Ever After: A Father's True Story

  I have a hard time talking again. Will it always be like this? I feel like such a neurotic. I wait several minutes as we walk along, our arms around each other. I look at her.

  “OK, you’re on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re on for tennis. You’re on for the whole damned thing, continuing as if they’re still with us, maybe waiting for a chance to visit with us here. We’ll keep our cup out. That’s something I can live with.”

  We hold hands again. We talk about everything under the sun, or moon, but not about what’s happened. I know we’ve independently decided the same thing. The worst has happened. The only thing worse would be to let it ruin our lives, our children’s, our friends’.

  The next morning we play tennis at seven. Rosemary beats me six-four. She plays like a demon. Her usually weak service is a bullet, or at least it seems like one to me. Then we take our bike ride, all the way to Spring Lake and back, then to the end of Asbury and back: that’s better than ten miles. We don’t talk much.

  We’re wearing our bathing-suits under our tennis outfits, so as soon as we return, we jump into the ocean. The lifeguards are just setting up the stands. Dave, Bobbie’s husband, spots us and comes over. Bobbie was one of the ones who was with us that terrible evening.

  We can tell this is going to be painful for him, too. He offers his condolences. There are tears in this big man’s eyes. He’s six-three and must weigh 220 pounds. We try to console him. We dry off, get onto our bicycles and return home. I go up to change. I peek into Robert’s room. He’s asleep. I’m not going to wake him. I wonder if he ever thinks about how much like death sleeping is. Maybe then he wouldn’t sleep so much, or maybe that’s why he does.

  CHAPTER 11

  WE GET through the day, then the next one, and the next one, until a week has gone by. I haven’t heard from the governor—or from anyone else from the state of Oregon. I call the Woodmans to find out if they’ve been contacted, but they haven’t heard anything either; I have the feeling they don’t even expect to be.

  Then I call the Oregon operator and ask for the phone number of the governor’s office, his mansion. Am I doing the right thing? Have I been away from America so long I don’t know how these things are handled any more?

  I talk with a person at the State House who says the governor isn’t there right now. She takes my name, address, and phone number, says the governor will call me back. I tell her I will only be at this address, and available at this phone, for one more week. I will then be in France. I give her my number in Paris. She assures me the governor will contact me. I hang up, then call his private phone at the governor’s mansion. I don’t get any answer, not even an answering machine. Rosemary watches and listens to me as if I’m crazy. I don’t say anything; I know what she’ll tell me if I do.

  I go up to the attic where I write. I have my notes from the letter I’d written in California, plus some additional information I’ve gathered since. I write a new letter and mail it to the governor. I pedal on my bike to the post office and send it as a registered letter. I’m beginning to feel like a boy putting notes into bottles and throwing them into the sea.

  Two days before we’re to leave, we receive a phone call from Steele, Cutler and Walsh, the legal firm in Portland recommended by Danny’s wife, Sally. It’s a woman named Mona Flores. We explain that we’ll be leaving. She says if we like, she’ll Federal Express a copy of the contract that was signed by Danny and Sally for Wills. It will reach us the next day.

  I’m still not sure I want to get involved with lawyers. I don’t want to sue anybody. “Do you want to sue anybody, Rosemary?”

  She shakes her head no.

  There is the slightest puddle of tears along the bottom of her eyes. Maybe we’re running out of tears.

  “Listen, Will. I’ve heard you calling. I know you’re angry. In the end you’re going to want to stop this field burning somehow. I understand. I know you. Forget about the suing part except for one thing. If they must pay a lot of money to us and everyone else, their insurance rates will go way up. Maybe they’ll think twice before burning again, or at least be more careful.”

  “But what’ll we do with the money? If it’s a lot, it could ruin the lives of our kids. I like our life the way it is.”

  “How about Wills? They certainly owe him something. I know nothing can pay for what’s happened, but they owe him. And I think with our own kids we don’t need to worry. They’re all quite sound that way. They can always say no.”

  The idea of doing something to make the field burners think twice before they burn is what convinces me.

