Aloha to a Hero

It was on this side of paradise that a kicker led his football coach and the coach’s son on a real-life Indiana Jones adventure through thickets and ferns to the locals-only waterfall not described at the visitors’ center.

In retrospect, it reads like a campy B-movie prelude, 11 unsuspecting hikers trekking along the red-dirt, sugar-cane trail past Book of Genesis landscape, chit-chatting as they passed gun-blasted private property signs on the way to the secluded Slippery Slide at Waipahee on the island of Kauai.

It was Shannon Smith’s desire to skydive into Aloha Stadium with the game ball next season and tee it up for opening kickoff. But last March 29, all he wanted was to show off the natural water slide he had frequented during his Swiss Family Robinson childhood.

Smith raced ahead of the group with 6-year-old Cody, freckle-faced youngest son of second-year Hawaii football Coach Fred vonAppen.

He tested the currents with a warmup slide, returned to the top, put Cody in his lap and pushed off.

Thea vonAppen, Cody’s mother, arrived just in time to snap the photo: Cody’s mouth agape in thrill-ride anticipation; Shannon’s right forearm wrapped tightly across the boy’s chest.

What ensued were terror, helplessness, Thea’s fingernails ripping off on the rocks. For want of a three-foot piece of cord. Or a pocketknife.

“I felt like I was in a horror movie,” Mike Law, one of the hikers, remembered.

Shannon and Cody dropped into the water, then surfaced in a panic. They had been sucked into a whirlpool. Experts in fluid mechanics later explained the vortex in terms of “tangential velocity,” relating the interaction of water and pressure to squirting a high-powered hose into a bucket.

Thea vonAppen wasn’t interested in the science.

“I was thinking, ‘Cody’s going to die here and I can’t do a thing about it,’ ” she said.

But she tried, heaving herself down the falls only to be swallowed, feeling “like someone was pulling my feet down,” as she and Smith, still clutching Cody, spiraled in what Law described as a “monster toilet bowl.”

Thea, a triathlete, screamed for Fred, who tore off his jacket and also took the plunge--still wearing his tennis shoes. He soon was flailing with the others against the currents.

Tim Carey, Hawaii’s quarterback, saw the look on Shannon’s face, “felt I had to do something,” and also threw himself in.

Throughout, Shannon kept Cody afloat, encouraging him to “keep his head up.”

Recollections are clouded. Did Shannon hand Cody off to Thea two or three times? How many times did Shannon go under?

The area was so lush, it was impossible to break a branch worthy of extending to desperate hands. Chris Shinnick, a Hawaii defensive back, discovered as much as he banged a jagged rock on a guava tree.

Thea prepared to die.

“It was really peaceful,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, that was easy.’ You think funny things.”

Shannon, fading fast, held Cody afloat with both arms as he sucked for air. Somehow, he passed Cody to Thea, who passed him to Fred, who passed him to Carey, who got Cody to shore. Kristan, Thea’s 17-year-old daughter, used a scrawny branch to rescue her mother. Fred made a last, life-saving frog kick and latched onto a rock. Carey managed to swim his way out.

But Shannon Smith was gone.

Thea called 911 on her cellular phone, but Shannon’s fate was sealed. It took scuba divers, harnessing themselves to ropes fastened to guava trees, 90 minutes to recover the body from the 20-foot-deep pond.

“A hopeless situation,” Carey remembered.

The bruise on Smith’s head led the medical examiner to conclude that he knocked himself unconscious on a rock as he made one last kick to the surface.

He drowned the day before Easter. He would have turned 21 on April 1.

Smith’s mother, Rosemary, was shopping for his present at the time.

Shannon was expected to be the starting kicker for the Rainbows this season.

Fred vonAppen can never forget.

“I feel a degree of responsibility,” he said. “Perhaps if we hadn’t been there, if [Shannon] hadn’t been compelled to show us his island. . . . As a coach, you’re responsible for everything. I know a lot of that is counterproductive, but we’ll never get over this. Cody, because he’s 6, has no future or past, at least in his perception. We do. It’s a haunting reminder how fickle it all can be, how quickly a pleasant, exciting moment can turn to tragedy.”

