was going to die. “Not on my shift,” she said. Bowman made the rounds quickly: “Where
do you hurt?” “What’s ailing you?” “What are you feeling?” The answer from everyone was: pain. “We’re trying to get you drugs,” she said. “But
we can’t find any.” At 9:32 p.m. she called rescue headquarters
in Dillingham: Send medical supplies ASAP. Two patients were critical, two stable. Rule of
thumb among Alaska rescue veterans: “Critical” means if they don’t come out immediately, they’ll probably die. Tucker landed for a third harrowing time,
bringing two EMTs from Dillingham. Three oth- ers had been dropped off by another helicopter and were lost. Tucker and Himschoot set off up the mountain to find them. One eventually made it to the crash site. Himschoot and Tucker found the two others, but exhausted, near hypothermic and now enveloped in darkness, they decided they wouldn’t be able to find the crash site again and
16 The waShinGTon PoST MaGazine | November 28, 2010
eMTs John dunson, Tammi clark, Sonny Gardiner and Susan dunson photographed near dillingham, alaska, in october with gear used to help the four crash survivors. The dunsons were able to reach the crash site; clark and Gardiner helped with logistics from the town.
lifted off the mountain a final time at midnight. The EMTs had first-aid kits, but no one had se-
rious drugs to dull the pain. Bowman was bitterly disappointed. But EMTs aren’t authorized to carry narcotics, and morphine was the drug she needed most. Then she discovered a ornate pillbox in her backpack: her late mother’s migraine medicine. “Oh, hallelujah!” She spread those pills — Demerol and Valium — as far as they would go.
The only way out was going to be up. The doctor and EMTs knew that four bro-
ken bodies couldn’t make it back through those tangled woods. And the choppers that dropped them had no equipment to hoist people out. The big rescue choppers had to come from
near Anchorage, almost 400 miles away. An Alaska Air Guard HH-60 took off at 8:50 p.m. for the flight to Dillingham, 17 miles southeast of the downed plane. The Lake Clark Pass through the mountains west of Anchorage was weathered in, so the chopper flew north to Merrill Pass. Just as bad there. They were flying blind. Doubling
PHOTOGRAPH BY JENNIFER BOOMER
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