The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 157: A Novel Hero

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

What he did was unspeakably brave.  So why then, did no one speak of it?

This is the way I heard it. Ellen was 26 years old on the day of the accident. Chuck was 53. The unlikely couple sat next to each other in the first-class carriage, holding hands beneath the coat that lay between them. Chuck was engrossed in his novel, as usual, as Ellen watched the English countryside roll by. Neither imagined their love would be put to the test two minutes from now.

Ellen glanced at Chuck and sighed. A talented actress herself, she'd fallen the moment she'd seen him take the stage eight years ago. She was only 17 then and completely mesmerized by the way Chuck could hold an audience in the palm of his hand. But beyond his talent on stage, Chuck possessed another quality that Ellen admired even more. A heroic quality. A quality that made her feel safe in his presence. a quality that would be in great demand 90 seconds from now. Sitting across from Ellen and Chuck was Ellen's mother, Francis.

Unlike Ellen, Francis saw nothing heroic about Chuck, nothing at all. What kind of hero would pursue a girl half his age? Francis recalled a line uttered by one of Chuck's most popular characters, a line he often repeated on stage in the course of his. popular one man shows. I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right and too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. Was Chuck himself a coward? A man too afraid to do the right thing? Francis was about to find out 60 seconds from now. Outside, a signalman jumped up and down on the side of the tracks, frantically waving a red flag. Francis paid him no mind.

Neither did Chuck, who was still engrossed in his novel. The engineer noticed, however, and quickly applied the brakes. Unfortunately, a train, traveling at 50 miles an hour, needs at least a mile to come to a full stop, and Tender Locomotive 109 was already half a mile from the bridge in Stapleshurst, a bridge that was currently undergoing maintenance. And so, at exactly 3.13 p.m. Greenwich meantime, the doomed train approached the Staplehurst Bridge at roughly 25 miles an hour. Then it ran out of track and plunged into a ravine. The chaos was unimaginable. Passengers screamed in terror as their cars were dragged off the bridge one after the next. Witnesses later testified that the pile-up appeared to, one fold in slow motion as each carriage fell onto the one before it, crushing the occupants.

One car, however, was spared. By some miracle, it teetered on the precipice, partly in mid-air, partly on the bridge. Inside were Chuck, Ellen, Francis, and a few dozen other first-class passengers, all in various stages of panic, all but one. Chuck, no longer engrossed in his novel, instructed everyone inside to hold still and remain calm. Then he opened the carriage door and stepped out onto the running board. Below him were a dozen smashed carriages and the screams of those trapped inside. Slowly he crept along the narrow running board to the back of the carriage. There, a gap roughly six feet wide, separated him from solid ground.

Chuck knew his carriage might tumble into the gully at any moment. So he backed up as far as he could and bolted toward the gap, leaping over the yawning chasm to solid ground. He then ran from the sight of the accident, confirming Francis's worst assumptions. But only for a moment. Chuck returned to the teetering carriage with a long plank of wood. He placed the plank across the gap and carefully walking. walked across it, re-entering the car. First, he summoned Ellen and led his love to safety.

Then he returned for Francis, whose opinion of Chuck was rapidly improving. Once they were safe, Chuck returned to the carriage again and again, escorting women and children down the narrow running board, across the plank and out of harm's way. Finally, when everyone was safely on solid ground, Chuck turned to Ellen and kissed her on the forehead. Stay with your mother, darling. There's work to be done below. Before he descended into the ravine, Chuck returned to the teetering carriage one final time to retrieve his top hat, a flask of whiskey, and of course, his novel. Then he scrambled down the embankment and walked in to a nightmare. The injured were everywhere, moaning and agony and calling for help.

Chuck offered whiskey to the wounded and dying. He scooped water from the stream, which he dispensed from his top hat. Several of the victims died in his arms, but Chuck remained on the scene for hours, doing what he could to be of use. Ten people died that day, and 40 others were seriously injured, including Chuck, who developed PTSD long before it had a name. So unnerving was his experience at Stapleshurst. He was unable to speak for two weeks after the accident.

He also developed a debilitating case of Cedarodromophobia, a fear of riding on trains that plagued him for the rest of his life. And yet, in spite of the national press surrounding the accident and the very public inquiry into the cause of the wreck, no one wrote about Chuck's heroism. Why? Because that's the way Chuck wanted it. He fled the scene of the accident before the press arrived. He then beseeched the Southern Railway Company to remove his name from the passenger manifest, which they did. They were so grateful for Chuck's assistance in the aftermath of the wreck.

