'Take it easy with Mom'

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Joanne Olson was snuggled deep in her bed in the wee hours of Thursday when the sound of a telephone interrupted the silence in her home in Port McNeill on Vancouver Island.
It was Benn, her 21-year-old son. He and his Albany River Rats teammates had just been in a bus accident and he wanted his mother to know that he was OK.
“Benn really downplayed it,” Joanne said. “But he knows me . . . take it easy with Mom.”
And with good reason . . . because it was less than two years ago when Benn’s older brother, Glenn, was involved in a plane crash near Port McNeill in which the pilot was killed.
So you can’t blame Joanne for flinching when the phone rings, especially in the middle of the night.
But it wasn’t until long after chatting with Benn that Joanne went on the Internet and discovered what had happened.
“I read some stuff on the Internet and watched a couple of newsclips,” she said. “I read some of the boys’ accounts and I was like, ‘Oh, my gawd. . . . it could have been horrendous.’
“I think I talk to him every day right now . . . I’m likely driving him crazy.”
Hey, that’s a mother’s right, isn’t it?
Benn, who played in the WHL with the Kamloops Blazers and Seattle Thunderbirds, had just been recalled from the ECHL’s Florida Everblades by the River Rats, the AHL affiliate of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes. The NHL team had recalled forward Michael Ryan just before that, and Olson was in Ryan’s seat near the back of the bus when it slid off the Massachusetts Turnpike. Four players and one of the team’s broadcasters ended up in hospital. Defenceman Casey Borer of Minneapolis came out of it with a broken neck but is expected to make a complete recovery. All five have since been released from hospital.
The River Rats, who were returning home from a Wednesday night 3-2 shootout loss to the Lowell Devils, postponed Saturday and Sunday games. They will resume their schedule Wednesday night on the road against the Bridgeport Sound Tigers.
Glenn Olson, meanwhile, continues to work his way back from the plane crash that occurred July 14, 2007, just southwest of Port McNeill. The plane, a Cessna 172 carrying the pilot, Glenn and another man, was on its way to Merritt, B.C., and the Merritt Mountain Music Festival.
Although Olson didn’t suffer a broken leg, as originally was reported, Joanne said he continues to have problems with his right leg which ended up trapped under luggage and electronics gear when the plane went down.
“Glenn didn’t walk away but of the three he was truly the most fortunate,” Joanne said, adding that her son suffered “punctured lungs, broken ribs and a broken shoulder.”
Olson, now 24, had played 21 games in 2006-07 with the AHL’s Worcester Sharks. He spent part of one season (2003-04) with the WHL’s Kootenay Ice and later signed a free-agent deal with the NHL’s San Jose Sharks. He went on to play with the AHL’s Cleveland Barons and the ECHL’s Fresno Falcons and Johnstown Chiefs. But he hasn’t played since the crash.
“He now has been told he won’t play,” Joanne said, adding that everything has healed except his right leg. “It was compromised too long . . . there was a lack of blood flow in his right leg.”
Still, she said, if you didn’t know that he had been in an accident, you couldn’t tell by looking at him. But, she added, his right leg does bother him when he’s on it too long. He recently spent six weeks of hard physiotherapy “trying to see how far he can get it,” Joanne said. “It won’t come back 100 per cent . . . he knows that.”
And that’s really too bad because, as she said, he’s “quite outdoorsy.”
Which is like saying that President Obama is quite popular.
Glenn works as a fishing guide in the summer, and also works as a guide for bear hunters. In the fall he heads into the far north and guides moose and caribou hunters.
“He’s young and gets through it,” Joanne says, “but he still feels it. When he hikes, it gives him a lot of grief.”
There is joy in Joanne’s voice as she discusses her two boys. She is able to talk about them in the present tense and she knows it easily could have been worse.
Not every Mom has had one son survive a plane crash and another walk away from an ugly bus accident.