“I think this is how I’ll feel when you and dad die,” he said.
Upon the MacPhersons’ return to Saskatoon, they sent a card to Duncan’s friends, announcing his death. On the front was an image of a young man standing on a mountaintop at sunset; on the back was the poem expressing how he’d thought he would feel upon his parents’ death.
A few nights later they hosted a barbeque in his memory, attended by many of his friends and former teammates. They were all grown-up, most of them married with children. Tara was there with her one-year-old. They’d loved Duncan for the usual reasons. He was warm, funny, and generous, even to strangers. Typical was a letter Lynda received after he disappeared from a girl in Springfield, Massachusetts. One day, as she was visiting her mother (a car insurance agent) at her office, Duncan dropped in to ask about changing his policy while his Karmann Ghia was in storage. Someone mentioned that it was her birthday, and upon hearing this, Duncan handed her the car keys and said, “Happy Birthday.”
Lynda knew it was an old car and that he didn’t really want to mess with putting it in storage, but he still could have sold it for a grand or two, and the girl seemed pleased with it. The most charming thing about the story was not his generosity so much as his spontaneity—his cheerful, devil may care approach.
Another letter was from a girl who’d known Duncan in high school and who would always remember him for his friendship. While none of the other handsome boys talked to her because she was overweight, Duncan always made a point of showing how much he cared about her, and it had done wonders for her self-esteem.
Nothing to prove and kind to everyone, Lynda thought as she’d read the letter. Then there was a letter from Kim Cory, one of Duncan’s closest friends, a sensitive and heartbreakingly beautiful girl.
There are no words powerful enough to say how much Duncan touched my life or how much I loved him. It’s so hard to say “so long” to someone you’ve loved. It’s so hard to say how sorry I am for your family.
I guess what I can say is that I was truly blessed to have met and befriended such an amazing man and person. Duncan will always be in my mind and heart. Duncan has touched me forever. As Carl Jung once wrote, “the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Love, Kim
The atmosphere of the barbeque was in keeping with Duncan’s cheerful nature. Everyone seemed to have a great time, telling funny stories about their old friend whose life was long gone but still a vivid memory. The only sad moment was at sunset, when—to Lynda and Bob’s surprise—a twelve-year-old boy walked out of a nearby stand of birches playing “Amazing Grace” on a bagpipe.
The occasion also conjured many of Bob’s fond memories. “You know, even when Duncan was little he enjoyed all of the stuff I do,” Bob recounted. “Up at our cabin we spent so many hours together watching birds and game. And he was a great pilot, too. I used to bring him along on flights for the Research Council, and sometimes when no passengers were on board, I’d let him take the yoke in the right seat. Already at the age of six he could fly on instruments like a pro. The little sucker just sat there and watched the dials and never got confused for a second. He was always such a joy to be with.”
Chapter 20: Something Sinister
Most of the time Bob let his wife do the talking. In conversations with Tyrolean men, they often gave him quizzical looks, wondering when he would chime in. Because he tended to be quiet, his understanding of mechanics wasn’t apparent to anyone who didn’t work with him.
At the Saskatoon Research Council, the doctors of engineering often asked him for practical solutions to mechanical problems. If you wanted to know which kinds of tools and materials were the most suitable for a task, Bob was your man. One of the things that fascinated him about the Inuit was their practical understanding of how to live on the ice. Their dog sleds were marvels of engineering, even though they knew nothing of theoretical mechanics.
Duncan and Derrick had often made fun of him for being such a handyman, and whenever Lynda boasted about his brilliance, they tried to bring him back down to earth in her eyes by pointing out that even he got flustered sometimes.
“Sure, dad can fix anything,” Duncan once remarked. “His secret is cursing with a wrench in his hand.”
In 2001, Bob built a new cabin on the shore of Lake Nemeiben, 400 kilometers north of Saskatoon. The structure consisted of 16 inch diameter spruce logs, 26 feet long, with a ridge-pole 26 feet high. When other men on the lake saw Bob preparing to build it by himself, they told Lynda that he was crazy and was going to get hurt and would need at least five men to help him put the logs into place. And yet, with a hoisting mechanism that he invented and built, he proved his naysayers wrong.
From trips to Stubai he’d become keenly interested in glaciers and the way they have shaped the earth. Centuries after he is gone, geologists may wonder how glacial boulders in the backyard of his house in Saskatoon got there, as there are no others like them in the area.
“Right after we returned from Innsbruck, I got this email from Rabl,” Bob recounted, and showed me a printed copy. The workers had, Rabl explained, recovered the body with picks “as carefully as possible.” However:
They had to use the Ratrak [grooming machine] for digging out the rest (clothing, snowboard…). The snowboard was [next] to the body of Duncan (as we saw in the photos) but it was stuck nearly vertical, deep in the blue ice. First they pulled on the snowboard and thereby broke it into pieces. They confirmed that the Ratrak ran over the snowboard too and therefore the damage with the red paint can be assigned to the recovery actions.
“Well, I found this very strange,” Bob explained. “No one with any experience working on ice would try to recover that board by pulling on it. And what did they pull on it with? It doesn’t have any points on it for attaching a winch cable or recovery strap, and there’s no equipment on those grooming machines that is suitable for excavation work. The blade on the front is for pushing snow, not digging into ice. And why in hell, after pulling on the board, breaking it to pieces, and digging it out, did they then run over it with one of those grooming tillers running? It could have gotten kicked out at high speed and struck someone. It just made no goddamned sense. I guess that’s when I started to realize that they were lying.”
I asked Bob if it was possible that the men had simply gotten tired of chipping the board out with picks, and decided out of sheer frustration to take a crack at it with the grooming machine.
“Look, even if some fellow from Somalia who’d never seen ice before had just arrived for his first day at work, he’d quickly realize that he wouldn’t get anywhere trying to pull or dig that board out of the ice with a grooming machine. The only way to recover an object from ice is to chip it out with a pick, melt it out with warm water, or cut it out with a chain saw. There is simply no other way.”
Something else started bothering Bob after they returned to Saskatoon. Before they’d viewed Duncan’s body, Dr. Rabl had prepared them by showing them two photos of the corpse. At the time they had not studied the entire images, but had focused primarily on Duncan’s face. When they’d then viewed his corpse, most of it had been covered with a sheet, but because they’d seen his shoulders and head, it hadn’t occurred to them to remove the sheet. Just before their departure from Innsbruck, Lynda had asked for copies of the photos, along with everything else Rabl had. Now, back in Saskatoon, Bob found himself studying them.