If we are the sum of our past experiences, it’s no wonder that many of us are complex individuals.
I firmly believe that most people would have greatly improved mental health if they felt the freedom to talk about problems in their lives. Unfortunately, society tends to be far less tolerant of emotional problems than of physical.
I’m not trying to write a ‘Penny Dreadful’ here, but I feel that I should try to explain why my behaviour can be somewhat strange and disconcerting at times. Although I acknowledge that one must take responsibility for one’s own behaviour, awareness of someone’s history can help to make it more understandable. I hope, too, that writing it down will help me to gain some healing.
After school, I spent a year in the army (not my choice) and then became a student for a few years. During this time I became a fairly significant rock climber and was drawn increasingly into the Search and Rescue organisation.
I picked up my first body when I was 18—a friend with whom I had climbed a week or two before. He was lying in a place from where it was clearly going to be difficult to extract him. I was selected as one of the three ‘body snatchers’ who were to load the body onto a Neil Robertson stretcher which, being intended for use in ships, caves, and mines, was ideal for use in a confined space. It was more like a whole-body splint than a stretcher.
Our job was to load him on the Neil Robertson so that the team above could hoist him and put him on a Thomas stretcher so that he could be carried down to the car park. Rigor mortis had set in and, since he was lying with his arms outstretched, we had to break his shoulders to fit him onto the stretcher.
I’ll never forget that sound…
Although it was a ghastly experience, I found—to my relief—that I had a so-called ‘strong stomach’. The work did not make me vomit, or even feel nauseous. I reckoned I could handle this because, surely, it couldn’t get any worse than that. Yeah, right!
With the passage of time, I got increasingly involved in S & R and, because of my ‘strong stomach’ I was used regularly to dispatch bodies. By the time I was twenty-one, I had already lost count of how many corpses I had handled. This went on for sixteen years, until we left the Cape. I claimed that I could handle all this without any kind of counselling. After all, someone had to do it.
The trouble is that you can’t un-see what you’ve seen, un-hear what you’ve heard, or un-smell what you’ve smelt. These things remain with you to the end of your days.
I remember dispatching a young merchant seaman who had taken a wrong turn and fallen a hundred metres, landing on his face. He had then lain in the sun for two days before he was reported missing. We searched for fifteen hours before we found him. When we came upon the body, I realised that he was lying only about ten metres from where I had sat and eaten my lunch around three o’clock in the morning. The south-easter had been blowing so strongly that I hadn’t smelt him.
I recall recovering the body of the fiancée of a friend of mine. She had died because of a mistake he had made. I remember trying to counsel him, saying that it wasn’t his fault, although we both knew that it was. A few months later, he died when, under rather strange circumstances, he fell through a cornice in the Alps. I guess he thought he had nothing more to live for. A remarkably talented climber, he had been my protégée.
I swore at a dead friend of mine because his rigor-mortised hands kept tangling in the rope as I abseiled down a rock face with his body tied on my back. He had fallen a thousand feet from a climbing route that I had long wanted to do. I never went back. And yet, my bravado made me sit next to his body and eat a sandwich as I waited for the rest of the party to come down so we could continue the extraction.
I remember recovering the body of a woman who—according to her husband—had fallen over a cliff because she was being attacked by a swarm of bees. Strangely, her body was devoid of bee-stings.
I can’t recollect many other details; there were so many—just a cavalcade of strangers. There’s one exception; I remember every detail of the times when we recovered the bodies of children. But I prefer not to talk about that; or even think about it.
Of course, there was also good news. We saved the lives of many people. But that tends not to ‘haunt’ us. It’s a bit like when you get trapped for speeding but get no credit for all the speed limits that you’ve obeyed. The single transgression defines you as a lawbreaker. In the same way, one bad experience seems to nullify all the ‘feel-good’ moments.
I continued to be the imperturbable ‘good old Kevin’ who never tossed his cookies; the chap with the unassailable sang-froid, who usually ate a sandwich after recovering a corpse. The guy with the grisly (and frequently inappropriate) sense of humour. In truth, I was just suppressing my emotions and self-medicating with lots of red wine. I’m amazed that I didn’t resort to using narcotics. I didn’t even smoke, so marijuana was also not an option. It felt a bit like I took all the horror, all the agony, and pushed it down into a box inside my head. Only Linda knew how I really felt, and helped me keep going, but I didn’t tell her too much detail.
But, one day, the lid popped off.
We were called to recover four people from a light aircraft that had crashed near the top of Table Mountain. We went up by cable-car and walked down to a stance above the crash site. From there we abseiled.
