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B IS T R
Victoria Stoppiello
T r o u b lin g
The Perfect Storm has captured the interest o f the
American public this past year. We have a veteran
Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer residing in Cannon
Beach these days. He is a modest person who asks to
remain unnamed. Deeds o f quiet courage and heroism
often go unnoticed. I thought my readers m ight enjoy a
b rie f account o f one incident that occurred during his
tour o f duty in our area. He describes that event in his
own words:
"I think it was about 1990. Six a m. Sun just coming
up. An EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio
beacon) indicated a capsized vessel 20 miles o f f Gray's
Harbor, Washington. They're salt-water activated, so
we knew the EPIRB was in the water. The crew le ft A ir
Station Astoria in our HH-65 Dolphin Helicopter fo r the
site: pilot, co-pilot, flig h t mechanic, and myself, the
rescue swimmer. The Dolphin is a French air-frame
helicopter, American avionics, fast, computerized, with
a 300-mile range. The crew maintains its own
helicopter, kind o f like a paratrooper packing his own
chute. You make sure everything's right that way.
When we arrived on scene, we saw the capsized
fishing vessel, gear tangled in the water. I saw a man in
a T-shirt clinging to a piece o f wood. The boat wasn't
broken up. I was lowered into the water and talked to
the man on the wood. He'd been in the water about 2
hours. I found out from the survivor that there were
tw o other crew members, and sent him up in the basket
to the helicopter. I located one body five feet
underwater, untangled him from the rigging, and sent
him up too. I couldn't see the other guy.
The crew decided to return to Astoria w ith the
helicopter and survivor. They lowered an LR-1 life raft,
deflated. I inflated the four by two foot rubber raft with
a carbon dioxide cartridge. It failed to inflate fu lly , and
water sloshed around me when I sat on it. The thing
was gym-bag size. I floated, but was far from high and
dry. No land visible, 20 miles offshore.
Then they left me all alone on the sea.
W ith the EPIRB in the water, they knew they could
return and locate me. A Coast Guard 41 -footer
launched from Gray's Harbor w ith an arrival time o f
about an hour.
The water was really clear. I could see 50 feet down
into the water. I swam a wide lap around the boat and
gear, trying to locate the other body. I didn't want to get
too close in case the vessel went down, sucking me with
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I floated on the raft fo r what seemed an eternity, a
little scared and seasick. I vomited in my own lap,
afraid to put any bait in the water that m ight attract the
wrong fish.
I fin a lly spotted a tiny speck on the horizon, what I
hoped was the 41-footer. I popped a smoke flare, and it
zeroed in on me and took me on board. H a lf an hour
later the helicopter returned. They spotted the third
body in the water and directed the 41-footer to that
location. I recovered it and placed it in the basket
lowered by the helicopter crew. They picked me up and
we returned to A ir Station Astoria."
239 N. HEMLOCK, CANNON BEACH
Open Daily, 11-5 436-2832
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REAL ESTATE
I find the aftermath o f the presidential
election in Honda very disturbing I have uneasy
feelings which I haven't been able to pin down. A
lifelong Democrat, I've lived through other Republican
administrations, so that can't be it.
The fact that the Republican party sought to
limit voters' access to the polls in St. Louis, followed
by legal efforts to limit hand-counting of ballots, plus
the mob scene in Miami Dade County are part o f what
has made me uneasy. These feelings go beyond simple
party politics to something deeper, a concern that our
democratic processes could be at risk.
As a writer, I would find George W.'s
inability, or refusal, to speak the English language
properly quite amusing— if he were another columnist
or a late night humorist. But that's not the job he went
after He doesn't appear to be competent to run one of
the largest organizations in the world If his intent is
to dismantle part o f it, he may be successful, but I
wonder if he's capable of even doing that effectively.
I've heard his brother, Jeb Bush, is more intelligent
and a harder worker— but George W is the older
brother, so perhaps this is a modern version of
primogeniture.
These concerns make me wonder if there is
some other "power behind the throne" that will
actually be running the country. One very skeptical
person suggested to me that this would actually be
George Bush Senior’s fourth term—two running the
Reagan administration, one term of his own, and now
his son's.
Then, while visiting friends in California,
one of them showed me a memo he'd received from a
colleague at Cal Poly It summed up my concerns so
adroitly. I'm passing it on in toto:
Our Election From A Third World
Perspective:
"A history professor from I ppsala
Gniversitet in Sweden called and pointed to this article
she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was
quoted as saying that children should study this event
closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a
third world phenomenon
"1. Imagine that we read o f an election
occurring anywhere in the third world in which the
self-declared winner was the son of the former prime
minister, and that former prime minister was himself
the former head o f that nation's secret police (CIA).
"2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost
the popular vote but won based on some old colonial
holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-
democracy past
"3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's
'victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province
governed by his brother!
"4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of
one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared
winner's opponent, led thousands o f voters to vote for
the wrong candidate.
"5. Imagine that members o f that nation's
most despised caste, fearing for their lives and
livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in
near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's
candidacy
"6. imagine that hundreds o f members of
that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way
to the polls by state police operating under the
authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
"7. Imagine that six million people voted in
the disputed province and that the self-declared winner’s
'lead' was only 327 votes Fewer, certainly than the
vote counting machines' margin o f error.
"8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and
his political party opposed a more careful by-hand
inspection and re-counting o f the ballots in the
disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
”9. Imagine that the self-declared winner,
himself a governor of a major province, had the worst
human rights record o f any province in his nation and
actually led the nation in executions.
"10. Imagine that a major campaign promise
o f the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded
human rights violators to lifetime positions on the
high court o f that nation.
"None of us would deem such an election to
be representative o f anything other than the self-
declared winner's will-to-power. All o f us, I imagine,
would wearily turn the page thinking that it was
another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy
peoples in some strange elsewhere."
A friend asked me recently why I think the
Republicans are responsible for all the craziness
surrounding the election in Florida. My quick answer
was, "I'm not blaming the Republicans, a rather
diverse group of people, many o f whom I admire and
like; I'm blaming the Bush family "
Victoria Stoppiello lives at the lower left
corner o f Washington slate.
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