For most of the day he stays in his hollowed-out tree, struggling to retain his heat. This day is cold and clear, and he needs to conserve his energy. He spends his brief outside moments tightening and insulating his tree. He cuts nearby boughs and lays them against the side of his log. He lines the inside with as much greenery as he can fit into the narrow enclosure. He looks for cracks and holes and plugs them.
Later, in the afternoon, he remembers his last small package of crackers. Without anything to eat all day he has grown progressively more hungry. He has only a little water left in the one bottle. His other bottle has been lost under the snow, but in any case, it was already empty. He decides he has to eat something. He figures the crackers might assuage his pangs better than the tuna. Jason knows he has to keep some in reserve. If he is not found in the next hour, he will be here another day. He only has the pair of crackers and the canned fish.
Finally, he unwraps the crackers and nibbles them down meditatively, drinking the rest of his water. Tomorrow, he knows—if he is still here—he will have to eat snow for water, or fill his water bottle and somehow try to melt it. By bringing it into his home, he thinks. But he has little choice.
Before dusk he takes one last look at his tree and his efforts to tighten and insulate it. He cuts more boughs, but in the oncoming cold it is only minutes before he starts to shiver. The shaking drives him back inside.
With less than an hour of search light left Milkovich radios down his worry. Since their freshest clue is the location of Jason’s car—a clue four days old—Milkovich knows Jason could be anywhere. A healthy hiker can cover a lot of ground. And from what they have heard, Jason is young, reasonably fit, and there are more than enough trails in those woods to choose from—and to go astray.
He tells dispatch to call search and rescue. What they cannot do from the air, they may be able to accomplish on foot. They are going to get searchers into those woods. Milkovich knows that on a search like this one it would be best to get as many feet as possible. They are all volunteer, and at any one time he can only expect a partial response to his call. But tomorrow is Saturday, he thinks. The weekend could be in his favor.
“Better call ’em all out,” Milkovich finally advises Lake County Dispatch. “Maybe the ground pounders can turn up something.”
Pat Loe and the tired spotter angle their wings westward and in the day’s last light return to Shagawa base. Lake County dispatch signs off and starts the page.
When the directive comes in over Jim Williams’s pager, he is winding down his Friday labors. By 3:00 PM his latest remodeling effort is coming to a close—at least for the weekend. When his radio pager beeps, he recognizes the voice of the Lake County sheriff’s dispatcher.
“Calling Two Harbors Search and Rescue,” she says. Her voice crackles over the small device. “Please report to the garage for a woods search.” She repeats the directive and then signs off.
Since its inception over three decades ago, Lake County’s volunteer search and rescue has grown progressively more sophisticated. In the late 1950s and 1960s it was little more than a group of concerned citizens. Today the fifty-plus volunteers are divided into three squads: Two Harbors, Silver Bay, and Finland. Each squad has trained individuals who can stand in as incident commanders, the leaders responsible for guiding and directing searches. And now the volunteer groups have plenty of the right equipment: all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), personal watercraft, and boats; gear for water searches, wood searches, climbing rescue; radio equipment; even their own command vehicles. The Finland squad’s vehicle is a used ambulance and trailer, gutted and refurbished with communications gear, a table, and a sleeping berth. Two Harbors has an emergency van specifically manufactured for search and rescue. The equipment is a far cry from what the volunteers scraped together just two decades earlier.
Among the group of altruistic citizens there has been talk of more training. Most of them have attended CPR and related courses. And most of them, either by practice or on the job of an actual search, have acquired reasonable familiarity with handheld radios, diving equipment, climbing ropes, carabiners, helmets, woods search packs, and assorted other equipment.
But Jim Williams, the head of the Two Harbors unit and the first commander to answer the sheriff’s page, knows there is little substitute for practical experience, particularly in the woods. He and his sons Darren and Ryan (also volunteers on the team) run a construction company on the edge of town. Jim and his boys mostly remodel, though he also owns the Minnesota distributorship for pre-manufactured log homes from a Canadian outfitter.
As he winds through town, he wonders who is lost in the woods this time. It doesn’t take long to reach the Two Harbors Search and Rescue garage, where the group’s equipment and emergency van are kept. Williams is on the phone getting more information when his son Darren walks through the door. Jim smiles and nods. His sons love the woods as much as he does. When calls like this come in, it is difficult to keep them out of the fray.
The dispatcher doesn’t give him much additional information. Jason Rasmussen is lost on the Pow Wow Trail. Jim doesn’t recognize the name, so he suspects an out-of-towner. Almost all their search and rescue involves people unfamiliar with the woods, usually from the Cities. Every year hikers come up, claiming they are knowledgeable and prepared. And then they go missing. Fortunately, Jim Williams knows these woods as well as people from the Cities know their streets.
The dispatcher tells him to take the van and head to the trailhead parking lot, where Undersheriff Steve Van Kekerix will meet them. Sheriff Steve Peterson is out of town and won’t be back for at least another week. Van Kekerix has all the information about Jason, the search, and what has already been done.