There probably is nothing more anyone could have done to save Smith, but all who were there say he died a hero.

“He consciously gave up his life to save Cody,” Carey said.

The vonAppens know why they entered the treacherous waters. Cody is their son. Why Shannon Smith risked his life to save someone else’s son has given his story a remarkable afterlife.

“It would be tragic if Shannon died in a car accident,” Noah Evslin, Smith’s best friend, said. “But there is a sense of incredibleness that someone would do this.”

Evslin, who will be a senior in the fall at Claremont-McKenna College, was convinced after studying the Holocaust that humans were inherently evil.

“Then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call,” he said. “This makes you realize people can do great things. My closest friend did this. If I have to die, and I could choose the way to die, I would die the way Shannon did.”

Ryan Smith, 23, said there was no way his brother could have let Cody die to save himself.

“He could have never lived with it,” Ryan said. “Never.”

Because of Smith’s last gift, Cody could spend an afternoon in early June playing with his dog outside his family’s home overlooking Honolulu.

Cody prays for Shannon each night.

“He’s so young, he really doesn’t know what death is,” Thea said.

But Cody doesn’t like talking about March 29.

“I was only scared when I came up because I was being pulled down,” he said as he fidgeted at the kitchen table. “I felt like I was drowning.”

Asked if he knew what a hero was, Cody said, “Someone that saves people’s lives.”

Like Shannon?

“Yeah,” Cody said. “Because he saved me.”

One mystery about the day can never be resolved. It isn’t why Smith trespassed. Island residents have gone to Slippery Slide for years without fear of prosecution, even though it has been closed to the public for 18 years, out of safety and liability concerns. Before Smith drowned, nine people had lost their lives at Slippery Slide in the last 35 years, although Smith’s death was the first in 26 years.

The question is: Why did Smith go down the slide when it appeared dangerous?

Many locals know it is unsafe to go down the slide after a rain, when the water is flowing briskly, exactly the conditions on March 29.

The best guess, after interviews with numerous friends and relatives, was that Smith--who had gone down the slide probably 100 times--did not know anyone had died there.

He probably felt some pressure to show off the slide to his friends, but he had made his own safety check.

The problem was, Smith initially went down headfirst, avoiding the vortex by skimming the water and peeling quickly to the right.

It was a different story when he and Cody went together, feet first, the weight of their bodies sucking them left into the whirlpool.

Shannon’s parents, Rosemary and Norbert Smith, who run a bed and breakfast here, have lived on Kauai for 19 years.

“Nobody in our family knew,” Rosemary said of the Slippery Slide’s dangers. “We sent B and B guests there.”

Shannon was a skydiver, a cliff-jumper and a daredevil, but not someone who would put a 6-year-old boy in harm’s way.

“Shannon would have never taken Cody down anything he thought was dangerous at all,” Thea vonAppen said.

*

Death lingers.

“Every day is a bad day,” Rosemary Smith said in the office of her family’s B and B, a canary yellow, picket-fenced former macadamia plantation house the Smiths remodeled.

Norbert’s raking in the backyard on a quiet afternoon sounds almost mournful. With a blown-up picture of Shannon and Cody’s last ride propped on the dining room mantle, Rosemary puts on a happy face and greets vacationers--”The sad thing is we need the money,” she said--although she would rather be in bed with the covers pulled over her head.

“When you lose a child, there’s no word to describe the pain,” she said.

Shannon, the fifth-born son, was the second of Rosemary’s seven children to die. Jennifer, her third, succumbed to leukemia in 1969 at 3.

The Smiths then lived in the Virgin Islands, having moved from upstate New York after Norbert got a job with an oil company.

When Jennifer’s temperature rose to 106, Rosemary rushed her to a better hospital in Puerto Rico.

“No one spoke English,” Rosemary said in a fragile voice. “I had to hold her in my arms all night while she slowly died.

“It was five years before I could stay in a room with a child that age, 10 years before I could get through a day without crying.”

Shannon’s death hangs on his mother’s face. She couldn’t eat for days afterward. Ryan remembers her excusing herself to vomit. It was two months before she would venture into town for a haircut.

