The Untold Tragedies of Ethan Morton

By Jonathan Rosen

Few have not been jolted by the suicide of someone close. Shock, guilt, regret, and bewilderment churn together in an insoluble swirl. "the untold tragedies of ethan morton" explores that ambiguous, emotional cyclone through the eyes of those left behind after a teen’s horrific act of self-destruction.
As Dr. Thad, the novel's conscience, says, “Trying to find a successful suicide’s motives is like chasing a shadow with a flashlight.” This wrenching novel chases just that elusive shadow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543907353

Jonathan Rosen

Jonathan Rosen is the author of The Talmud and the Internet and the novels Eve's Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is the editorial director of Nextbook.

Book preview

is!"

This time the sign said, Smoke Signals. Just when the blaring, red phone jolted me awake, the words dissolved. Like on those Etch A Sketchers the kids used to have. Seems I only dream in words. Never remember if there are images or scenes that precede them. I wake up with that one word headlined, like on a Bible-touting billboard. Then it vanishes.

The call registered on my digital by my cot at the fire station and then printed out at 6:43 a.m. Not that I am some kind of punctuality nut. Whenever I get a call on the dispatcher phone, the digital clock starts blinking the time and prints out a record. And then to cement it, I’ve had to record the time sequence in the multi-dozen reports they’ve made me file since the goddamn tragedy.

Late May in the middle of nowhere Maine. Nothing ever happens, and all you can do is eat junk food and try not to watch the infomercial-packed TV while toothpicking your eyelids open to stay awake. Naturally, the last twenty minutes of my shift I got the call. Mega-disaster from minute one.

Just a campfire flare, the dispatcher Lorraine called it, way off by Seawall on Route 202, on the thumbprint of Mount Desert Island, a good half an hour away. I was stomach-churning starved and just ready to dig into a stack of flapjacks delivered by Annie over at Link’s Diner. But a small campfire gone rebel down there in the middle of nowhere could huge up pretty damn quick. Shoving a handful of pancake into my mouth, I lit out.

All the while driving down, I’m thinking Craig, that lazy SOB nephew of the chief, who always dumps any possible shit-kicking chore the last hour of his shift onto me, was due to come in any minute. So why the heck didn’t I return the favor, wait five minutes, and send him right to Seawall? I could have gone home and crashed. But I’m forever having to clean up messes that screw-up unleashes anyway, so why try to detour around the inevitable?

Had I known I would spend the next month sucked into inquest after inquest and answering obnoxious reporters’ questions from all over flippin’ New England, Craig would have been the named sucker. Not to mention constant calls from that psycho-dad from Connecticut who to this day, six months later, still calls me every couple of weeks to ask if I’ve found out anything else. Like his son is going to rise up from the grave and text message all of us with an answer that will satisfy him.

Five minutes before I hit Seawall, just as I spot some plumes of smoke curling over the tree line, Lorraine the dispatcher calls me back.

Ellington, you there? Someone called in that there’s a body.

A body?

Yeah, a body on the edge of the woods. Not far from the fire.

Dead or alive?

She couldn’t say. She wouldn’t get close enough to tell. Lady was pretty hysterical, but from what I could gather it was still smoking.

Did you call the ambulance?

No, asshole. I thought I’d let you, God’s gift to firefighting, handle it yourself. Course I sent the ambulance. And a bunch of backup engines just in case, but you’ll still get there a good twenty before they do. So do what you can.

Always do. I’ll call in details.

As I neared Seawall, I could see flames shooting out the tops of trees, and blackened smoke filled the air. Small fire, my ass. Since I was a kid everyone talked about the Fire of ’47 that wiped out a couple of thousand acres of forestland and destroyed dozens of homes and a bunch of mansions on the island. Most of why I became a firefighter was because my grandparents lost their home and my Uncle Ralph in that fire. Every time I came on one of these brushers that was starting to get out of control, I was sure it would be the next Fire of ’47.

I quickly realized my HME MiniEvo fire truck with HME Hydra Technology the state had just gotten us, despite all the hype about its mega firefighting capabilities with compressed foam technology was not about to cover this one. Lorraine, you still there? This fire ain’t small now.

Okay. How about the body?

Crap, forgot about it for a second. Where’d you say it was?

Lady said she was just a couple hundred yards from the campground entrance.

Right. I’m heading there now.

A couple of miles in, I almost took out a woman running at me waving her arms and sobbing uncontrollably. She looked about twenty-five, dark black hair matted over her char-blackened face, wearing khaki shorts and a gray hooded sweatshirt with Maine Squeeze stenciled on the front. A graying golden loped behind her.

