No Regrets (6 page)

Everything seemed normal.

It was only ten days from the longest day of the year, and the dawn of day was still just hidden behind the mountains to the east, so it was dark and warm as they headed toward the loading area. A good morning to be at sea. Armed with the confidence born of all he had survived in his tussles with oceans and rivers, Rolf Neslund believed in himself, and in his almost mystical grasp of what it took
to get a ship to do what he wanted. With his wide-planted feet, he felt the
Chavez
’s heart rumbling and beating through the decks, and he knew all the sounds and the smells and the shifts that meant he was right on target.

Two tugboats began to move into their slot so they could help bring the huge ship from the wide waters to the north into the narrow slice that is the Duwamish’s West Waterway. Neslund, the old pilot, would call out the commands to keep the
Chavez
straight and true in an almost impossibly tight and shallow river which local industrial waste had turned the color of lead. The West Seattle Bridge’s drawspan was up and waiting.

Later, there were those who came forward to say Rolf was getting a little vague and that sometimes he didn’t pay as much attention as he should. He knew they were wrong. It was true that he didn’t like modern tools like radios and other electronic devices used by the young pilots; he was like an old cowboy who knew how to control a bucking horse or an angry steer. He sensed in his bones what was right, and he would give his orders to the helmsman without using the portable radio.

As the ship’s pilot, Rolf Neslund was the top man in navigating the
Chavez
safely into port. From the moment the pilots board the big ships, they instruct everyone from the ship’s crew—including the captain—to the longshoremen who man the lines and the tugboat crew on what to do and when. Visibility, storms, ferryboats, and docked ships can all make a pilot’s job more difficult. On this night, the tugboats needed to pull the
Chavez
to the left because there was another ship on the right—an ancient freighter waiting to be dismantled and recycled partially blocked the already-tight route.

This was a dicey route, and seconds counted as the
Chavez
moved through the waterway. Men aboard a Coast Guard boat on traffic duty watched the massive ship warily.

The Coast Guard officers called Rolf on the portable radio and got no answer. The reason was simple. Rolf Neslund had turned the damned thing off.

In the hierarchy of the sea, Rolf was in charge. No one else on the ship could countermand his orders, and it was a heady feeling, as it always had been—whether he was the captain or the pilot. He ordered the helmsman to turn to port (left) and they slid by the no-longer-seaworthy freighter.

And, then, for some inexplicable reason, the old man had a spate of forgetfulness, possibly even a small stroke—a TIA (transitory ischemic attack)—something that made him lose precious seconds of awareness. The West Seattle Bridge lay ahead, its red lights blinking to warn drivers that the barricades were coming down. Its alarm bells were harsh in the soft darkness. Cars that looked like toys lined up obediently at the edges of the huge bridge, held back by the safety arms.

For those precious instants, Rolf Neslund apparently forgot that he was the pilot in charge, neglecting to notice that he had not ordered the seaman at the helm to turn back starboard (right) and then to straighten it out.

The
Chavez’s
captain, a citizen of Yugoslavia who had an impeccable safety record, suddenly realizing they were in trouble, raced to the wheelhouse, shouting “Hard-a-starboard!” And then he desperately ordered the man at the wheel to put the huge ship into reverse.

They were headed straight for the West Seattle Bridge’s east support piers at a speed of nearly six knots.

At that point, Rolf snapped back to alertness and realized
the danger, too. He stumbled toward the wheelhouse to repeat the same order the captain had just given. The only thing they could possibly do to stop—or even slow— the
Chavez
was to drop the anchors. But that maneuver wasn’t likely to work because the ship’s path was already committed. From his long, long experience, Rolf knew that there were huge cables carrying power and phone lines to homes and businesses on either side of the bridge span below. If they dropped the anchors, they would cut underwater cables which were as thick as a man is tall.

It was far too late to do anything but stand on the
Chavez
and wait for what was about to happen. It only took ten or twenty seconds, seconds when the tugboat captain of the
Carole Foss
frantically did what he could to keep his crew from being crushed between the ship and the bridge piers or decapitated by wires, ropes, or knifelike slivers of shattered steel from the bridge.