There were a few things about this call-out that were unusual.
Firstly: There were four bodies. Usually, I dealt with one or, occasionally, two (as on the day that Linda and I got engaged, but that’s another story). Four took quite a long time, in blistering heat, and we were very tired. A basic precaution that I always took when I knew that we were going to recover bodies was to skip breakfast, so I was hungry and, probably, dehydrated. The fuselage had broken in two on impact. After recovering two bodies from the front section we were only half-way. We then had to abseil further down to get the other two out of the aft section.
Secondly: These bodies looked very different from what I was accustomed to. Whereas fall injuries are usually covered with lots of blood, so they don't look too bad, these ones were almost bloodless. According the the air-crash investigator a common mechanism of death in a plane crash is a ruptured aorta, so the person exsanguinates into the chest cavity, thus leaving the injury sites on the limbs in plain view. Extremities had been ripped off, leaving bloodless wounds that looked as though the limbs had been cut through with a butcher’s band-saw. All this was quite disturbing.
Thirdly: The air-crash investigator asked us to rifle the bodies and put their personal effects in the Ziploc bags that he gave to us. We were then to tie the bags to the victims’ wrists. This was a very unpleasant task.
And, fourthly: After pulling out three males, we finally got to the only female.
And I recognised her. I Knew her!
As we lifted her body out of the starboard rear seat, I realised that she was the young lady who had served us in a pizzeria two nights before. We had known her for years and we had always chatted when she served us. She particularly used to joke with me about my ordering pizzas with extra garlic and onions. She said she pitied my wife for having to share a bed with me after one of these delicacies. Strangely, because we were about to move to Durbanville, we had said good bye and told her that we probably wouldn’t see her again.
She was wearing a pink flip-flop on her left foot. I still remember that it matched the colour of her nail polish. The other flip-flop was lying under a bush nearby, accompanied by her big toe, which had been ripped off at the joint. It seemed incongruous that her nail polish was unsullied. I tied her bag of effects to her right upper arm because both of her arms were missing below the elbows. I found them near her toe—one of them hanging from the bush—and put them on the stretcher with her body. The fact that her left hand was adorned with what looked like an engagement ring felt like a punch in the gut.
That’s about all I remember, other than that I could feel a strange kind of anger building up in me. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t define it. I still can’t.
I suppose the bodies were evacuated by helicopter; I’m not sure. I don’t remember carrying any stretchers up to the cable station, so I guess they were.
At this point I cracked.
Without telling anyone my intentions (a cardinal sin!), I left the rescue party. I probably didn’t know what I was planning anyway. I just went. To this day I know neither what I did nor where I went. All I remember is that when I finally arrived at the cable station, my colleagues—looking very concerned—were arranging a search party to come and look for me. Apparently, I had been missing for over an hour.
I have no recollection of going down in the cable car nor of driving myself home. I know Linda met me at the door when I got home and I cried all over her, told her about the Pizza Girl, and then became more and more morose and truculent, alternating between ranting and crying. I told her I had anger inside me that I didn’t know what to do with. Fortunately, I’m not violent by nature, otherwise who knows what might have happened.
Hours later, Linda—at her wits’ end—told me to phone my mother and ask her for advice (Mom was a Registered Nurse). Surprisingly, I agreed. I wasn’t known as someone who easily asked for help. Arrogance, perhaps? I think it was more that I felt that my problems were unimportant compared with those of others; people who had ‘real’ problems. Many of the people who had trained me in mountain rescue were ex-servicemen; one had been in the parachute battalion in England, one had flown a Spitfire, a few had been POWs, one had been in the Wehrmacht and was taken prisoner on the Russian Front and held for five years, and another had been a U-Boat commander. What were my problems, compared with what these people had been through? I wasn’t even a victim; the victims, after all, were the people we took off the mountain.
I gave my mom a brief description of what had happened and how I felt and her reply was quite startling, given her rather puritanical attitude to drink.
“Kevin, this is going to sound pretty strange, coming from me, but do it. Get a bottle of wine, go upstairs and get into bed. Drink the wine and then go to sleep. You can deal with the anger in the morning.”
I did as I was told. I drank an entire bottle of good Pinotage straight from the neck and then slept for fifteen hours; possibly the longest sleep I have ever had in my adult life.
I doubt that I was very effective at work the next day, but at least I was able to function in a way that appeared normal. I worked in the IT industry. Mountain rescue was voluntary work.
Continued in Part II…