Where the hell have you guys been? she shouted at me. He’s down the road, smoking. I think he’s still alive.

I pushed the unhinged girl into the front seat, dog in the back, and raced down the road, trees on both sides lit up in flames. I found him lying on the edge of the tarmac, flat on his back. Slowed the truck down, not sure I wanted to see and touch what I had to. Walking toward him, I got only a bit clearer view than from a distance. He was stretched out flat, arms folded on his stomach, legs straight, no movement as far as I could see. Shirt burned off him. Bare chest. Jeans melted on him like tarpaper. Worst thing was he was pitch charcoal black, head to toe. Hair singed off. Little bursts of smoke puffed off him time to time, like a brief smoke signal from the beyond. I déjà-vued for a second but couldn’t recapture the image. I wasn’t sure whether I could see live breathing until I got closer and made out short, shallow, guppy-like breaths that didn’t seem to move any air at all.

Afraid to shake or even touch him, Son, you okay? was about all I could come up with. Not sure why I called him son, because thinking back there really was no way to tell his age. His lashless eyes jolted open, showing white orbs that flash-lit up against his charcoaled skin.

Just hold on, son. Help is coming.

He almost nodded in reply.

What happened? I couldn’t help asking, though I expected no reply.

That’s when I smelled the overpowering stench that somehow hadn’t registered. I spotted the tilted-over, red gasoline can thirty yards down the road on the woods’ edge, a black stain darkening the earth beneath it.

I ran back to the truck, Maine Squeeze still huddled on the front seat, still shuddering, Golden laying quiet in the back like he’d done something wrong. Did the kid say anything to you? I asked her.

Just, ‘It’s hopeless.’ That was all. But he said it like nine times. She started whimpering again.

I got back on the intercom. Lorraine, get the ambulance here pronto. Crazy kid’s still alive.

For sure what hooked me here was the beached whale. Damned thing was so huge close up. Of course, I had seen pictures before of other beachings and back home in Oregon, once off Coos Bay, I tried to help rescue a herd of dolphin washed up on the shore. Thirty or forty of them were pathetic enough, and we did manage to save about half. But nothing like this huge, ponderous, heaving, melancholy flesh, panting and sweating on a narrow strip of beach off the east shore of Mount Desert Island.

I was interviewing for a position at University of Maine, Orono, as a forestry professor early fall a few years ago, thinking that no way was I moving East with all those provincial, uptight rubes and no space, and New York tourists sucking the air out of everyone else’s lungs. But they had solicited me. Wined and dined and paid my way after I had published my article, Revised Volume and Taper Equations for Six Major Conifer Species. My name, Patrick Wheeler, printed in sixteen-point Times Roman below, that had pretty much blown away any prior thinking. I was a thirty-year-old, newly minted PhD. I figured why not take advantage of Maine generosity, get some free frequent flyer miles, and sample East Coast lobster and oysters.

But only four minutes into my last interview with the oceanography professor, Jenny Lin (who, I might add, was pretty hot, although later I would find out was also gay and married) got a call on her cell about a beached whale out on Sand Beach. Without missing a beat she said, Screw the interview. Let’s book.

We took Park Loop Road east and parked a half-mile away from the beach that had no nearer road access. I was wearing my only sport coat, a beat-up tweed, and a pair of cords and, with an unexpected late summer heat wave in the seventies, I was sweating my balls off by the time we reached the beach. Both of us stopped dead a few hundred yards away, mouths open, when we spotted the huge gray, hump-hulk rising thirty feet above the sand. We could see it was still breathing, with sporadic heaves and occasional spews of mist shooting out its blowhole another fifty feet into the air. A couple of curiosity seekers hung out a ways down the beach, watching, and they waved when they saw us coming. Periodically, the whale fluked its tail in the air like it was also waving to us. I froze in awe.

I had seen pictures of beached whales, even one with a pod of eleven dead ones washed ashore in Oregon. I followed their necropsies on YouTube—gruesome to the max, with supposedly a stench that soaked into your sinuses for weeks—but never had I witnessed a live one or the effort to save him.

Looks like an Odontocetes, maybe a pilot whale pulled in by the warm water and hunting for food too close to shore, Jenny said. It’s a male. See all the dents in its head from fighting off males of other species. They really aren’t all that friendly to each other, despite everyone thinking they’re all so peaceful and sweet. Anyway, we better get some help pronto if we’re going to try to rescue the beast.