What keeps Rosemary functioning is the outpouring the family has received since the story made headlines and the seemingly mystical aura that accompanied Shannon’s death.

“There’s something strange here,” she said. “It’s not just a death.”

Unexplainable things:

* On March 2, Rosemary lost the diamond inset in her wedding band, a family heirloom.

The family scoured the house and had the floors mopped before receiving more than 150 guests for Shannon’s memorial, but the diamond never turned up.

Then on May 11, Mother’s Day, a day Rosemary was wishing she could blot off the calendar, Ryan was working at his potter’s wheel on the porch, making an urn for Shannon’s ashes. His brother Greg, standing nearby, noticed a shiny object near Greg’s foot.

It was the diamond.

* Christopher Smith, a pilot and the oldest sibling, was scheduled to drop a group of skydivers over Mokuleia Beach on April 1, Shannon’s birthday. He took off work because of his brother’s death. The single-engine plane he should have been flying that day experienced engine failure a minute after takeoff, clipped several trees and crashed into 15 feet of water.

Somehow, the pilot and four passengers survived. But would Chris Smith have been so lucky?

“He should have been there,” Rosemary said.

*

Some consider the mouth of the Wailua River near Kapaa one of the most sacred areas in the world, a point of cosmic energy.

Ancient Hawaiians erected seven temples, called heiaus, on the river’s banks. Scores of New Age religious denominations have set up stakes along the river.

Shannon’s death has reverberated in the cosmic community.

A Hindu guru, Deva, smiled as he left Shannon’s funeral Mass at St. Catherine’s Catholic church, explaining that Shannon had transcended to the highest spiritual plain because he had given his life to save another.

Deva said Shannon would be reborn into a family of a healer--Greg Smith, 34, is a chiropractor--and that the family would know it was Shannon because the boy would be afraid of water.

Anson Holley, a family friend, says the island is “charged with life energy.”

Holley persuaded the Smith family to postpone Shannon’s cremation until his spirit had left his physical being.

Holley, 55, sat alone next to Shannon’s body at the funeral home one night and said he communicated with Smith’s spirit, explaining that it was all right to leave the mortal world.

The Smith children were born Catholic but raised in an open religious household.

Friends say Shannon was particularly respectful of Hawaiian culture.

According to mythology, mischievous spirits still lurk in the vortex at Slippery Slide. Hawaiians looking to get a read on the spirits used to drop a leaf down the falls. If it disappeared into the whirlpool, they knew it was unsafe to slide.

Holley believes renegade Hawaiian spirits, still angry at whites for “stealing” their land, snatched Shannon in retribution.

Rosemary Smith, however, believes her son’s life was taken for a purpose.

“That’s all you have,” she said. “Because I don’t have Shannon.”

Greg Smith has no doubt.

“He really was a saint,” he said.

*

Shannon Smith wasn’t born a saint.

He was the most difficult of the five boys. At 14, he was hyperactive and obstinate.

He underwent a profound change, however, after Rosemary enrolled him at Winners’ Camp, a seven-day, nonprofit residential summer program for teenagers. After two summers as a student, Shannon spent the next three as a volunteer counselor.

Delorese Gregoire, the camp’s founding director, said Cody vonAppen wasn’t the first person Shannon saved.

She recalled a teenager named Frank--gawky, homely, skinny. When Frank came to camp, he wouldn’t talk to anyone.

“He had just shut down,” Gregoire said. “He was painfully shy, to the point it crippled him. Shannon made it his crusade to get him to talk.”

Shannon shadowed Frank, following him through daily activities with his cheery refrain, “You’ve got to love it.” After four days, Frank spoke. But only to Shannon. On the last day, Frank took the stage and sang with the rest of the campers to their parents.

Smith spent much of his spare time helping others. In high school, on his way home from his part-time job at a pizzeria, he regularly dropped off leftovers to a mentally disturbed Kapaa transient named Jeffrey, still encamped on a lawn chair at the corner of Hawaii Highway 56 and Kuamoo Road.

Shannon’s journal revealed him to be optimistic and introspective.

“Depression to me is something that is pointless,” Shannon wrote Feb. 23, 1994.

