This morning the blind man and his one-legged partner, tethered to each other by a length of rope, will brace themselves for a breath-stealing plunge into the frigid water surrounding the island dungeon.
All around them body after body will drop into the sea beside them, struggling to find their bearings so that they can begin the long swim through choppy open water to the mainland. The two men will be in more peril than all their co-conspirators, their tether uniting their fates. If one goes down into the depths, the other will follow.
This is Escape from Alcatraz. It isn't, however, a jail break. In fact, the two men about to take the plunge — Burnaby's Brian Cowie and West Vancouver's Meyrick Jones — aren't hardened criminals at all. They are two great friends with a story as inspirational as it is unique. Both have felt suffering that pushed them to the edge of death, and both are now beacons of life, pushing each other to the limits of human achievement.
They won't be thinking about that today though. They'll be thinking about those jagged rocks around Alcatraz, and how to get the hell away from them so that they can crawl out of San Francisco Bay and begin the next leg of their incredible journey.
• • •
For the first few minutes, it was just screaming.
"It was excruciating," Jones remembers. "It was the worst pain you can imagine."
It was August of 1995 and Jones, a Vancouver native who was about to enter his fourth year of studies at the University of British Columbia, had taken a quick trip down the coast with his then girlfriend to visit San Francisco. An unfortunate set of coincidences led him directly into harm's way. The pair wanted to take a trip to Alcatraz but all the boats were full. As a substitute, they opted for a ride on one of the city's iconic cable cars, cheering their luck as they avoided a long wait by getting the last two spots at the back of a car crammed full of tourists.
"We were right at the back corner, which we thought was a great place to be because we could see things better than if we were in the middle," says Jones.
Nearby a pair of workers were doing maintenance on another cable car. They stepped away without properly securing it and, after a few minutes, the big hunk of steel slipped out of its barn and started rolling down San Francisco's famous Nob Hill. The cars don't have engines — the underground cable supplies the power — so as it dropped towards Jones it was virtually silent.
The runaway car didn't travel far — only about 10 feet one report said — but it was space enough to gain plenty of momentum on the steep hill. When it slammed into the trolley that Jones was riding on, everyone on board scrambled off, stunned by the force of the impact. Everyone, that is, except for Meyrick Jones. The empty car's front bumper jumped up upon contact, hitting the exact spot where Jones was standing in a stairwell. He was stuck. While everyone else scrambled, he could only scream. And scream and scream. Eyewitnesses quoted in later media reports all mentioned the terrified screaming.
Jones's right leg and foot were broken in multiple places. His left leg was worse.
As an army of firefighters raced towards the scene, Jones began to regain rational thought. Was he about to bleed to death? Did he need a tourniquet? He asked his girlfriend to crouch down and look below the wreckage. Was there a huge pool of blood? She looked, and reported back that there wasn't blood rushing from his legs. In a series of horrible events, Jones had his first lucky break: the cars were melded together and his legs were clamped, somewhat sealing the wounds.
"That was one really lucky thing," he says. "If they had hit and then separated, I likely would have bled to death."
Firefighters then got to work separating the two cars. As the minutes passed, they started to improvise, their normal extraction tools failing to get the job done.
"(The cars) are really old and they're heavy steel," Jones says. "They're not like Toyota Tercels. The Jaws of Life didn't work."
Out came sledgehammers and circular saws. Complicating the matter was the fact that they were still perched on that hill. Firefighters didn't want to separate the two cars only to have another runaway careening down the slope to wage more destruction. The clock kept ticking. Thirty minutes. Sixty minutes. Jones was given some pain medication but was conscious the entire time.
One firefighter was assigned the job of focusing solely on Jones, talking to him throughout the entire ordeal. At one point Jones got into a panic about health insurance. Would he be stuck with a huge hospital bill when this was all over? The response almost dragged a laugh out of the fiery pain.
"Don't you worry, I think you're going to be OK," the man said.
Finally, 90 minutes after impact, Jones was freed from the wreckage, loaded into an ambulance bound for San Francisco General and knocked out by pain medication. He now credits the firefighter in his face for helping him get to that point.
"In retrospect he wasn't entirely truthful," says Jones. "But I think that was a good call on his part."
When Jones awoke he opened his eyes to a room full of doctors and hospital administrators staring back at him.
You've been in an accident, they said. Your left leg has been badly damaged. There's no circulation in the lower leg, parts of which are already gone. The best thing to do would be to amputate it, they said. Do you consent to this? Jones signed his consent and almost immediately was put back to sleep. Before he went under, however, he watched as a doctor approached his bed with a marker and drew a big X on his leg.
"It was a bit shocking," says Jones. "They do it right then and there, right in front of you. It was an odd thing."
He later found out that doctors do that so that they don't remove the wrong leg. Both his legs looked terrible. When he woke up again, the left one was gone below the knee.
"You're famous," the woman sharing a recovery room with him said. With his family arriving to comfort him, Jones was shown the local newspapers. He was front-page news.