For the next ten hours, I was a rescue team recruit. Jenny called the University of New England Marine Science Center out of Portland, and in three-plus hours a huge crane was trucked to the beach. It had a tarp sling the size of Alabama that they hoped would lift the whale and then be able to transport him out to Thunder Hole where the tides were more favorable to let him swim out. While we waited for the crane, dozens of people from all over the island filtered down. They were dressed in whatever they were wearing that day: car salesmen and nurses and an accountant and a few real estate agents and fishermen and just anyone. And not only to watch or gawk. To a man, they started to haul buckets across the sand and bathe Odon, as Jenny got everyone calling him, until the tide started to cooperate and gave him some natural bathing. We worked for hours soaked and starting to freeze up from ocean water that was colder than my last girlfriend’s shoulder and raising a stink that we didn’t fully appreciate until we went home and had to chuck our clothes because no one else could stand to be within seven hundred yards of them.

While we were baling and soaking and shivering, Jenny gave us a running lecture on the theories about whale strandings. "Nobody really knows what causes whales to wash up onto shore. We do know beachings have been going on throughout history, even a recorded one during Aristotle’s time. The Puritans used to celebrate and make a barbecue out of the event. Not like us, who look at it like a humanitarian disaster, instead of part of the natural life cycle. Though I have to admit, the number of beachings is climbing scarily and the environment is getting so fucked who knows what’s natural and not anymore?

"There are likely multiple different reasons for stranding. About half the time no one can figure out why a stranding occurs. Most often they are solitary whales, maybe from being sick or injured, or dead ones who just float onto the shore. At times, like with Odon who seems healthy, we think the whale just wandered too close in, chasing dolphin or seals. Sometimes we find a group or mass beaching and believe, since they’re such social creatures, others may have followed a sick whale onto the shore. Or maybe one on shore has called out to the rest, inadvertently dooming them all.

"Then, there are theories that Navy sonar has damaged the whale’s delicate honing mechanism and sent them off course.

Last of all, there has cropped up the odd but unprovable theory that these isolated whales have beached themselves knowingly in a suicide attempt. That they get depressed just like humans. Maybe they’re grieving a lost loved one or child or have just fallen into a grand, psychic, unexplainable funk.

I nodded, not pretending to understand sea creatures, much less humans.

After what seemed days, we finally spotted the crane heading down to the beach. You had to see this effort to believe it. First they laid the cloth tarp out flat on the sand next to Odon. When the tide came in to let him float up some, the eighty-odd of us tried to gently push the fifteen-ton mass of him onto the edge of the tarp. His skin that seemed so tough was actually kind of fragile, maybe from being dehydrated for this long, especially his underbelly that started to split if we pushed too hard. But amazingly, we were able to rolling pin him over twice, the second time landing him about ten feet past the edge of the tarp, ending right side up. He remained totally docile the entire time, no fluking or even twitching, like he knew we were his only chance.

I stood at Odon’s head, maybe three feet from his right eye that stared into me like he realized I was trying to help but wasn’t too sure about my competence. He had this huge red-brown orb bigger than my head with a pupil the size of a fist that reflected my face right back at me. Jenny said he was maybe two years old, but looking into his eye felt like staring into the soul of some ancient sage being who had answers to questions I had never even thought of. He had a mournful, teary expression that suggested he lacked confidence in our entire venture. But more than that his stare made me wonder not just what I was doing for that day, but also what I was doing for my lifetime and, over and above that, what my entire species was doing with and to our planet lo these many years. The whole day was making my brain sizzle much more than I needed.

Within minutes of getting him onto the tarp, the crew hooked up the tarp to the joists on the crane, cocooning Odon. Slowly, gently, the crane operator hoisted Odon in his coveralls up, up, up into the air till he hovered fifteen feet above the ground suspended like he was being stork-borne into life. The image of huge Odon floating above us with a full moon hanging low over the water lighting him up incandescent, like some asymmetric space vehicle, shocked us into an awed silence. Then, in unison, eighty cheers rang out. We hugged each other with tears flowing as if we had just birthed twins in the back of a taxi.

It took maybe a half hour for the crane to work its way down the road to Thunder Hole with a caravan of us trailing behind, unable to resist seeing the climax to this opera. Pitch-black road, headlights of crane leading, followed by thirty more pairs of headlights—a funeral procession or a parade, who knew? The crane worked its way off the road onto a rocky outcropping above Thunder Bay, Odon hovering maybe thirty feet over the ocean. We all exited our cars, lining up along the cliff, dead silent. Odon hadn’t moved as far as we could tell during the ride down, and I guess we all wondered without saying so whether he had already died.