And then, inevitably, the
Chavez
sliced into the bridge as if the span’s supports were made of butter. There was a tremendous shudder and a sound like an earthquake as the force of the impact exploded, sending steel and concrete and wood, and everything else that made the West Seattle Bridge strong, into the river and its shores.

It was quite possible now that the whole structure would fall down upon those who watched, almost stupefied with shock. Everything was suspended for seconds that seemed hours. The ruined bridge could easily plunge into the sudden abyss: the cars and their drivers and passengers, the bridge tender in his little house, all of it.

Thank God, however, the remnants of the ruined bridge held, and no one died.

That was the good part of it, the almost miraculous part of it. But there was hell to pay, and a long Coast Guard investigation
lay ahead. The young Yugoslavian captain lost his job, Rolf Neslund lost his reputation as a peerless captain and pilot, and people who lived in West Seattle or wanted to go to West Seattle had to wait seven years for a new bridge to be built.

Even so, some residents of West Seattle were oddly grateful to Rolf Neslund for doing what they had hoped for for years. One woman, a high school student then, recalls: “Most people don’t realize that some of us in West Seattle were almost glad [when] Rolf Neslund finally forced the city, county, and state to do something about the old drawbridge and the awful traffic snarls it caused.

“Our Job’s Daughters’ group sold T-shirts that summer that said, ‘Where were you when the ship hit the span?’ and they were a big hit. It couldn’t have been easy for Neslund to be the butt of such jokes, but surely he also knew it wasn’t all a bad outcome?”

Rolf was allowed to retire without censure, but there were many who thought how much better it might have been if he had chosen to bow out a year or so earlier. And the Coast Guard enacted age regulations for future pilots. It was the end of an era.

Rolf’s fellow pilots continued to revere him and welcome him to their meetings, parties, and celebrations. He had had so many, many years of being among the best men on the sea. Nevertheless, Rolf Neslund became a target for jokes—not just on Lopez Island for his domestic fisticuffs—but for being the man who destroyed the West Seattle Bridge.

Everyone who read the newspapers or watched television recognized his name.

Rolf returned to Lopez Island, to his wife and his home on Alec Bay Road. Lesser men might have been humiliated and hidden away, but he wasn’t a broken man, not at all. Some people even said that he looked back on the whole incident with a sense of humor, while others said he was simply whistling in the dark.

The former was closest to the truth. He had survived much devastation in his long life, and Rolf continued to appreciate the twilight of his years. He preferred to listen to those who said he had done West Seattleites a favor. He had only hurried the project along.

Now retired, Rolf returned to Norway for another visit in 1979, joining his siblings in Oslo for the skating championships.

“He was happy and gay,” his sister Eugenie recalled. “The last time I saw him was in Oslo and he was just like himself. We had lots of fun.”

This was probably the twelfth trip Rolf Neslund made to see his family in Norway, and neither Eugenie nor his brother Harald found him depressed about the debacle surrounding the West Seattle Bridge collapse. He was like he had always been, except perhaps a little more content to stay at home. If he ever needed to talk about what had happened, Harald felt he would know and they would talk about it then.

As things turned out, no one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf exactly how he did feel about the bridge.

No one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf anything.

In the seventies,
Ray Clever was a cop in Newport Beach, California, a smart young policeman who hoped one day to emulate the older, experienced detectives he watched with something like awe. “They could get suspects to tell them almost anything,” he says with a smile. “I used to sit in the interrogation rooms just to watch them work, hoping I could learn from them.”

One of Clever’s heroes was a detective named Sam “the Shark” Amburgy, whose mastery of interrogation was phenomenal—low key and silent and deadly as his nick-name—and who always wore a fedora. A younger officer with a friendly open face, Clever carried out the usual routine duties of patrol, but his ambition was to be a criminal investigator himself one day. He remembered the way the experienced detectives questioned suspects, noting that they often let them ramble on long enough to back themselves into a corner without ever realizing it. What might seem to be only a casual conversation could be, in reality, a delicate game of cat and mouse.

