Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [106]
For all these reasons, perhaps, heroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can. “It’s something in your heart, your soul, and your emotions that gets a hold of you and says, I gotta do something,” Oliner says. This finding agrees with the results of other (albeit scant) research into heroism. People who perform heroic acts are very often those who are “helpers” in everyday life, be they firefighters or nurses or police officers.
Perhaps because of their training and experience, heroes also have confidence in their own abilities. In general, like almost all people who perform well under extreme stress, heroes believe they shape their own destinies. Psychologists call this an “internal locus of control.” I asked Roger Olian if he felt in control of what happens to him. “There’s no question in my mind. To a very large degree,” he said. “Even if I couldn’t control it, I would feel like I should.”
Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. “They pay scant attention to other people’s problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,” Oliner says. And bystanders, it’s worth remembering, are what most of us are.
“He Just Kept Coming”
Stiley heard Olian before he saw him. “Hey, guys! Hold on! I’m coming!” Stiley looked toward the shore and saw a person, a tall, determined, and possibly crazy person hacking his way through the ice. Stiley felt a rush of gratitude. “I thought, ‘That guy’s a man.’” He and the other passengers said the Lord’s Prayer as they waited. It wasn’t clear what Olian could do for them if he ever got to them, but it would be better to die knowing someone had tried and failed to help than knowing no one had tried at all.
Twenty minutes came and went. None of the six survivors passed out. The cold was becoming unbearable, though, and they kept swallowing jet fuel in the water. Meanwhile, Olian slashed through the water, ever so slowly. The lifeline around his waist kept getting caught on the ice, so he tried to take it off. But his hands had turned into useless stumps from the cold. Then he heard shouts from the people on the bank; they’d run out of rope. He had to wait for them to find more. He thought to himself: “Good night nurse, I can’t wait! This is hard enough.” But soon they lengthened the rope, and he charged back into the slurry.
At that point, Olian was just halfway there. He’d been in the water for about fifteen minutes. If it took another fifteen minutes to get to them, and it would probably take more since he was exhausted now, what would he do next? If he somehow summoned the strength to carry even one of them back across the football-field length of water, it would take yet another thirty minutes at least. Realistically, there was no way his body—or the survivors—could last another forty-five minutes in that water. He remembers staring at the tail section of the plane and noticing how smooth it was. Even if he made it out there, there might be nothing to hold on to, he thought. “I was pretty sure I was gonna die,” Olian says in a quiet voice. “But that was OK. I had an internal calm and good feeling about that. I was not going to turn my back on those folks.”
Stiley and Olian both felt the helicopter before they saw it. The whoomp, whoomp of the blades broke through the sky like thunder. That afternoon, the Park Police helicopter had been grounded at its home base a few miles away. Chief pilot Donald Usher had ruled out flying in the storm conditions—until he got the call from the airport about a downed plane. He and rescue technician Melvin Windsor decided to lift off. Flying in a near whiteout with periods of freezing rain,