Giving thanks for a long-ago rescue

REGIONAL- Thirty-seven years ago, a float plane carrying a father and his ten-year-old daughter fell from the sky and crashed in Voyageurs National Park.
Last week, that now grown-up girl made a softer and far happier landing in the heart of one of the men who rescued her that day.
Former game warden Lloyd Steen and his wife Glenda were waiting on the front porch of their home in Ray last Thursday morning for the arrival of Jennifer Vändersøl, who made the long trip from her North Carolina home to meet Steen in person for the first time since fate unexpectedly brought them together on July 10, 1987 beside the crumpled wreckage of a red single-engine Taylorcraft float plane. Their plane had just crashed near Loiten Lake, about three miles northeast of the Ellsworth Rock Gardens.
After exchanging joyful long hugs, Vändersøl and the Steen adjourned to the kitchen, where the conversation flowed warmly and freely for nearly three hours, covering far more than just memories of the plane crash and rescue as they learned about each other’s families, careers, and more.
Going fishing
Fishing was uppermost in the minds of both Steen and Vändersøl on that fateful Friday.
Vändersøl and her father, Delano Skeim, were on a family vacation at Lake Kabetogama from their home in Ramsey when they took off on a father-daughter fishing excursion to Loiten Lake.
“I didn’t want to go fishing that day, but he made me,” Vändersøl said. “We fished all day. I remember that after we went fishing we put the fish in the floats, you know, because they’re like storage.”
Vändersøl paused to smile, then said, “And after that, I remember my dad wanted us to bring the darned fish back after the crash.”
For Steen, his fishing trip with his buddy Tom Carlstrom was a coup of sorts.
“Tom was a good friend of mine, but he was a machinist, and he was not an outdoors guy,” Steen said. “He didn’t hunt, fish, trap, nothing. I said, ‘Tom, I’m going to take you to an interior lake that’s absolutely full of fish. You’ll never see anybody back there, it’ll be just you and me. You’re going to catch a hundred bass. You’re going to have a blast.’”
The pair used more conventional modes of travel for the trek, taking Steen’s 19-foot Lund Fisherman boat to the Locator Lake Trail Head, then hiking to the lake where they picked up a canoe Steen had rented for the day. The two had paddled to War Club Lake, where they tossed out their lines.
“We were both casting and catching bass and having a great time and I heard you guys land,” Steen said to Vändersøl. “I didn’t think anything of it because that happened from time to time.”
The crash
Steen and Carlstrom were still catching bass when Delano Skeim and his daughter got in their plane to leave Loiten Lake.
“I remember hearing him throttle up,” Steen said. “There was no breeze, it was hot and dead calm. That’s not what pilots like. They like a nice breeze and a little chop on the water, anything that breaks the friction a little bit, and you get more lift from a little breeze.”
Moments later, both fishing trips were done.
“I expected to hear that little throttle back up over top when you can tell he lifted off and cleared the lake,” Steen said. “Suddenly I heard that whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, just a horrendous sound. Immediately I knew what had happened.”
Vändersøl recalled her experience during the takeoff attempt.
“The plane was so loud that you’d have to talk through your headsets,” she said. “I just remember him screaming ‘Jenny!’ and we turned to miss a really big tree, and then we landed in the trees and he said get out. The plane wasn’t on fire, thank goodness, but the radio didn’t work. And it’s Voyageurs National Park, right? So, at ten years old, I’m thinking like when are we going to get out of here? I was running around and I didn’t see anyone. I was afraid we weren’t going to be found.”
Meanwhile, Steen and Carlstrom were racing to find them. They paddled to the east end of War Club Lake, made the portage to Quill Lake and paddled mightily again to reach the Loiten Lake portage, and they quickly spied the crashed plane as they ran down the trail.
“It must have taken us a half hour to get there,” Steen said, talking to Vändersøl. “I remember as we’re walking up there and your dad was saying, ‘We’re alright, we’re alright.’ I remember him saying he just couldn’t get the lift. And then I saw you, a little girl, my Jennifer’s age.
“I was so glad to see you,” Vändersøl said. “It was my angel.”
After Vändersøl’s father took some pictures, the quartet hiked down the trail to the canoe and made their way back to Locator Lake and the two-mile walk to Steen’s boat. From there, it was a relatively quick trip back to Sandy Point Resort, where Vändersøl’s adventure began. After another picture with her rescuers holding her stringer of fish, they parted ways. Vändersøl never learned their names that day and wouldn’t for many years to come.
Reconnecting
In the years following the crash, her family never talked much about the incident, Vändersøl said.
