tree-planting life

The True Story of How Annoying a Helicopter Crash Can be

A helicopter crashes; the pilot goes missing

I thought we were done. The chopper had flown the crew in. It had slung all the trees out to the block. Some were, no doubt, already going into the ground. I was about to return to camp when the radio crackled into life.

"Oh shit!" said Gary. Then silence. This was bad. Gary was our helicopter pilot.

I keyed the mike on my radio. "Gary?" I said. "What's up? You okay?"

I looked at Marcus. He'd heard it too. He stood on the pegs of his quad to look in the direction we had seen Gary fly off.

I keyed the mike again. "Gary? Please acknowledge." Marcus and I listened. We could hear nothing with the naked ear but birds and a light wind blowing through the trees—no sound of a helicopter anywhere within range. Nothing came over the radio.

"Shit!" said Marcus. "Do you think he crashed?"

"I Hope not," I said. "But we'd better check." I pulled out a map and laid it on the seat of my quad. I oriented it against our current position and drew a line in the direction Gary had been heading.

We started our quads and headed down a cutline roughly in the right direction. Once we judged we had veered too far off the flight line, we abandoned the cutline and made our way through the woods.

We slowly picked our way through the woods, calling Gary's name and looking for any signs of a crash. About half an hour later, we spotted what was left of the chopper hanging nose-down in the trees. It was about 15 feet off the ground. There were just stubs of the rotors left. Most of the tail was gone, and the front of the canopy was smashed. There were bits of helicopter strewn all about us.

There was no sign of Gary. We called his name. No response. We left the quads parked by the helicopter and headed out on foot in a rough spiral, walking about ten feet apart and tying flagging to trees to mark our location whenever we made a complete circle.

It wasn't long before we found Gary stumbling through the woods. He was disoriented. There was blood streaming down his face, and he was limping heavily. He had no idea what had happened. He wasn't sure what he was doing in the woods or why his head was bleeding. We sat him down on a log. I pulled a first aid kit out of my checker's vest and did my best to clean him up while Marcus returned for one of the quads. Considering the state of the helicopter, I was amazed that Gary was still alive. He was definitely pretty banged up, though. I was most worried about the head wound.

"What happened?" asked Gary.

"We're not too sure," I said. "It looks like you crashed." I rinsed the wound on his head with water from my bottle.

"I was flying?"

"Yep." I gingerly picked some pine needles and other plant matter from his wound.

"How high was I? How fast was I going?"

"Well, I don't know. You were done for the day and headed back to base. We didn't actually see the crash." A lot of blood was still coming from the wound on his head. I wiped most of it off with a piece of gauze and then held another one on the wound to stop the bleeding.

"Are you sure I crashed? I don't remember a thing."

"Well, it was either a crash or a really shitty landing." I lifted his hand and put it on the piece of gauze. "Hold this." I said. I started wrapping tape over the gauze and around his head.

Gary was silent for a while. Then he asked, "What happened? Was I flying? How high was I?"

"Uh. You crashed," I said. "I just told you."

"Oh, sorry." He paused briefly, then asked, "How fast was I going?"

I explained again we didn't know. That we just found the chopper in the tree and then him. I continued to check him out. He had definitely done something bad to his right leg.

After another pause, Gary asked again, "What happened? Was I flying?"

I was going through the story again when Marcus returned with the quad. I helped him load Gary up on the quad and told him to hold tight. The two of them headed slowly and carefully back through the bush to the cutline; I walked along behind, helping to prop Gary up whenever Marcus had to drive over anything particularly gnarly.

Once they got to the cutline, I trusted Marcus to make it back to the truck without my help and went back to get my own quad. When I caught up with them again at the staging area, Marcus was putting some fresh gauze on Gary's head and taping it down again.

Gary was asking the same questions. "What happened? Was I flying? How high was I? How fast was I going?"

"Dude!" said Marcus. "We've told you all this before. We don't know. The last we saw, you were well above the trees and headed back to base. Then you said 'Oh Shit'. Then nothing."

"Oh, okay."

Gary kept asking the same questions all the way back to camp. It worried both Marcus and me. Aside from having no short-term memory and a very sore leg, he seemed all right.

At camp, I called the helicopter company to report the crash and try to get another chopper to take Gary to a hospital. Amazingly, they had nothing available. The nearest chopper was three hours away and supporting another crew. We were about a hundred and fifty km of gravel road from the hospital, so we decided to drive him there ourselves.

We had another problem, of course, in that we had a crew on the other side of a very wide river, and the chopper we'd planned to fly them out with later that day was smashed to bits. After getting assurances from the helicopter company that they would arrange something to fly our crew out, Marcus and I loaded Gary back in the truck and high-tailed it for Prince George.

It took us about 90 minutes to get to the hospital. Every couple of minutes, Gary would have the same conversation with us. We went from being worried to finding it funny to finding it extremely irritating. An hour and a half of someone asking you the same thing over and over again can get more than a little tiring.

I desperately hoped Gary wouldn't die on us when we'd headed out from camp. But I admit that after a while, I began to hope he would pass out for a bit.

I was very relieved when we handed him over at the Emergency room. They told us he had a broken leg and a concussion. The concussion is apparently what caused the memory loss.

He was still asking what happened when we left him, but that was good. It meant he was still alive.

We never did hear what caused the crash, but we discovered that Gary was released from the hospital about a week later and was flying again within a few months. If he can't remember the crash, there was nothing to make him scared of it happening again.

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