Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (9 page)

The lookouts spend anywhere from a few days to a few months at a time at their stations, which are also usually in the middle of nowhere—getting to them can mean a long hike or even a helicopter ride. Some stations have amenities like electricity and running water, but others are much more primitive. A husband and wife who manned Idaho’s Gisborne Station in the 1970s had to haul water every day, so they conserved the use of water for meal preparation and ate foraged greens and berries, which they dried on the station’s steps.

Several well-known writers were fire spotters at one time or another, including environmentalist Edward Abbey and Beat poet Gary Snyder. But the most famous fire spotter and the only one who used his experience in his work was Beat novelist Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades, between Washington State and British Columbia. His 63 days in the simple 14’ x 14’ structure provided him with material for
The Dharma Bums
and
Desolation Angels
. He wrote:

Desolation Peak’s lookout station is closed to visitors, so Kerouac pilgrims who manage the 4.7-mile, 4,400-foot climb won’t be able to sit at the desk where he penned some of his most famous passages, but they can look in through the many windows.

A lot has changed since Kerouac wrote
The Dharma Bums
, but the job of fire lookout hasn’t. Lookouts still monitor the weather (lightning strikes can start fires), confirm fires, and help firefighters to determine the extent of a blaze. For example, smoke is generally bluish—when it turns black, the fire is growing.

The lookouts still use the Osborne Fire Finder, a tabletop device developed in the 1920s by William “W. B.” Osborne, a National Parks Service employee. The Finder consists of a topographic map of the lookout’s area with two sighting apertures a user moves until he can center the crosshairs on the fire.

Their equipment may be simple and from decades ago, but a fire lookout’s task remains important. In 2007, 16 countries besides the United States had active fire lookouts. In the United States, there are about 155 fire lookouts, a combination of volunteer and paid positions. Modern techniques, especially the use of planes in fire prevention and spotting, have helped, but when it comes to fighting fires in the wilderness, there’s nothing as effective as a pair of human eyes.

A real ad: “This is a full-time seasonal paid position, which begins as soon as the snow melts . . . and ends when the snows fly in the fall (typically 5 days per week, May–October). Built in 1934, Fence Meadow is a 30’ metal tower with a 14x14’ wooden live-in cab, powered by electricity and comes furnished with a single bed, stove, refrigerator, lights, heater and a fine-by-any-standards double-head outhouse. The lookout is located off of paved roads . . . The lookout is in the process of being refurbished (already newly painted on the inside and carpeted). Carpentry skills and smoke monitoring experience a plus!”

D. B. Cooper

In today’s post-9/11 society, the possibility of an airliner being hijacked by a lone criminal who escapes without ever being caught or positively identified is both deeply disturbing and highly unlikely. But on November 24, 1971, before the days of airport metal detectors and other stringent security regulations, one polite, well-dressed man did exactly that.

What’s more, his apolitical and “stick-it-to-the-man” motivations, relaxed threats, and willing release of innocents earned him a community of supporters who deemed him a modern-day Robin Hood. And, at the time, antiestablishment types were in vogue. Thirty-five years later, with no new leads, the FBI is still trying to uncover the true identity of “Dan Cooper,” the man behind the only unsolved commercial skyjacking in U.S. history, a man who seemingly vanished into thin air.

On a rainy afternoon at Oregon’s Portland International Airport, a middle-aged man wearing a dark suit with a slim tie and mother-of-pearl tie clip purchased a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines to Seattle, Washington. He paid $18.52. The name on the reservation was Dan Cooper. After taking his seat in the last row of the Boeing 727 aircraft, he ordered a bourbon and Coke from an attractive flight attendant, 23-year-old
Florence Schaffner. Then he lit a Raleigh filter-tip cigarette and settled in for the ride.

According to the flight staff, Cooper was cordial, tipped generously, and had a smooth demeanor. In fact, when he handed Florence a piece of paper to let her know that he was toting a bomb in his briefcase, she slipped it into her pocket unopened, assuming he’d simply passed along his phone number, as many male passengers before him had done. But Cooper urged her to open the note. The note threatened to blow up the plane if Cooper’s demands weren’t met:

Northwest Orient president Donald Nyrop instructed the pilot to cooperate, and the FBI scrambled to meet Cooper’s demands, while at the same time preparing to apprehend him. When the plane finally landed in Seattle, Cooper released all 36 passengers and two flight attendants, leaving only himself and four airline employees onboard as the plane was refueled. Bags filled with the cash, weighing a total of 21 pounds, were delivered as promised.