On March 4 of the same year, he penned, “I can’t say I have ever had a full bad day.”

Smith wrote passages that now seem eerie and foretelling, such as the poem about water, which he described as “extremely crazy and unpredictable.” The most treacherous waters would be “right before a waterfall or right after a waterfall.”

Another entry offers a glimpse as to why he might have saved Cody:

“We can’t learn anything in life if we only deal with things that are familiar with us. We have to step out of our comfort zone and do things we’ve never done before or do things we thought we’d never do.”

Shannon’s 10,000-watt personality clearly zapped Fred vonAppen. It is not every day that Division I football coaches strike up friendships with walk-on kickers.

“He had a special fondness for Shannon,” Thea vonAppen said of her husband.

Fred was taken by Shannon’s boundless enthusiasm, not to mention how far he had come as a kicker. Smith was an all-star soccer player on Kauai when his mother persuaded him to try out for football his senior year at Kapaa High.

He was strong-legged but knew nothing about kicking an oblong ball. On his first field-goal attempt, against Kauai High, the holder bobbled the snap and Shannon scooped up the ball, a la Miami’s Garo Yepremian in Super Bowl VII, before 10 players ambushed him.

Smith was not deterred. He practiced daily, attended kicking camps and ended up earning all-league honors at Kapaa. After spending a season at Oregon Southern, he returned home, determined to become the kicker at Hawaii.

VonAppen said Smith never pushed for a scholarship but often dropped by the office to invite the coach and his family to Kauai.

Hip-deep in efforts to turn around a team that finished 2-10 last season, vonAppen found a break in his schedule Easter weekend and took Shannon up on his offer.

Of course, vonAppen wishes he hadn’t.

He still flashes to March 29 during staff meetings, remembering how he stared into that water hole and prayed Shannon would pop his head out of the water, recalling the awful wrench he felt when divers fished Shannon’s limp body out.

“There’s nothing like watching someone who was alive one hour ago with their features distended,” he said. “I continue to revisit it. You don’t want to, but you do.”

*

Ryan and Greg Smith recently led a reporter, photographer and Max, the family dog, through an opening in the fence toward Waipahee, a 30-minute, breathtaking hike on a muddy trail that narrows to hip-wide in spots. It is best negotiated in bare feet.

Waipahee’s deceptive beauty revealed itself and, as was suggested, it seemed ridiculous that anyone could die there.

The water in Slippery Slide was a trickle, compared to the day Shannon went down it with Cody. Ryan began digging a hole for the ginger and gardenias he had brought to plant in Shannon’s memory.

Greg stared into the hole where his brother disappeared, slowly maneuvered down the slope, removed his shirt, and took a dip in a place farther downstream.

It wasn’t long before three young boys arrived, eager to experience the thrill ride at Slippery Slide.

As the first boy slithered over the mossy rocks, Max rushed to the edge of the cliff, barking frantically.

Greg and Ryan remarked later how weird it was. Max was Shannon’s dog.

“These kids are completely oblivious,” Greg said.

Slippery Slide appeared perfectly safe 10 Saturdays after it had swallowed Shannon.

“If it was any higher, I wouldn’t let them go down,” Greg said of the water flow.

Greg has vowed to put a life preserver and a rope at Slippery Slide, so that no more families will have to make urns. The Smith family has no plans to sue the company that owns the land, but wonders whether it would be too much for the company to replace the warning signs that have been shot to pieces by hunters.

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.

Greg Smith sat perched on a rock, gazing into his dark chapter.

Out of earshot of the brothers, one of the kids was asked if he realized 10 people had died at Slippery Slide, the last one being the brother of the two men standing before them.

The boy’s smile disappeared. He said it was his first trip.

“Kind of takes the fun out of it,” he said.

*

Two scholarships have been set up in honor of Shannon Smith:

University of Hawaii Shannon Smith Football Scholarship: 1337 Lower Campus Rd., Honolulu, Hawaii 96822-2370, (808) 956-6508.

Winners’ Camp Foundation: Shannon Smith Memorial Scholarship: 1292 Maleko St., Kailua, Hawaii 96734, (808) 263-0177.