“The funny thing is my dad when he died in 2007, we never really talked about it. I mean, he was just like it’s one of those things like, it happened, and it’s not like you forget about it, but you think you have all the time in the world with your parents and so we didn’t really chat much. I didn’t fill in the gaps. I didn’t know who these two people in this picture were.”
It would take another ten years before Vändersøl decided to make the effort to find the answer.
“I had this one photo (of the crash) after my dad passed away,” she said. “It was 2017, my daughter was 17 and my two boys were already in college, so I was getting ready to be an empty nester, and I think you just have time to think about things when your kids leave. This was a major moment in my life and I didn’t even know who rescued me, and I never even got to thank who rescued me.”
So Vändersøl turned to social media. She posted the photo along with some others her sister had found and a copy of what appears to be the only brief newspaper account of the crash to Facebook. The post was shared almost 300 times, and with many Minnesota family and friends, it wasn’t long before Vändersøl had names and then a connection with Steen’s daughter, Jennifer. Steen and Vändersøl talked on the phone, but the chat was somehow incomplete.
“The phone conversation was great, but, well, we never really talked about it (the crash and rescue),” Vändersøl said. “I wanted to meet him in person. I’ve been meaning to come back here, but then my daughter graduated, then COVID hit, and I just haven’t been back.”
But a family reunion here in Minnesota this past weekend provided the perfect opportunity for Vändersøl to make the trip serve another important purpose.
The meeting
Perhaps a good indicator of how well the meeting with Vändersøl and the Steens went could be seen in the center of the kitchen table, a large plate of chocolate-chip cookies that went untouched for well over an hour, as it appeared sharing stories absolutely took precedence over satisfying one’s sweet tooth.
It became clear that the years had taken their toll on many details of the incident. When Vändersøl asked Steen what he remembered about her father, for example, he had little to say beyond his description of the crash scene.
“Your dad was very appreciative and thankful, I do remember that,” Steen said.
The two also had gifts for each other. Steen gave Vändersøl one of his last remaining copies of “Border Warden,” a biography about Steen filled with stories about his days as a game warden that’s now out of print. When handing it to Vändersøl, Steen asked her to promise to tell him someday what her favorite story is.
“I can’t wait to read it,” she said. “To answer your question about the favorite story? I already know it’s this one. After I read the book, I will tell you my second favorite, though.”
Vändersøl’s gift to Steen was a framed copy of the picture her father took at the crash site with Steen, Carlstrom, and the happily rescued Vändersøl. The exchange sparked a lively conversation about the red hat Vändersøl was wearing, as she had given it to Steen later that day as a thank you. It was something the Steens went looking for before Vändersøl’s visit.
“Glenda said, ‘You know, I think I might still have that red hat,” Steen said. “So yesterday and today, she looked for it in our attic in the garage. Even this morning, we went and looked in the attic up in our garage, because she thought she might have kept it. We couldn’t find it.”
But the Steen’s had photographic proof the hat had been in their possession, a picture of their son as a young boy wearing it.
Steen also said the condition of the plane was much worse than he remembered it.
“You could have died,” he said to Vändersøl.
During the conversation, Steen appeared to gain a deeper understanding of just how important the word rescue is to Vändersøl’s experience of the event. For her, the crash and prospect of being stranded in the wilderness were traumatic; for Steen, who discovered two survivors from what he thought would be a fatal crash, it was a happy outcome to a bad situation that didn’t end up rising to the same level in his mind as some of the more tragic and difficult rescues he’d been involved in over the years.
“It was a joyous occasion,” he said. “The Lord put me there for a reason. I never forgot about it, but in the scheme of life it didn’t rise to the occasion like some of the ones that were horrendously terrible outcomes.”
The former warden with a reputation for being “hard-nosed” turned out to be a real softie, Vändersøl said, and their emotions were on full display as their reunion wrapped up. Both agreed that there was divine intervention that led their paths to cross 37 years ago, and they promised to continue the path moving forward.
After the reunion, there was much to process, and Vändersøl said that she realized that the meeting wasn’t just about having a chance to say thank you, something she shared in an email with Steen.
“No one close to me knew much about the crash,” she said. “Even my stepdad said he never saw that picture and thought we had just missed a runway or something. I don’t know if my dad minimized the story out of ego, guilt or fear – I’ll never know. It was a major story and experience in my life that I held and processed alone. So in addition to thanking you for the rescue, I equally thank you for the opportunity to talk about the crash and fill in some details. This was healing for me and provided some closure to a traumatic experience.”