  The next day, the letter arrives. Steele, Cutler and Walsh will represent us for the “wrongful deaths” of Kate, Bert, Mia, and Dayiel. They will take twenty-five percent of any settlement and deduct their costs including filing fees, expert witness fees, travel expenses, and so forth. The whole document is one of suspicion and mistrust, calculating every possible advantage, any conceivable deception. But then, it is the law and these are lawyers.

  Trouble is their business.

  Rosemary and I sign the contract and date it August twenty-fourth, 1988, just three weeks after the deaths, and a day before we leave for France.

  When we’ve settled into our home, the houseboat in France, I ask Steele, Cutler and Walsh to mail us a copy of the accident report. I receive it in early September. It was compiled on August eleventh by a Sergeant Richard Corrigan of the Oregon State Police. I read it carefully and find myself vacillating between grief and disbelief.

  It seems that at three fifty-two p.m. on August third the Albany Patrol Office received numerous calls of a major motor vehicle accident and resulting fire. Sergeant Corrigan, Sergeant Steels, and Senior Trooper Tommy Nelson left for the scene at that time and arrived twenty-eight minutes later. The northbound lanes were ablaze. Six or seven cars and a large truck were in flames. Several other cars and trucks had stopped or had turned over on a shoulder north of where the wreck occurred. Approximately ten injured people were observed lying or sitting around these vehicles. They were being attended to by bystanders.

  Sergeant Corrigan immediately requested all available fire and ambulance equipment to be dispatched. A request was made to notify the Linn County District Attorney and Medical Examiner.

  The report goes on to list all the vehicles and people involved in the accident. Seventeen vehicles were damaged by the fire.

  The van that Kate, Bert, and the babies were in is listed as Unit 19 in the report. It had been damaged in three different areas. According to the report, “The first very major contact damage area was from the front of the vehicle around the right front corner, straight back to the rear right wheel, near the passenger door.” This is where Kate would have been sitting. Poor thing. “This damage,” the report continues, “is from contact with Unit 5 while the van was being pushed into it by Unit 18.” Unit 18 is the eighteen-wheeler trailer-truck that crashed into Kate and Bert from behind. Unit 5 is the vehicle in the next lane, the one the eighteen-wheeler pushed Kate and Bert’s van into.

  Minor contact damage was also evidenced on the left front of Unit 19 from contact with another vehicle, Unit 20. Unit 19 also had very major contact damage distributed across the rear of the vehicle along with both rear wheels. This was from contact with Unit 18 as it rode up on top of the rear mounted engine of Unit 19.

  This is where the two babies, Mia and Dayiel, would have been strapped into their safety belt seats. No safety belt could protect them from the momentum and weight of an eighteen-wheeler trailer truck coming through the roof of the van onto them.

  The report continues: “All four (4) occupants of Unit 19 were found deceased in their respective positions, the vehicle having been involved extensively in the accident fire and ALL OCCUPANTS EVIDENCING DEATH FROM THAT CAUSE.” The caps are mine—this is the information I most dreaded finding. Ideally, we like to say that someone was killed instantly. In this case, apparently, they were horr
ibly maimed, crushed by the impact, but were still alive, perhaps conscious, and then burned alive.

  “Having struck the van, Unit 18 then rode up on top of the rear.”

  Bert must have been scared out of his mind, in the right lane, trying to get to the verge, not able to see anything except the yellow, smoky headlights of the huge trailer-truck directly behind him.

  This impact caused an immediate ignition of both vehicles. Unit 18 pushed Unit 19 into Unit 5 … The vehicle, having much weight from Unit 18 pushing it down as well as forward, went under the left rear of Unit 5, pushing Unit 5 forward and slightly counter clockwise…

  This chain reaction of collisions was all [my italics] caused by Unit 18. The fire then began to spread rapidly, causing the other vehicles nearby to catch fire and burn. Heat from these vehicle fires was intense enough to cause large chunks of concrete to break from the roadway surface.

  The accident report goes on to describe the sequence of compounded crashes that followed in the total darkness of the smoke. It’s more than I can bear. I close the report and sit numbed.