• • •
Brian Cowie's loss was more subtle, but just as shocking. When he was 22, almost the same age as Jones was when his accident occurred, Cowie was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a condition that causes progressive vision loss usually to the point of legal blindness. Cowie could still see quite well at the time of the diagnosis but he felt his whole future being shrouded in darkness. Though doctors were not specific about how much of his eyesight he would lose and how quickly it would go, Cowie convinced himself he'd be blind, and maybe even dead, within 10 years.
"For some reason I didn't think I would make it past 33," he says. With an expiration date already stamped on his mind, Cowie started to think of himself as spoiled goods.
If I can't see, what's the point, the voice in his head said. I don't care if I die. Life's not worth living if you can't drive a car, do all the things that your friends do. How am I going to find a girlfriend? Who wants to hang around with a blind guy?
He started living like worthless meat as well, partying all the time and hanging around the scary corners of Vancouver. In the first few years after the diagnosis he could still see just fine, and he took advantage of that ability by getting a sports car and driving it as fast as he could. He would race all the way from Vancouver to Penticton on the Crowsnest Highway — a stomach-churning stretch of road full of switchbacks and sheer cliffs — trying to beat his record time.
Cowie counts himself lucky that he didn't kill himself. He cared little about his own welfare, and acted as if others felt the same way.
"You forget about your parents and brothers and sisters. They might be a little bit concerned if I drive off a cliff on the way to Penticton at 100 miles an hour. You don't think about that kind of stuff when you're that age."
The years passed and the lights stayed on, although dimming a little each year. Cowie matured and learned more about his situation.
"And then there was somebody else," he says. Wife Marlene came along, followed by sons Sean and Aaron. The drinking, the partying, the death races stopped. As his vision slowly failed, the rest of his life flourished.
Meanwhile Cowie's condition took away the fine details in the centre of his vision, leaving behind a big blurry middle with sharp peripherals.
"When I meet people they don't even know that I have a vision problem," he says. "I don't walk into things, in general."
Cowie has learned to manage social situations despite not having an ability to see faces. He relies upon clothing to keep up with swirling crowds. If someone at a party is wearing blue pants and a white shirt, that combination will, in essence, become that person's face.
"For the rest of that time, I'll recognize the blue shirt and white pants," he says. "But if I saw that person half an hour later with a red shirt and black pants, I would not recognize them."
The former devoted athlete — he gave it all up during the troubled years — got back into fitness, eventually joining Canada's national paracycling team and riding all the way to the Paralympic Games. Cowie competed in 2000, 2004 and 2008, winning a bronze medal in Sydney. After Beijing he was hit with hometown fever — the 2010 Winter Games were coming to Vancouver. Maybe he could make the Paralympic cross-country ski team and compete on home soil.
Cowie signed up for a training camp aimed at finding ski stars for the 2010 Paralympics. You can perhaps guess which one-legged fitness freak he met there.
• • •
In the month after his accident Meyrick Jones experienced the disconcerting phenomenon known as phantom pain, sensations that seemed to originate in the limb that was no longer there. He'd wake up from nightmares of riding a motorcycle with his leg pressed against the searing hot tailpipe.
"It felt like somebody had a blowtorch or was stabbing me with a knife," he says. "It just felt horrible all the time. Like torture. I tried everything. I tried hypnosis, I tried all sorts of pain killers, acupuncture. None of it worked."
When the phantom pain became unbearable Jones would start punching himself in the leg above the amputation until the sensation moved to a spot on his body that actually still existed. Soon, though, he was fitted with his first prosthetic leg, and the pain stopped. It never returned.
Back in Vancouver Jones threw himself into rehab immediately upon receiving his new leg. He finished his degree, got a job renovating homes, got bored of his job renovating homes and then got sick.
"I started having some health problems from compensating all the time," he says. "It's a common thing for amputees."
The solution to both the boredom and the health problems was the same: fitness. Jones upped his exercise game and started racing mountain bikes. Soon enough he was so fit he was racing triathlons and landed a job as a personal trainer at West Vancouver's Innovative Fitness. At about the same time, Jones had the crazy idea that he should try out for the 2010 Paralympics that would be held on his own doorstep. He did well, racking up a couple of crosscountry skiing national championship medals, but didn't quite make the cut. He did, however, meet an older guy after his own heart.
One year later Jones was contemplating riding the annual Seattle to Portland bike race when he had another crazy idea. They both loved bikes, after all. Why not do it together? Jones gave his new friend Brian Cowie a call.
"OK, let's do that," was Cowie's answer, for reasons he still can't really understand. "I don't know why."
First, though, came a tandem bike tutorial. Jones had never ridden one before. And Cowie was cautious about getting on that thing with someone new.