At maybe a foot per minute the crane lowered Odon down till he touched the surface of the water washing over him. The crane operator waited a while to let Odon re-accustom himself to the surf, then released the joists holding the tarp. Odon laid on the surface, unmoving, floating with the waves. For what seemed an interminable time, while we held our collective breaths, Odon was dead still. Then, we spotted a ripple of movement dance up and down his back. His tail fluked up into the air. And he was off. Skidding along the ocean. The full moon lit up the sea and reflected off Odon’s silken glide like a bioluminescent bay. A dive, then resurfacing, and then he was gone. Only hugs of joy and open weeping broke the silence.

I was hooked.

•

Three years into my tenure at Orono, I did not mind at all being tapped to lead the freshman forestry students’ annual two-week excursion into Acadia National Park. I did, however, mind everything that transpired after.

Jenny, now the department head, intercepted me in the hall after spring break, saying, Patrick, you’re on for the freshman post-spring semester outing this year. No questions, no choice. I didn’t object at all. I saw an opportunity. Each year, about twenty first-years volunteered for a two-week camping trip to Acadia to explore the area and work in the forest. My idea instead was to use the time to set up a system investigating how global warming was affecting the island. Nearly two years before, Hurricane Bill’s huge swells had swept twelve people into the ocean. A seven-year-old girl and a sixty-three-year-old guy visiting from Florida had drowned, heightening everyone’s senses to the idea that things were changing double time. So, I managed to get support at the U to document just how much rising tides and unstable weather were affecting our shoreline. We planned on sinking markers into selected areas along the coast, so over the next ten years we could measure variations in tides daily, seasonally, and annually. Plus, we were donated sensors to track the salinity of the inland waterways whose freshwater was endangered by the encroaching sea. All of these intentions became only that after the first day’s events.

When I got the call about Ethan around 9:00 a.m. that first morning, I hadn’t even realized he was missing. The night before had gone too smooth—everyone drove in from wherever at right place right time, hiked from the parking lot the couple of miles to our campground, and set up camp like they had been doing it from day one, which most of them apparently had. We grilled burgers and beans. Naturally with eighteen guys (two girls were not enough to stop them) post-meal raucousness ensued. They passed around a flask when they thought I wasn’t looking, which I confiscated after letting each of them get in a couple of swigs.

Highlight of the night around the campfire was when four of them—an a cappella group who called themselves The Tootenpoofs—unleashed their well-rehearsed act. With much pre-performance fanfare and calls for total silence while they readied themselves, the group ripped out a rear-end generated version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" that lit up the rest of the pack in whoops and set the campfire ablazing. Even quiet Ethan got into the groove by pounding out some in-time syncopation with spoon and pot.

I had met Ethan Morton in the first semester of the first level course, Forest Land Navigation and Outdoor Preparedness. Like I said, he was quiet. A pale kid, sandy hair scattered in multiple directions, shuffled when he walked, shrugged his shoulders when he talked, always uniformed in khaki pants and blue oxford shirt, even when we headed out to the field. But in the field was where he blossomed. He used navigation devices, charts, topographic and digital maps, compasses, and the like, like nobody I’ve ever met. A savant for the land. No pride or boasting, just pure skill. He could and should have taught the course. I asked him once where the hell he had learned all that, and he just answered, Picked it up along the way. But I later found out he was some kind of Zen master Eagle Scout who had more awards and medals than General Patton. Really seemed born to the ecosystem like Mozart to music.

The night we arrived, he had chosen to pitch his own tent and not bunk with anyone else like the rest of the kids were doing, which surprised me not at all. And also didn’t worry me much. After breakfast, one of the kids, Stan I think, noticed that Ethan was not there. I figured Ethan had decided to do some solo reconnaissance and, knowing him, thought nothing of it. I just hoped he would be back soon enough for us all to head out.

At 9:13 a.m. I got a call on my cell. Right off I was not pleased.

Are you the Professor Patrick Wheeler? No hello or ID himself. The whole conversation he kept calling me the professor, like I was a character on Gilligan’s Island.

You leading a group of students from U of Maine on the island today? He definitely sounded pissed off. Or tired. Or was just mean. Maybe all the above.

Yes . . .

They all there?

I started to get worried. Can I ask who this is?

I don’t know why I got this particular task, but it always seems like it comes down to me. This is Assistant Fire Chief Grant Ellington of the Mount Desert Island Fire Department. You’re on the island now, right?

Yeah.

Would you mind coming to the hospital so I can talk with you?

Can you tell me what the hell this is about?