  Maybe Rosemary’s right: I should just let it be; there’s nothing I can do now. But I can’t quit; I owe it to Bert. Whatever it takes, I must do what I can to keep something like this from happening to some other family.

  I review the medical reports attached to the accident report. Blood Alcohol Tests were made by the State Medical Examiner. Kate (then known only as “unidentified female passenger VW Bus”): no alcohol in blood, eighteen percent carbon-monoxide saturation. Bert, “unidentified male driver VW Bus”: zero alcohol detected, carbon-monoxide saturation thirteen percent. Neither Dayiel nor Mia was tested. Nor were any of the other drivers! I can’t believe it.

  I look through the report to find the name of the driver of the eighteen-wheeler, “Unit 18.” It’s Bob Stone. He was not tested for alcohol, or if he was, it is not listed in the report.

  According to the “in substance” statement he gave to Sergeant Corrigan, Stone was traveling northbound on I-5 in the right lane. He was, he said, going about forty miles per hour when he entered the smoke. He could see a hundred to 150 yards. He had seen the field burning and knew that he would pass through it in a short time. But then the smoke got so bad that he couldn’t see his hood and he slowed to twenty miles per hour. He put on his headlights and his four-way flashers. He hit something but couldn’t see what, when the flames started. Then he bailed out. He was not injured. He ran away, with our family trapped under his truck! According to witnesses, he went back to the truck to take something from it. He admitted this later. He claimed it was to remove a radar-detection scanner.

  I take the report apart, it’s held together with staples, and spread it along the walls of my writing room. I spend days going over it, reading all the eyewitness accounts, the field-burning rules and regulations, the statements by Mr. Thompkins and his son concerning this particular fire which got away from them. It all seems so senseless, so careless, so unnecessary.

  I decide it’s time to write another letter to the governor.

  Dear Governor,

  Today, it is exactly two months since we buried our daughter, Kathleen, her husband, Bert, and their two daughters, Dayiel and Mia, our only granddaughters.

  One week from today we would have been celebrating our daughter Kathleen’s thirty-sixth birthday. We’d hoped to fly out as a surprise for that celebration. Instead, we flew to Oregon, two months earlier, to bury her.

  I’ve waited before writing you again until I could gather as much information as possible about the horrendous catastrophe which stilled our loved ones.

  Our law firm in Oregon has warned us against writing to you, or anyone else, concerning the accident, but sometimes personal concerns can outweigh the exigencies of legal procedures.

  I’m still waiting for someone responsible to explain what has happened and why. I expected a call or a note from a public official, any public official: from the Department of Environmental Quality, the highway department, the police, or even the governor himself, expressing sympathy for our loss. I had hoped to hear from Mr. Thompkins who set the fire, or perhaps from someone representing the seed-growers’ association. But there has been nothing. I mentioned that at the funeral, well publicized in Dallas, the funeral director had been asked by me to watch for representatives from any of the above categories. No one showed up.

  I’ve been told since that it was probably on the advice of lawyers that they were not there.

  “But Governor,” I write, “an expression of sympathy is not an admission of guilt.” The obvious culprit in all this is field burning itself. The fact that the field-burning farmer, Paul Thompkins, has complied with all the rules and regulations for a “controlled burn” while causing the deaths of seven people and injury to thirty-five others is, in itself, a condemnation of the practice. It doesn’t matter what conditions the Department of Environmental Quality might impose; it’s a hazardous activity. In fact, the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that field burning is ultra-hazardous. Yet it goes on. This is, I write, a blight on the reputation of all Oregon, a state generally known for its ecological concern.

  Governor, how do you defend the fact that this obviously deleterious activity continues? The land itself is being depleted, despite seed-growers’ contentions to the contrary. Burning converts nitrogen to phosphates; the soil needs nitrates more than phosphates. The smoke is a summer-long pall over the length of the Willamette Valley. It is a menace to the health and well-being of those living there. The smoke is ugly and the burned fields are ugly. A beautiful part of the world is ravaged by a few, for the profit of a few, to the detriment of the many.