"When you give up complete control, it's a little bit scary," he says. "And when you're going down a hill at about 100 kilometres per hour, it's a little bit scary. You have realizations like I'm on two tiny little tires, going 100 km/h on a bike — you have two people on a bike that has a braking system for one person. You can't stop that bike like you can stop a normal bike. . . . If you hit the pavement at 100 km/h you know it's going to be a mess at the end of that."
Before heading to Seattle the two took the tandem bike for a 15-minute spin.
"Basically I think he was interviewing me to see if I was someone he would trust his life to," says Jones. "I guess I passed." They headed south.
The 330-km ride lasted the better part of a day — 14 hours total — but the pair made it to Portland safely. Comic relief was supplied by the constant chatter that Jones kept up.
"Wow, look at that pool," he said. "Wouldn't you love to jump in that." Other landmarks came into view, with Jones directing Cowie's attention to one cool sight after another. Finally Cowie had to offer a reminder.
"Meyrick," he said, "There's a reason why I'm on the back and you're on the front."
Tandem triathlons came later. Jones was ostensibly Cowie's guide, known as a pilot, for the races, but in fact both athletes needed each other to complete the gruelling events without other assistance.
Tethered together at the waists by a length of stretchy rope, Jones leads the way in the swim with Cowie behind, following the white cord as if it were the lane marking on the bottom of a pool. Roles reverse when they hit the beach — the guided becomes the guide.
"I don't have my leg on," says Jones. "I put my hand on his shoulder. I tell him where to go but I also sort of lean on him to get to where I'm able to put my leg on." The tandem bike is next, followed by the run. Cowie is once again attached by a tether and following behind.
"We're a true team," says Jones.
"While Meyrick helps me with my vision problem, I help him with his amputee problem," adds Cowie. "I don't need any outside help except him, and he doesn't need any outside help except me."
The pair didn't get into the racing business to become famous, but fame has found them to some extent. They've decided to use their notoriety for good, raising funds to help young parathletes follow their trail. The Paraproject, as they call it, has already raised more than $15,000 and Jones and Cowie are hoping for a lot more. They know that the kids who look up to them need it.
"That running leg that I'm lucky to have, if I had to go buy it again tomorrow it would cost almost $20,000," says Jones. "There's no government assistance with that. Racing wheelchairs cost $10,000 or more. It's a very, very expensive thing to do."
It's expensive, but enormously rewarding. Cowie, 61, and 39-year-old Jones have each done numerous triathlons individually and together, including three Ironman races done as a team. Paratriathlon makes its Paralympic debut in 2016 and both could potentially compete there, although not as a team.
The iconic Escape From Alcatraz race that they will be competing in today is a bucket list race, one that every serious triathlete wants to tackle at least once.
The swim is longer than most and, of course, there's a unique start. The athletes don't actually jump off The Rock — "The island is super rocky, you can't put 1,000 triathletes clambouring over these rocks," says Jones. Instead everyone is loaded into a paddle wheeler that chugs across the bay and anchors right beside the island. The triathletes then jump off the second deck into the ocean. It's a little less harrowing than what an old gangster would have attempted during a prison break but it's still no easy feat for a guy with one leg who is tied to his visually impaired partner. Jones and Cowie seem unconcerned.
"We're just going to jump off like everybody else," says Jones. "Three, two, one, go."
The pair, in fact, often forget that they are different from other racers or teams when they compete in triathlons, even though everyone else is keenly aware of that fact.
"We're just doing it because we have fun and enjoy doing it together," says Cowie. "We didn't do it thinking, 'Oh, he's an amputee and I'm a visually impaired guy, won't this be different.'" Even so, when they both step back and look at the whole situation, they acknowledge the uniqueness of it all.
"There's no missing the fact that you're different," says Jones. "But that's OK, we're both used to being different. One of the nice things about doing the types of things that we both do now is that it does have that power to inspire people. I don't know how I ever would have been able to inspire anybody without losing my leg, but I feel very lucky that I can now. It's a bit of a gift out of a bad scenario."
"You're never going to hear this story anywhere else," adds Cowie, who has played games of 'Can you top this?' with various race organizers before.
We've got a guy with one leg, they'll say.
"Yeah, but does he ride with a guy who can't see?"
Well no, we don't have that.
"And is he going to San Francisco where he lost his leg in a trolley car accident?"
No, we don't have that.
Alcatraz, of course, isn't just another race for Jones.
"There is that sort of little extra something about going back to San Francisco," he says. "There are a few iconic things about that city, Alcatraz being one and the cable cars being another. I just kind of feel intricately connected with that stuff. I hope it will be rewarding for me to go back and do this."
With the accident now a distant memory, Jones says he isn't looking for closure by heading back to San Francisco now. It's more like he's looking to conquer.
"I like the story," he says with a laugh. "I like it that this thing happened to me down there, we go back and hopefully we kick some butt. . . . I don't know if you want to call it closure. This thing is closed, and I've been doing races for a long time. But it will be satisfying."
For more information on the Paraproject or to donate, visit paraproject.com.
