On the dark side of the light-to-dark entertainment continuum, “Breaking Bad” is making its third comeback in my viewing life. It’s delightfully packed with outrageously bad human behavior, and I love it all. Over the years, I’ve talked to dozens of people who gave up on the show based on one scene from the second episode of season one. I’ve advised them to look past that particular gruesomeness, since the dozens of murders from there on out are mostly not so gnarly. The reason I keep coming back again and again is probably the same reason I chose to read “Stalingrad” when I was expecting my first child and not “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.”
But while I revel in Walter White’s every evil turn, I’m also a sucker for good turns. I’ve recently watched a movie and a play that both tell inconceivably good, true stories from real life events of the past 20 years. If you are one of those for whom “Breaking Bad” and its violent cousins will never appeal, I’d like to interest you in “The Rescue” and “Come From Away.”
The story of the rescue referenced in the title here should be familiar. In 2018, 13 young Thai soccer players and their coach became trapped in the Tham Luang cave, near Chiang Rai in the north of Thailand, the fourth-longest cave in the country. It was nearly monsoon season, and though dry when they entered it to play, the cave flooded while they were inside, forcing them toward higher ground, which they found two kilometers in. Their predicament made the news worldwide. This documentary film, by husband-and-wife team Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, is told from the rescuers’ perspectives, and pieced together from more than 87 hours of GoPro footage shot on site, along with underwater reenactments they shot afterward using the participants.
More than 5,000 Thai and foreign military officers and experts from around the world participated in the 17-day effort to get the boys out. In the early days, a retired Thai Navy SEAL diver named Saman Gunan, who’d volunteered to help out, passed away when he lost consciousness during a dive. Another, Beirut Pakbara, died in 2019 of a blood infection he contracted while in the cave.
The job at hand demanded highly specialized cave divers. A local expat caver named Vern Unsworth happened to know the names of the world’s foremost experts and handed a list of them to Thailand’s Minister of the Interior. He reached out to Rick Stanton, in Coventry, England, who enlisted his regular diving partner John Volanthen, and the two headed east. They, in turn, enlisted a larger team from around the world, including Dr. Richard Harris from Australia, who would be charged with the rescue’s most morally fraught task, that of rendering each of the boys unconscious, tying their hands behind their backs and pushing their heads underwater, so they could be conducted from the site of their high ground entrapment, to the area they called Chamber 3, where hundreds of military and volunteers waited to carry them to safety. Harris is blunt and candid about his feelings as he sedated each boy. “I didn’t feel good about any of it. It felt like euthanasia.”
The nuts and bolts of how the rescuers pulled off the impossible were interesting, but what moved me about the film was not what they did or how they did it, but their attitude. The hobbyist cave divers were a bunch of misfits. As Harris described himself, “Last picked for the cricket team, first picked for the cave rescue.” Another was proud that the emotional detachment that had been problematic in his personal life had finally been put to good purpose. I cringed as I watched each boy’s head go under at the start of their three-hour journey to daylight. I cheered when I saw the children emerge on green stretchers from the cave, one after the other. I cried when I heard the terms their awkward saviors used to refer to them. “My precious cargo,” “my boy,” and “my child.”
“The Rescue” had a limited theatrical release, and is available now on National Geographic, via Disney Plus. (National Geographic owns the rights to the rescuers stories, but Netflix bought the rights to the boys’ and their families’ stories, so we do not hear directly from any of them here, but apparently there is a feature film informed by the boys now in the works.
The day after watching the movie, I headed to New York to cat sit for a friend, expecting to close out 2021 on a mini writing retreat. I wound up instead on a whirlwind day in Manhattan with a group of my cousins. When dinner was over, they hustled off to find last-minute Broadway tickets, and I prepared to take my leave and salvage a few hours of writing time. But their mantra on such occasions is, “No woman left behind,” so there I was at 6:58, running through Times Square, toward the marquee for “Come From Away.”
In the past 20 years since 9/11, I’ve read about the families who lost loved ones, visited Ground Zero, talked at length about it with my family and friends who were, like me, living in the city at the time. But I’d heard nothing about the role played by Gander, Newfoundland. You need to seek out good news. The bad news will always find you. Gander is a town the size of Great Barrington, but with an airport that could serve Los Angeles. Back in the early days of transatlantic air travel, it had been a refueling waystation. So when airspace was shut down on 9/11, 38 jets were directed to land in Gander, and suddenly the town had twice as many residents.
The show’s writers, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, another wife-and-husband team, attended the 10-year reunion of this makeshift community, and interviewed both townspeople and travelers. Their finished project captures the story of a couple whose relationship disintegrates over the course of their stay, a pair of singles who come together there, a frantic mother whose firefighter son is unreachable and whom a gentle Gander resident leads to the town’s Catholic Church to pray, and a Muslim man who is subjected to an invasive strip search before he’s permitted to re-board the plane. Gander doesn’t sleep for four days. It only feeds, comforts, clothes, and shelters strangers. On their way home, the grateful strangers start a scholarship fund for Gander.
The circumstances of the movie and play are strikingly different, but the underlying theme is the same. When we are called to rise above our own self-interest, we do it. As Rear Admiral Apakorn Youkongkaew of the Royal Thai Navy put it in “The Rescue”: “People came together from all over the world. Different countries, different languages, different cultures, coming together. There may be misunderstandings, but all you need is generosity, and a united effort.” I wonder how we might tap into our capacity for generosity and a united effort in our regular, workaday lives, when the many crises calling out for us to rise above our own self-interest are not so immediate.