Jim Williams signs off, and he and Darren get into the van, starting the seventy-mile drive north. They are joined by Jim’s other son, Ryan, and six others from the Two Harbors squad, all in their own vehicles. Jim knows the Silver Bay and Finland squads will also be answering the page. By the time they hit the north end of town, it is 5:00 PM.
Williams knows that area around the Pow Wow and the old Forest Center site well. The summer of his seventeenth year, in 1963, he cooked and made coffee for the crews of Tomahawk Lumber, which operated the town of Forest Center. He drove plenty of lumber trucks on the back roads out of the small lumbering community. He remembers the town, its chapel, small café, grocery store, lumber mill, and pulp operations. It was the site of an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp before the town started. For twenty-five years, Forest Center was the logging train’s last stop. There was a school, too, with classes through the sixth grade. Beyond that, kids had to be farmed out to relatives down in Two Harbors or boarded in local homes. The distance from Two Harbors to Forest Center was too far, and the roads too rough, for daily trips.
Forest Center supported at least seventy families. At the time, the log harvesting practice was to set up remote camps from a base, work the area for a year or more, and then move on, setting up another camp somewhere else. The men headed out on the trails to remote logging camps at places like Calamity Lake, or Crystal Bay—now well inside the Boundary Waters borders. The theory was that, in the years it took loggers to circumnavigate a logging center, the trees replacing the ones they’d cut down would be ready for harvesting. The reality, of course, was slightly different. In the end, Tomahawk Lumber ran out of trees and time.
Williams graduated from Two Harbors High School and made his first professional purchase: a chain saw. He knew the area and was ready to log. If Tomahawk hadn’t been on the verge of bankruptcy, the company would have hired him. But they folded in 1965. He found plenty of other logging work, and for the next couple of summers his young chain saw hummed.
Then the Wilderness Act was passed, and Forest Center and everything around it closed up and moved away. But if you wanted to build a complex maze in the woods, with sucker trails and misplaced route
s, you would be hard pressed to improve on the region.
Williams has crisscrossed the bogs, swamps, and woods his entire life. He has mastered compass and map. He has perfected a way of moving through woods, whether along trails or in rougher terrain, in strides that are almost precisely three feet long. There are 1,760 yards in a mile. With a compass and his map-reading skills, it’s likely that Jim Williams could pinpoint an area in the middle of dense woods with as much accuracy as a handheld GPS.
When asked about getting lost in the woods Williams is matter-of-fact and self-effacing. “I’ve never been lost, but I’ve been confused many times,” he explains. “I was a timber cruiser.” In those days, the only maps were aerial photos. “You had to be accurate with what you were doing. I trained myself to take three-foot steps. And I was fairly accurate with where I’d be. But you have to pay attention to the wind, sun, terrain, the trees and streams. If you’re observing those things—other things—there is really no reason for someone to get lost.”
Williams knows many hikers enter the woods unprepared, whether physically or psychologically. When people are lost, he’s used to hearing families say that they’re experienced hikers. “That may be,” he says, “but they’re not experienced woodsmen.”
Most of the people they search for are like Jason—urban people. The city, Williams says, is a place where “I’m just as far out of my element as hikers are when they get up here.”
Jim, Darren, and Ryan Williams, along with the other Two Harbors searchers, reach the trailhead parking lot well after dusk. There are a handful of others assembled from Finland and Silver Bay. They have already done some preliminary searches along the nearby trails. They have signaled with heavy sirens and flashing lights, but there is no response. The call has gone out for dinner, for fifteen volunteer searchers must be fed. Some are still in the nearby woods. Others are milling around, waiting for their first crack at pizza.
When the searchers have assembled, Steve Van Kekerix is joined by Rebecca Francis, the U.S. Forestry Service law enforcement officer. They tell the group what they know. Steve and Rebecca explain where Jason went in, how long he has been gone, when he was supposed to return, and where he was going. Van Kekerix has already spoken with the parents. In fact, Steve is heading over to Ely from here. The parents have come up from the Cities and are staying in an Ely hotel, ready to help out with more information, or by entering the woods themselves, if need be. Everyone knows that’s a bad idea. The best thing the parents can do is let the pros handle the search and rescue.
Steve Van Kekerix is already mulling the delicate diplomacy he’ll use in his conversation with the Rasmussens. He has plenty to share about what has already been done, and the number of search-and-rescue folks who have answered their page. He is hoping the kid’s parents can tell him more about the maps he is carrying, his equipment, and his back- woods savvy.
It sounds like Jason Rasmussen is experienced, fit, and more than equal to surviving in the woods. He appears to have the right equipment and plenty of food. And he’s a med student. If he has broken a leg or is wounded, he should be able to keep himself alive. But they are all troubled by the failure of the day’s flyover efforts. Steve tells them the Forest Service plane has covered every inch of that trail and much of the area inside and out of it—but they didn’t see a thing. Not a tent. Not a hiker. Not even tracks. Deputy Milkovich will be heading up tomorrow to spend another day in the air, but they need some ground pounders in those woods—to see if they can find something, anything.
It’s a puzzle. All of them—seasoned woods people and those familiar with the area—know anything could have happened to Jason. He might have fallen into a bog, slipped and dropped into a ravine, broken a leg, sunk to the bottom of a lake. They hope their imagined calamities are just that—imagined.