As the plane left the runway, this time in a heavy storm, Cooper gave the pilot specific instructions: Keep the plane under 10,000 feet, wing flaps at 15 degrees, and speed under 200 knots. He then ordered everyone into the cockpit, strapped the money to his waist, put one chute on his chest and one on his back, opened the plane’s rear door, and plunged into the darkness somewhere over the dense pine forests and deep canyons of the Cascades in southwestern Washington.

The search for Dan Cooper, or any shred of his whereabouts, was on. For several weeks, the FBI scoured miles of forest for a body or any evidence of a landing—successful or otherwise. But the case, code named NORJAK, offered investigators precious few clues.

They knew that Dan Cooper was an alias. But police brought a man named D. B. Cooper in for questioning shortly after the hijacking and alerted the media, who confused his name with the name
used by the jumper. Although D. B. Cooper was quickly ruled out as a suspect, his name would be forever linked with the crime.

The FBI also worked with a composite sketch and personality profile of the suspect, based on flight crew accounts, and—decades later—a DNA sample from his tie (he took it off before he jumped), obtained in 2001. The number of suspects totaled close to 1,000 over 30 years. Many who couldn’t possibly have been Cooper falsely confessed to committing the crime, often just before their final breaths. Of the handful of suspects who were seriously considered, Kenneth Peter Christiansen was a favorite. To many, Christiansen seemed to be an obvious match.

A former paratrooper in the army, Christiansen had extensive skydiving experience and was accustomed to no-frills equipment and brutal landings. As a retired flight attendant and purser for Northwest Airlines, he was obviously well-versed in airline procedures—plus, he was living in Washington at the time of the crime. He smoked Raleigh cigarettes and collected bourbon. And he supposedly bore an uncanny resemblance to the composite sketch—at least according to his brother Lyle, who recognized his face while watching
Unsolved Mysteries
on television.

Civilian researchers theorized that Christiansen’s motive was retaliation against an airline known at the time for unfair employment practices (mainly against women) and layoffs that led to frequent strikes, which helped to further fuel the Robin Hood syndrome. FBI investigators, however, were not convinced. Deviating from their original assumption that the hijacker was an experienced jumper, they ultimately ruled that only a novice would have jumped under those impossible conditions, and without first checking his chutes. (He jumped with one designed for training, which had a sewed-shut reserve chute.) They also contended that Christiansen, who died in 1994, did not resemble the man in the sketch after all and therefore could not have been Cooper. And so the search continues.

Although they firmly believe that Cooper could not have survived
the jump, the FBI is still determined to get their man, at least on paper. On December 31, 2007, the Bureau revived the 36-year-old case by releasing to the press and public details and evidence surrounding the case, including photos of the deteriorating $20 bills ($5,800 total was recovered) that were found on the banks of the Columbia River on the Washington-Oregon border in 1980. (The FBI matched the serial numbers on the bills to those delivered to Cooper, but nothing more came of the discovery.)

Immortalized through books, movies, music, airline safety features, and even an annual festival in Cowlitz County, Washington, the man known as Dan Cooper continues to elude capture, if only in spirit.

Q:
What do James Baldwin, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and James Joyce have in common?

A:
All were overlooked for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ian McEwan and Roger Ebert

THE NAME:
Ian McEwan

THE MOVIE:
The Good Son
(1993)

In 1993, Macaulay Culkin was the go-to kid for on-screen cuteness. Moviegoers knew and loved him for his work in
Uncle Buck
,
My Girl
, and the first and second
Home Alone
films. While he may have been the hottest child star of the moment, Culkin’s overbearing stage parents were running his career and annoying moviemakers in the process.

Reportedly, his father desperately wanted Culkin to star in
The Good Son
(it would be his first dramatic role) to show the young actor’s range and thus ensure his continued success. He threatened to pull Macaulay off
Home Alone 2
if he couldn’t also star in
The Good Son
. The movie earned Macaulay $5 million and made about $60 million at the box office. But critics hated it. The
New York Times
remarked, “
The Good Son
has more interesting ambiguity in its title than it does anywhere else” and Roger Ebert asked, “Who in the world would want to see this movie?” It also signaled the end for Macaulay’s career. He went on to make
Getting Even with Dad
and
Richie Rich
, but audiences never again took to Macaulay as they once had.