They agreed to pretend he was never on that train. You see, Chuck was not the kind of hero who wanted any recognition. He was instead the kind of hero with a wife at home and ten children, a wife who had no idea. Her husband was on a train with a woman half his age. Not until his death, five years to the day after the deadly derailment at Stapleshurst, did Chuck's gallantry come to light, along with the details of his scandalous affair with an actress named Ellen. Turnin. And when the truth came out, as the truth so often does, the good people of Victorian England

were no longer sure how to feel about their national treasure. Some condemned him, obviously, while others simply refused to believe a man who had so frequently captured the nobility of the human spirit was capable of such a rank betrayal. Many, though, lovers of literature in particular, praised his heroic decision to rescue not just his young lover, his prospective mother-in-law and a few dozen fellow travelers, but the novel in which he was so completely engrossed at the time of the wreck. Not the novel he was reading, the novel he was writing. the last novel he would ever write. It was entitled Our Mutual Friend, and like his 14 previous bestsellers,

this one was packed with a cast of rich and complicated characters, characters he brought to life not just on the page, but on the stage with his popular live readings. Colorful characters like Madame Defarge and Sissy Jupe, Craven characters like Yerai Heath, and Bill Sykes, tragic characters like Mrs. Havisham and Rosa Dardle, and most of all, imperfect characters like Fagan, Ebenezer, and of course, Pip, the flawed hero from great expectations, who famously said, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, and too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. a telling turn of phrase penned by a famous writer

who left the world a collection of unforgettable heroes heroes every bit as human as he a novel hero named Charles Dickens anyway that's the way I heard it

well good for Chuck when the chips were down he did the right thing he acted like a hero a novel hero in this case but a hero nevertheless a human human hero with feet of clay and flaws and foibles. But that's okay. Who among us is not festooned

with a foible or two? This is the way I talked about, the way I heard it, the only spontaneous analysis of the only podcast for the curious mind with a short attention span wherein I attempt to explain the circumstances that led to the writing of the tale you just heard. In this case, I think it began a couple of weeks ago when I was sitting in this very chair where my butt is still quarantined and was waiting to zoom in to one of those morning shows where I was going to be interviewed about, well, I was going to plug my mother's book, which by the way, thank you. Those of you who purchased about your father and other celebrities I have known have helped my sweet mom become a New York Times bestselling author twice.

She debuted at number eight. She's delighted. The book is great if you don't have a copy yet. You can get it at aboutyourfather.com slash book. That's basically what I was going to do. I was going to go on Fox and Friends or Good Morning America or I forget which one and saw my mom's book. But before I zoomed in, there was another guest, Andrew Cuomo, in fact, who said the following. He said, and I quote, that no measure, no matter how drastic or draconian should be deemed

unjustified if it results in saving a single life. He was talking, of course, about relaxing the lockdown and the pros and cons of doing so. And it really struck me. In fact, it reminded me of something I had written a couple of months earlier about safety third. If you're a fan of dirty jobs, you know that safety third was a special I did back in 2008 that examined the unintended consequences of safety first orthodoxy and challenged the idea that telling people that their safety was the most important thing was a good idea. In fact, I argue that it's a very bad idea and that when people start to believe that someone else cares more about their safety than they do, you wind up with a sense of complacency that leads to all kinds of occupational and vocational accidents.

So safety third became a rallying cry for me and my crew on dirty jobs to remind each other that our safety was fundamentally our responsibility. And it was also a fun way to stir up a conversation around some pretty important issues, homeostatic risk, risk equilibrium, risk compensation or compensatory risk, all these ideas that I'm really interested in. And I was reminded of all of that, as Governor Cuomo told the country that nothing was more important to him than our safety. And to be honest, I just found it egregious. It's the same nonsense you hear on United Airlines. When you sit down and they say, here at United Airlines or American Airlines, they all say the same thing. Here at Blankety Blank Airlines, your safety is our top priority. They tell you this moments before they invite you to strike.

wrap yourself in to an aluminum tube and defy gravity by hurtling through space at 700 miles an hour. Of course, your safety is not the top priority. Our safety is important. Safety always, right? But to say it's the top thing and to say that no price is too high in order to save a single life, well, that was hard to listen to. As of now, 33 million people are, unemployed. The country is headed toward a very, very, very difficult time and a deadly time. Poverty kills people too. This virus is a serious thing. And I supported the quarantine when it began. And I support it now in some areas. But I've never supported the idea that we should treat Newark, Newark, New York, New Jersey, the same way that we treat Bismarck, you know, or Scottsdale, like Manhattan.

