Hurt from Allagash tragedy still fresh In five years since 14 seasonal workers died, survivors remake their lives

SANTA LUCIA, Honduras – Lina Maldonado Cruz took shelter from the afternoon sun on the patio of the farmhouse her husband built with his own two hands.

The spare, deeply religious woman sees the house – perched high in the Central American country’s jagged green mountains – as a fitting tribute to Dionisio Funez, her husband of 35 years.

“He was a good man,” Cruz said earlier this year of Funez. “What my husband wanted was to improve my situation, and we were also thinking about our children and improving their situation … But now we just have to face life by ourselves.”

Lina Maldonado Cruz has years of experience in taking care of things herself – five years, to be exact. Her husband died the morning of Sept. 12, 2002, in a different green wilderness very far from home.

Dionisio Funez, 54, was the oldest of a group of men from Honduras and northern Guatemala who were legally working that summer planting and thinning pine trees at a remote work site deep in Maine’s North Woods. The seasonal workers, 15 altogether, were speeding on an unpaved woods road when their Dodge van skidded on John’s Bridge, a one-lane wooden pass without railings that spans a section of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, and plummeted into the water below.

Fourteen drowned. The lone survivor, a Guatemalan, escaped out the back window and swam to shore. He waited on the lonely road until he could flag down two logging trucks and get help from the drivers.

That morning marked the worst vehicle accident in the state’s history and inextricably seared Maine into the minds of the people of Honduras’ dry and impoverished southwest corner.

“It was an accident that took place around the world,” Cruz said, “and since it happened, there is no happiness for me.”

In the immediate aftermath, the bereaved and bewildered survivors tried to make sense of the future. Teams of news reporters ascended the bumpy road to their village to report on the tragedy. And amid the grief and worry, there were small rays of hope.

Money – including $90,000 in charitable donations from the Migrant Relief Fund, started by the victims’ friends in Caribou, and thousands of dollars in workers’ compensation payouts – began trickling into the community. The money meant that the men’s dreams to help their families achieve better lives did not die that day, too.

Five years later, tidy houses have replaced the dirt-floor shacks that once lined Santa Lucia’s dusty streets, and more children have the wherewithal to attend school. It doesn’t make up for the lack of men, the dearth of employment or the sadness still palpable when the survivors talk about the accident and the dark days afterward. But it is something.

“Now you can feel the difference,” Cruz said. “Ten and 15 years ago, people didn’t go to school. They weren’t financially able … Now they are becoming more professional.”

Cruz and her son talk in hushed voices about other aspects of the accident’s legacy. One mother takes “depression medicine every day,” they say. Other, younger widows have strayed from their evangelical church, and some of the families have argued over who gets the say in use of the compensation dollars. Some of the smallest children still wait for their fathers to come home.

Two of Dionisio Funez’s grandsons remember him well. Erwin Josue Funez, 8, and Elbert Obved Funez, 9, spent a lot of time with Funez when he was home in Santa Lucia, working on the farmhouse.

“They really liked to walk with their grandfather, with the cows,” Lina Maldonado Cruz said, smiling at the dark-eyed boys.

“He gave us clothes,” Elbert remembered.

“I would like to see my abuelito, grandfather,” said Erwin.

Many in the village had felt that Maine had forgotten about their men, about the accident. But Sonny Tracy of Caribou hasn’t forgotten. The grandfatherly man rented apartments to the accident victims, and he and his family were more like friends than landlords.

“It hurt me,” Tracy said earlier this year in his Caribou pawnshop and jewelry store. “It still does.”

Tracy had two photographs of the men together, which he wanted to send to their survivors.

“So they can see their men one more time,” he said.

When a reporter visiting Santa Lucia earlier this year handed Miriam Zulema Alvarado the photos that showed her 23-year-old son, Delkin Padilla-Alvarado, relaxing with his friends in Maine, she wasn’t sure she could bear to see him one more time.

“I don’t like to think about this day,” she said through sobs. “I have a big picture of Delkin, but I can’t look at it.”

But when Zulema Alvarado heard about the man 1,500 miles away who still hurts when he thinks of her dead boy, of all the dead boys, that he can’t put the accident and his sorrow neatly behind him, either, she relented and carefully took her copies of the photographs.

“We were thinking that they forgot,” Zulema Alvarado said. “Tell Sonny Tracy thank you.”