  Governor, you can stop all this with a word. Why don’t you? Would you defend marijuana growers or cocaine growers for the same economic reasons? They, too, would be profitable crops, only another kind of menace. Give the word, Governor!

  It is only necessary to outlaw field burning, help the grass farmers find other alternatives to their current reckless system which despoils and desecrates your beautiful state. Let us not have any other families go through the grief, sorrow, sadness we have suffered.

  I’ve enclosed photos of the bodies in the morgue in Dallas along with other photos in better times, of our children. I pray it gives you some idea of what we’ve lost. I think, more than any statistic, it will help you understand what’s involved.

  Nearly two weeks later, October fifteenth, I receive a phone call from Bill Buchs, Oregon Secretary of Agriculture. He is phoning only to pass on his own and the governor’s condolences for what happened. He’s not going to defend or explain it.

  But I have many questions and we move into a discussion which lasts almost two hours. Finally he says I must learn the character of the Oregon grass-seed farmer, who does things the way he’s always done them and doesn’t want to change and doesn’t want anybody else telling him what he ought to do. I ask if it isn’t his responsibility as Secretary of Agriculture to make the farmer change his ways when what he’s doing is against the public welfare. He ducks that one. He says they’re just stubborn. Matt, who has picked up the listening device, a second earphone on a French telephone, takes the phone from me.

  “Mr. Buchs, I am Matt Wharton, Kate’s brother. I’m a biologist, a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin and I took my advanced degrees in plant pathology at the Sorbonne here in Paris. I have contacted friends in my field around the world at various educational institutions—in New Zealand, Australia, England, different parts of Europe, North Africa. I’ve studied the problem of stubble disposal which killed our family and here are some of the things I’ve found out.

  “It seems that since Oregon planted its first grass seeds in the forties, many new patents have been registered, mostly for seeds resistant to the diseases and pests for which the growers in Oregon claim it is necessary to ‘sanitize’ their fields. It would cost little for Oregon farmers to pay these small patent costs and eliminate the problem which jeopardizes the li
ves of the people in the Willamette Valley.

  “It is the Oregon Seed Growers’ Council that still insists on its old grass seed patents, even though they have been superseded by superior versions.

  “The solution recommended to me is to plant and then use the stubble as a field compost; that is, cut the grass and leave it there so that it can be plowed back into the land. This returns the nutrients to the soil and helps keep down weed growth. There will be no blind seed or molds or the other diseases which have plagued grass-seed farmers in Oregon. That makes more sense than burning.”

  Matt pauses and stares up at the ceiling. Then he continues. “You can’t bring back my sister, my brother-in-law, or my two beautiful nieces, but it would help us to know that something is being done so no one else suffers as we have suffered.”

  Tears are running down his face as he hands me the phone.

  Secretary of Agriculture Buchs insists that the governor is against field burning, that he’ll do everything he can to stop it. That’s what I’ve been wanting to hear. We finish the call in what seems to me to be agreement. Matt is listening in on the other earphone. We put down the phones and celebrate by opening up one of his prized bottles of Burgundy.

  We celebrate too soon.

  A few days later I receive a letter from the governor. It is written on October nineteenth.

  Dear Dr. Wharton:

  I apologize for not writing you sooner to express my personal sorrow and regret about the tragic death of your daughter and her family. Their deaths deeply grieve me and everyone else in Oregon. I can assure you that state officials responsible for administering the field burning program share this sorrow, even though they did not extend their sympathy to you directly.

  Your letter reflects your serious efforts to understand field burning and grass seed growing in Oregon. The Oregon Legislature debated the practice extensively in the 1970s. The Legislature concluded then that banning field burning, given the lack of alternative practices, was not in the public interest. The Legislature directed the Environmental Quality Commission to regulate field burning to reduce air pollution and to seek alternatives to the practice. Millions of dollars have been spent by the state since then to develop alternative crops and ways to avoid burning. I am told that, so far, none of the alternatives found are complete solutions.