It just never made sense, but that's what we did. That's how we started the lockdown. And now we're having this conversation that's really dividing the country. People who want to see the lockdowns rolled back or routinely described as impatient, irresponsible, money grubbing. And to be fair, people who are arguing to extend the quarantine, they're being described as cowardly and uninformed. And it's just fascinating. We're trapped again in this prison of two ideas where it's a completely binary world. And for some reason, it has to be all of this or all of that.

Anyway, I wrote a novel hero, I think, because after listening to Cuomo, I did this interview and shared a lot of the same ideas on TV that I shared just now. And I got some pushback. People went to Facebook to tell me that I had somehow managed to get my head all the way up my butt. And they wanted to challenge me on these ideas, which I welcome. I love it. But it's very, very difficult to be understood in a sound bite or a quick burst. And so to some people, I may have come off sounding flip or glib.

Look, safety is incredibly important. I know that. I say safety third just to stir things. things up and make people think about the reality of business. Companies don't exist to keep their employees safe. That's not the reason American Airlines exists. And if Cuomo was serious about employing any measure to save just a single life, well, then why not knock the speed limit down to 20 miles an hour and require motorists to wear helmets and outlaw left turns? That would save 40,000 lives a year. But of course, he won't do that. No governor would.

And nobody would support that because deep down, we all know that safety is not the most important thing. There are times when it is top of mind. But never in the history of the country has it gone on indefinitely. And yet, Zeke Emanuel just said we should stay locked down for another 18 months. And Bill Gates is arguing for a national lockdown to go for another 10 months. So, look, smart people have different opinions. I can respect that. But I can't respect the big platitudinous bowl of warm milk that says nothing is more important than our own safety. So I shared my idea about safety third on the air and spent the last couple of weeks defending my position.

And somewhere in the midst of all that, I wrote a story called a novel hero. Why? Because Charles Dickens, I think, found himself. faced with a similar choice, a binary choice. He's a selfish guy. He's having an affair. He's living a lie. He's trying to protect his reputation. He wants to avoid scandal. Suddenly he's in the midst of this calamity. And he has to decide. Does he turn tail and run? No, he goes back in. He gets his mistress out. Then he gets his mistress-in-law. And then he makes it even braver call. He goes back in. He helps everyone. He helps everyone.

one he can. And then he goes into the ravine and spends hours down there as a first responder. Ask a first responder if safety is first. See what they say. They'll laugh. Safety first is insane. There would never be a soldier or a fireman or a cop. Bravery itself requires that something be more important than safety. And so you can get away with it for a while. You can tell the country for a while that in the interest of public health, we're going to have to do this thing. We're going to have to pretend like safety is the most important thing, but it won't last. It never does. In London, in 1939, you might recall the Germans drop bombs every day, hundreds of bombs. The bombings were awful. The people stayed hunkered down for weeks at a time.

But then they emerged before the bombing stopped. They opened up shop. before the bombing stopped. They opened up schools, even as the bombs were falling, because the Brits got bored of being terrified. I think something like that is happening in our country, and I think it's important to understand that as we come out of this thing, it's going to be ugly, and the conversations are going to be heated. And one group is going to point to 60 or 70,000 fatalities, and another is going to point to 30 or 40 million. people who've lost their livelihoods, and we're going to have to make a tough choice. Anyway, I think that's why I wrote about Dickens. He had to make a tough choice. In the end,

he went from being a selfish guy to a selfless guy, and he put other people's well-being ahead of his own. You can't do that in a safety first world. You just can't. Anyway, I'll be back next week with another story. I think I'm going to try. I'm going to try and write one tomorrow, but the situation is fluid. It's a busy time and a weird time and a difficult time to concentrate, if I'm being honest. But it was nice of you to listen to this 10 minute and 30 second ramble. I appreciate it. Whatever you decide, staying in, venturing out.

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