Some of the older detectives were very intense and some seemed laid-back, but Clever found them remarkable in their ability to elicit information that their subjects never expected to reveal.

Clever rose through the ranks in the Orange County department
and become a detective there, but his first marriage ended in what he recalls as “a bad divorce,” when he was in his midthirties. He didn’t have much to distract him from the disappointment of his failed marriage; he was back working patrol rather than investigating baffling murder cases. He wanted to change his life completely and move someplace as unlike Orange County, California, as possible. Clever’s brother, Dick, was a reporter for the
Post-Intelligencer,
the morning newspaper in Seattle, Washington, and he made Seattle sound like a good place to live. Ray moved north.

He became a building contractor first. He was always talented in construction and tile and granite work. It wasn’t his real ambition—that was law enforcement— but Clever also enjoyed building.

“But then there was a downturn in the economy,” he recalls, “and pretty soon I needed a job.”

San Juan County was hiring deputies, and Ray Clever had experience. He was hired on in February 1981. He didn’t expect a lot of action on any of the four little islands that composed San Juan County. It wasn’t the ideal place to commit robberies or burglaries since the felons would have to wait for the next ferry to make their escapes. DWIs (Driving While Intoxicated) and family fights were more likely than homicides, although anywhere human beings live there are sex offenders, disputes between neighbors, and even love triangles. Still, there was little chance that all Clever’s studying and observation of master detectives in Orange County was going to pay off in San Juan County, Washington. Nevertheless, Clever liked the region and he was glad to have the job.

He was assigned to Patrol on Lopez Island and told the name of his first partner: Senior Deputy Greg Doss. Clever
didn’t know the geography of Lopez Island, or anything about its residents. For that matter, he had never even seen Doss before they met on Clever’s first day on the job on February 23.

The two deputies had been asked to check on the welfare of a longtime Lopez resident named Rolf Neslund. Apparently, he hadn’t been seen in his usual haunts for some time, and members of the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had become concerned. Gunnar Olsborg, a retired pilot and a Norwegian like Rolf, who had been his friend since 1945, talked to a number of pilots who were used to seeing Rolf often. He found that no one had seen Rolf for months. Gunnar was worried enough to call the sheriff’s office. He had also notified Rolf’s relatives in Norway. He made sure the Puget Sound pilots all knew that Rolf seemed to be missing.

Ray Clever, of course, had never heard of the allegedly missing man, but then he didn’t know anyone on Lopez. This call sounded routine, a familiar task for any police officer anywhere. Adults usually disappeared for their own reasons and most of them came home within a week...or eventually.

“Our first dispatch, my first call ever on the San Juan Sheriff’s Department,” Ray Clever remembers, “was to the Rolf and Ruth Neslund residence on Alec Bay Road.”

As they headed toward the Neslunds’, Doss gave Clever some background on the couple. They had become very familiar to local deputies. “We’ve been called out there on a lot of domestic disturbances,” Doss said. “It’s probably something like that again.”

Doss told his new partner that he’d been on a call to the Neslunds on June 15, seven months earlier. At that time, he’d seen obvious signs of a physical fight. “Their place
was a mess,” he recalled. “There were dishes and the tablecloth on the floor. Rolf had fresh scratches along the side of his face from his ear to his chin.”

Ruth, he said, had been hiding in the bedroom, her clothing and hair a mess, her face puffy. She told Doss she was safe there, but if Rolf came in, she was going to shoot him.

In July, Ruth called the sheriff again, complaining that Rolf had “decked” her. She pointed to a rifle and said that he would never do it again.

It had seemed an idle threat at the time.

Ray Clever wondered how a couple whom Doss described as sixty and eighty years old could do much real damage to each other. He fully expected his first assignment as a San Juan County deputy to be quite ordinary. “Domestics” were the most dangerous calls for law enforcement officers, but the Neslunds sounded pretty long in the tooth to be a danger.