Jim and Darren will spend the night in the van, just in case Jason comes out. But it is cold tonight, Williams knows. In this first good snowfall of the season most critters will be hunkering down. Jason would, too, he suspects.
Van Kekerix, Rebecca Francis, and the other searchers leave. Everyone promises to return at first light. Over cold pizza Jim and Darren Williams plan Saturday morning’s search. Jim peers out at the places he knows they will search first. These first, obvious places are referred to as hasty searches. Seasoned rescuers know hasty searches have the highest likelihood of getting results. In the morning, they will be ready.
16
The OPP Emergency Rescue Team
Quetico Provincial Park, Friday, August 7, 1998
At 3:00 AM on August 7, Jeff Moline, a constable with the Dryden Detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police, is awakened out of a deep sleep. The goddamn phone is ringing and it sounds like an alarm going off in his head. His hand reaches to stop it. He brings the receiver to his ear at about the same time he musters his single-word response.
“Yeah.”
“Jeff Moline?” the voice asks.
Moline barely manages an affirmative.
“Out of bed, Moline,” someone on the other end of the line directs him. “We’ve got a Scout lost in the Quetico.”
Moline recognizes the dispatcher’s voice, but can’t come up with a moniker. He is still groggy, not entirely certain he’s awake.
“Get your crew and report down to Atikokan lickety-split,” the voice commands. “We’ll see you there in four hours,” he says.
It is the Dryden on-duty communications specialist. Moline still cannot remember his name—but he manages a dull “okay,” then hangs up.
The OPP has two Emergency Rescue Teams, each comprised of sixteen men. Moline and Kevin Hunter, out of the OPP’s Thunder Bay Detachment, are the two search coordinators for Moline’s team. Jeff doesn’t know if this search will require a second team—unlikely—but he knows there will be at least sixteen searchers heading into the woods.
Jeff’s team would be assembled from the other detachments: Atikokan, Fort Francis, Kenora, Dryden, Red Lake. In all, there are over a dozen detachments from which the members could converge. Given their location across the massive Ontario province, they will arrive in Atikokan at different times.
Atikokan is the central point for this operation because it is perched like a tiny bug atop the million-plus-acre Quetico Provincial Park. It takes a little over a minute to drive through the town. Apart from the hospital, a few bars, a half-dozen stores, and some lumber mills, the ranger HQ and the OPP station are just about all there is to the place.
Moline knows everyone on the ERT will follow the same process: review the case, learn about Moline and Hunter’s plan (after they create one), and head into the wilderness to help set up a base camp and start searching. Moline, like everyone else in the ERT, knows that every minute matters.
By the time Moline wipes the sleep out of his eyes, he is already on the phone to Scott Moore, the other ERT member from the Dryden Detachment. “Look for me within half an hour,” he tells Moore.
In the middle of the Quetico night, Dan Stephens stirs. This night his coiled bark and pine bough bed is rough and scratchy, but relatively mosquito free. He doesn’t actually sleep. He enters a kind of half-consciousness in which his tired body rests. But it is not sleep. He feels a large ant or spider move across his legs. He feels a point on his abraded skin where something bites him. He flinches under the microscopic jaws. He wriggles to be free of it. He closes his mind, trying to reach toward darkness, to find rest, but it is a long time coming.
He feels more of these critters crawling on him. He wonders if he has lain down on some kind of ant hill. He made sure his bedding was bug free before coiling it around him. But he guesses they are attracted to his legs.
He has been careful about drinking, and now he is going to pay for his compulsive hydration. He has to peel out of the bark coils and throw off the boughs. He tries to do it carefully, because he knows in just minu
tes he will have to crawl back inside.
He pees and looks at the stars. They are brilliant in the cool August night. He focuses on the North Star, high in the sky but still pointing north. He finds another stick and lays it down, pointing toward the bright sphere. In the morning, he reasons, he will use it to double-check his coordinates. He will have three pointers. One marking east-west, tracking the setting sun. One laid perpendicular, pointing south. And this one pointing north. They should all line up. If they don’t, he knows he will have to reconnoiter. But he feels better, now that he has a plan. He is confident his markers will align.
He is about as comfortable as you could expect, recovering from a concussion, lying on the ground in tree bark with black spruce boughs for bedding, surviving a cold northern night in a light shirt and shorts, not having eaten anything in more than a day. His stomach gnaws at the thought of food. He tries to recall everything he knows about wild food. He believes he remembers reading about the inner bark—cambium layer?—of northern white pine. It can be harvested and chewed. He also recalls arrowroot and knows he has crossed through plenty. He resolves to try both in the morning. Then he crawls back into his birch-bark coils and gathers the pine boughs and broadleaf around him.
Later in the night he feels the ants crawling. One crawls near his arm. He reaches down, picks it up. But instead of smashing it with his hand or brushing it away he feels the large black shape wriggling, recognizes the outline of a large carpenter ant. And then he pops it into his mouth. He bites and swallows and in darkness feels a satisfying twinge of vengeance at having turned the tables on at least one of the gnawing beasts.
Lost in the Wild Page 16
