Alta Journal is pleased to present the first installment of a six-part series by writer Benjamin Cassidy. Each week, we’ll publish online the next portion of “The Ripples of Mutiny Bay.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading, and sign up here to be notified by email when each new installment is available.
The seaplane is an icon of the Pacific Northwest. Small aircraft launch and land regularly on the placid waters that lap against its major cities and destination isles, serving as quaint reminders of both the region’s rich aviation history and its majestic, fragmented geography. But on Labor Day weekend in 2022, in the most tranquil of settings, one such aircraft ferried its passengers to the most tragic of ends. Shortly after takeoff from idyllic San Juan Island, a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter bound for the Seattle area nose-dived into Puget Sound, killing all 10 people and an unborn baby on board.
The flight carried a remarkably eclectic group of passengers, among them a seasoned civil rights activist, a popular winemaker, and a young lawyer. Their deaths sent shock waves up and down the entire West Coast, from Southern California to the northwest corner of Washington State, and as far as Minnesota. Who were these people, and what can we learn from their lives—and their deaths?
Ten thousand feet above the semiarid expanse of eastern Washington, over patches of sagebrush steppe and irrigators perched mantis-like over the land, Sandy Williams squinted out the gaping side of a Cessna and prepared to face one of her greatest fears.
For many years, Williams, a Black woman, had toiled as an activist in Spokane, advocating for the city’s Black community through a monthly newspaper she founded and a cultural resource organization called the Carl Maxey Center. In the Black Lens and conversations, she disseminated information about everything from COVID-19 vaccines to community barbecues to hairdressers. Williams served as a grand marshal in the city’s Pride parade in 2019 and ran multiple nonprofits. In a predominantly white hub of the Inland Northwest, Williams ascended, gradually and then suddenly, from the grass roots to the center of the civic firmament.
But during the early days of the pandemic, Williams’s free-spirited partner, Pat Hicks, reminded her that she needed to poke her head up every once in a while and live a little. Advocacy was important, but so was her life. So Williams created a bucket list. She’d take up horseback riding, for starters. Then, to celebrate her 60th birthday in September 2021, she’d jump out of an airplane.
Williams’s friends and family couldn’t believe she wanted to skydive. They knew she was afraid of heights. Skeptical, a small group of them accompanied her on a 55-mile drive southwest to Ritzville, where a hangar sat just off I-90. Only Williams’s daughter, Renika, 33 at the time, joined her in the Cessna at Skydive West Plains.
Inside the cabin, Renika kept exchanging glances with her mother as they rose higher over the wheat fields of eastern Washington. Are we really going to do this? Renika wondered. But as Williams slid toward the open door with her tandem instructor, her shirt emblazoned with the Black Lens logo, she didn’t show any signs of backing out.
“I love you,” she told Renika just before she jumped.
Her daughter watched, terrified, as her mother began her free fall. For about 45 seconds, Williams plummeted with her guide toward the ground below.
But, just as planned, the parachute opened. For five minutes, Williams drifted downward, the sky washing over her, a gravity-defying smile on her lips. Renika followed, jumping next.
When she finally touched the grass, Williams was beaming. She greeted her waiting loved ones and spoke with her brother, Rick, over FaceTime. She hugged Renika. Afterward, her daughter recalls reveling in the seemingly limitless possibilities of what they could accomplish together after conquering their fear.
Williams was reinventing herself, she wrote later in the Black Lens in a column titled, “I’m Out. I’m Proud. And I’m Sixty. Now What?—Sky Diving.”
“At sixty, a woman, particularly a Black woman, comes into her own,” she wrote, “after a lifetime of taking care of the needs of others, her attention begins to turn inwards, towards herself and towards her own needs. Finally. So, look out.”
This realization was classic Williams—pointed and somehow still self-effacing with a hint of dry wit. But she didn’t arrive at this self-awareness alone.
Just before the pandemic, she had rekindled an on-again, off-again romance with Hicks, whom she’d met after moving to Los Angeles decades earlier to attend film school at the University of Southern California. Unlike Williams, Hicks hadn’t needed a nudge to form her own bucket list; she was ready to unwind after a long career in special education and a difficult upbringing. Shortly after retiring, Hicks bought a mobile home and resolved to travel the country, checking off visits to friends, spiritual centers, and national parks. One of her first stops would be to see Williams in Spokane.
The two had lived together for years in California, raising Hicks’s adopted son, Dyondre, and Renika while enduring some unspoken resistance to their same-sex relationship. The women each coupled defiance with determination. Hicks worked her way through college, becoming the first in her family to receive a degree. Williams once joked she had a feminist fist raised from the time she was in the womb; by junior high, she was decrying her school for forcing girls to take home economics instead of shop class.
Initially, pandemic shutdowns kept Hicks parked in Spokane. Over time, though, it was clear her renewed relationship with Williams was the reason why Hicks had delayed the rest of her travel plans, why locals continued to see her riding an e-bike around town, drumming at Riverfront Park, and chatting away in her walking group. She carried significant weight from her past; after her parents divorced during her youth, she and her siblings were uprooted from a comfortable middle-class life in the San Fernando Valley to a housing project in downtown Los Angeles. But Hicks had a lightness about her; to remember her name, she was known to tell new acquaintances to think of “pat on the back.” Though Spokane may not have been her intended long-term retirement destination, she embraced it wholeheartedly as a quiet space for her own reinvention—as a soft landing spot after some hard years.
In her new home, Hicks’s radiant smile drew people in, especially Williams. The normally stoic community leader was giddy around her partner. She’d pull friends over to the side just to rave about Hicks.
For all her advocacy, Williams could be a wallflower at dinners and events; she didn’t trust many people, and she didn’t like to be the center of attention. At parties, Hicks had to drag Williams onto the dance floor.
