Tink Bwain, Tink!

Six-year-old Linnea helping with my snowshoe hare research

When my daughter Linnea was about two and rambling fast through a story of friends and places and activities, she would sometimes stop, scrunch her face with thought, gently tap her temple with her knuckles, flash her clever smile, and firmly implore her memory to recall the factual detail: “Tink Bwain, Tink!”. As a scientist and university prof, this Linneaism would make my heart soar as much as it cracked me up. She was then, and always, a creative and earnest thinker. Straight up smart, yes, but also with uncanny intuition and wisdom. Get the facts, use your brain.

I am a proud father whose greatest life achievements are my two children, Nick and Linnea. I am also a scientist with a lifelong commitment to evidence and methodological inference. This skillset served me well during the investigations, cover-ups and legal battles that marked the first 1000 days following Linnea’s untimely death at age 18. My forthcoming book explores the arc of Linnea’s life and weaves together laughter, tears, devastation and resurrection, supported of course by hard cold facts and evidence.

Linnea’s story will be shared with the world for the first time on February 14 at the Big Sky Film Festival. Damon Ristau’s documentary How to Kill a Mermaid: The Linnea Mills Story, skillfully shares the beauty of Linnea’s life and the horrific truths of her unnecessary death. While Damon’s movie and my forthcoming book are separate endeavors, each shares a commitment to the facts surrounding her life and devastating death, inviting the viewer to “Tink Bwain, Tink”.

At midnight on November 1, 2020, a sheriff came to our house to tell us that our daughter had died in the scuba training class that she had carefully and enthusiastically prepared for. With few details about the circumstances of her death, I was thrown into an abyss devoid of rational reasons for what in the hell had happened. But it didn’t take long for me to sense that Linnea’s death was not an accident, and that the reason the facts were not clear was because key information was already being withheld by the very people Linnea trusted to teach her dive class. I knew then that I could not let inconsolable grief alone consume me. I had to re-engage my analytical brain to find the facts and follow them to the truth of what had happened. I had to tap my temple and command myself: “Tink Bwain, Tink!”

Here is how I describe in my book manuscript that moment of realization:

 When I called the Flathead County Coroner on this morning of November 2 he told me Linnea’s body would be brought down to the Missoula mortuary of our choice by the next morning. That’s strange, I thought, do people typically have in mind a preferred mortuary of choice for their 18-year-old daughter?

I asked if I could go up there and ride with her back to Missoula. He said no.

When I asked what he knew about what happened, he didn’t have much to add to the jumbled vagaries we’d got from the sheriff. He could only say, haltingly and uncertainly, that he was told that Linnea had swum away from the group toward the bottom. Really? I replied, Who Said That? And what else did they say?

Because over all the haze and strange rituals of the moment, I was already feeling the pounding imperative to figure out what the hell had happened. The implication that during a scuba training class Linnea somehow just swam away from the group towards the bottom and thereby drowned triggered my bullshit alarm across the board. First, Linnea was totally comfortable in and around water, an expert swimmer and lifeguard who understood rescue procedures. Second, Linnea was not a panicker; in big ocean waves and deep snow and cold winds and hostile crowds, she possessed a calmness even in stressful situations. Third, Linnea was a pure people person, a social creature, and even if she were in a tight spot every bone in her body would propel her towards other people, not away.  Finally, for all her independence and creativity, she was a committed student who appreciated and respected expertise of teachers; under duress she would have done everything she could to reach out to the professional instructor. Given the lack of any basis or evidence for this narrative, I smelled rot.

This is my story of the joyous arc of Linnea’s life right up to the collision with this unfathomable moment of her shocking death. Linnea’s path emerged from all that she was, shaped in part by the blending of my career and family life that included plunging Linnea and Nick into remote field research sites and tales of nature and cultures around the world. I will tell how Linnea’s adventurous spirit fueled her passion for scuba diving, where she died trying to gain the skills to do so safely and responsibly. And because the general public knows little of the unregulated callous indifference of scuba training -- a reality applicable more broadly across the profit-seeking outdoor industry – that too becomes part of this story. Finally, I will tell how somehow, after 1,000 days of devastating traumatic grief while battling for justice through the legal system, resilience prevailed and hope bubbled up again.

Telling this true story is what Linnea would have wanted. Tink Bwain, Tink.