Yet Hicks was making Williams realize that life could be a little more exciting, even in dusty Spokane. Setting aside her Hollywood dreams, she had returned to the city in 2006 after Renika started attending fashion school in New York. Williams initially planned to lie low, living off her savings at her parents’ home. But she quickly felt the urge to work in the community—first in suicide prevention for teens, later as an executive director at Spokane’s LGBTQ youth center, and, eventually, as the first coordinator of Eastern Washington University’s Pride Center.
While her work there prominently represented one aspect of her identity, Williams also sought to advocate for another more loudly. Conversations with her father before his death in early 2015 spurred Williams to start the city’s first Black newspaper in almost 15 years. She wanted the Black Lens to publish solely uplifting stories since, too often, she found, media outlets only focused on the Black community in crime articles and other negative stories.
But when Williams felt the local paper of record, the Spokesman-Review, didn’t sufficiently scrutinize a Department of Justice report about excessive police force, she decided that she needed to devote some of her newspaper to weightier matters, too. The headline on the front page of the first edition began matter-of-factly—“Justice Department Report Says: Use of Force by Spokane Police ‘Not Racially Biased’”—before emphasizing a blatant disproportionality that had been overlooked: “But Blacks 2% of Spokane Population; 10% Use of Force Incidents.”
It was a scramble to get that first edition, and all subsequent issues, out into the world. Operating out of her mother’s home, Williams had taught herself how to use Adobe InDesign, wrote or edited all 12 pages, and personally delivered the paper to churches, restaurants, and other community hubs. She called on friends and family to help with bundling the paper at her mother’s dining room table and to contribute articles.
In time, and especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the Black Lens gained more visibility. The Spokesman-Review included it as an insert during the ensuing protests and thereafter, and Williams received invitations to speak on panels in the area. As the Black Lives Matter movement rose in prominence, conservative Spokane County became more concerned with racial justice. This was Williams’s moment: She had a knack for hearing opponents out without compromising her own strong opinions, and, with enough support, she was on the cusp of creating another improbable arm for her advocacy.
Two blocks from I-90, Williams and a handful of friends were in the process of transforming a former automotive shop in East Central Spokane into a gathering space and resource center for the Black community. When her friends and mother first saw the dilapidated 1920s building, they thought Williams had lost her mind. But they couldn’t deny the void such a space could fill: Once home to upward mobility and the city’s largest concentration of Black residents, East Central had, like many other urban American neighborhoods bisected by highways, experienced upheaval and displacement during the construction of I-90 in the middle of the 20th century. It irked Williams that these problems persisted as she came and left the area over the years. And she knew that, while the Black Lens had drawn awareness to these issues, it couldn’t solve them.
Raising funds from Williams’s network of allies new and old, the Carl Maxey Center fêted the completion of its first remodeling stage with an open house and press conference in February 2022. Williams, who was quick to shift the attention away from herself, asked her daughter to hold her wedding there that day. Renika exchanged vows with her spouse in a modest room surrounded by her childhood community.
It still had a lot of space to grow, but the center had clearly gained a foothold in the community. Named for a civil rights attorney and boxer, it would ultimately offer business consulting, rental assistance, and free legal aid, among other services.
Personally and professionally, Williams was flying high. She’d recently helped a friend and early Maxey Center board member, Betsy Wilkerson, become the second Black woman ever elected to Spokane City Council. Coupled with some legislative contacts in the state capitol, Williams felt like she’d built a coalition that could offer more than platitudes—it would create tangible change.
And after decades of fits and starts, she’d hit her stride with Hicks, whose vision for the future had melded into her own. In the short term, that meant Williams was going to take a break. Starting in January 2022, the Black Lens went on a one-year hiatus. Though she continued to lead the Maxey Center, Williams told close confidants she planned to step aside as executive director later that year.
That summer, she took time off, beginning with a little mother-daughter bonding. In July, Williams and her daughter left for Alaska, where they once again stepped into an aircraft—this time a helicopter—as part of an itinerary that also included dogsledding down a glacier.
Another trip called for another flight. Ever since seeing a seaplane in a movie, Williams had wanted to ride in one. The light passenger crafts had long been a popular icon of the coastal Pacific Northwest, where Boeing took off and calm waters between major cities serve as gentle launch and landing pads. They also serve a more practical purpose, as a quicker mode of transit than the ferries that shuttle to and from some of Washington’s scenic isles.
In the summer of 2022, Hicks and Williams planned to celebrate their birthdays and the latest incarnation of their love with a trip to a tranquil archipelago on the other side of the state. They both gushed about it to friends and family members. Rick traveled from California to stay with his mother, Wilhelmenia, who needed constant care. Her brother was happy to help, though he advised Williams against taking a small plane.
At the start of Labor Day weekend, Williams and Hicks headed west. They flew from Spokane to Seattle, where they then journeyed to the San Juan Islands by ferry first. Only on the way back toward the Seattle area, after spending days enchanted by the evergreen coastline that meets deep blue waters, would Williams finally get to ride a seaplane like she’d seen onscreen.
As she always did before flights, Williams checked in with her family before boarding, calling her brother in Spokane. Rick waved Wilhelmenia over to hear her daughter rhapsodize about her time with Hicks and her impending floatplane ride. She couldn’t wait to land on water, she told them.
It would be the last time they ever spoke.
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “The Ripples of Mutiny Bay” by Benjamin Cassidy, and sign up for email notifications when each new installment is available.
Benjamin Cassidy is a journalist and fiction writer. Formerly the features editor of Seattle Met, he has written for GQ, National Geographic, and Scientific American, among other publications, and has received awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association and Society of Professional Journalists. After spending several years in the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in New England.
