Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Looking at the dog in the club chair, she says, "Maggie's more the red, smaller kind. She's probably about seventy-five pounds. Yogi's the larger, blond, long-haired fellow. In the winter he's over ninety pounds. He's got the typical golden big butt."

  Looking at older pictures, she says, "About eight years ago I had a dog named Murphy. He was border collie/Australian shepherd mix, an incredible dog, and I thought, 'Here's a good way to work obedience with him and maybe meet some people. I was working at Hewlett-Packard, in an office situation, so I needed a balance."

  She says, "The more I did it, the more intrigued I was by the cases. It started out as this dog-focused obedience thing and evolved into something that I really had more of a passion for."

  In the photos of Honduras, Michelle and Yogi work with fellow volunteer Harry Oakes, Jr., and his dog, Valorie, a mix of border collie, schipperke, and kelpie. Oakes and Valorie helped search the ruins of the Federal Courthouse after the Oklahoma City bombing.

  "Valorie, when she smells a dead body-or what she's looking for-she'll start barking," says Michelle. "She's very vocal. Yogi, he'll wag and get very excited, but he barely says a word. If it's a deceased victim, he'll whine. His tail will go down and do the stress reaction."

  She says, "Valorie will get hysterical and start crying. And she'll dig, if it's mud with someone underneath. Or if it's water, she'll jump in the water."

  Looking at the photos of collapsed houses, she says, "When someone is either stressed or angry or anything, they let off epinephrine. And when violence or death happens, it's just a more intense release of those smells. Plus whatever gases and fluids belonged to the body when it died. You can imagine in the wild why that would be so important to a pack. To an animal that means, 'Something has been killed here. One of my pack members has been killed here. They get particularly upset over a human, because we're part of their pack."

  She says, "About ninety percent of the training to do search and rescue is the human recognizing what the dog's doing naturally. Being able to read Yogi when he's stressed.

  "Obedience sets the tone that you're in charge," she says. "Then you hide toys from them; I still do that. And they love it. They have a race to see who can find it first. The next thing you do is have someone hold the dog while you run away and hide. You just keep doing more and more complex situations. They're looking on a track. If they haven't seen where you're going, they can smell."

  Looking at a photo of a group of men, she says, "This is the Venezuelan fire brigade. We said we were the Pan-American rescue team."

  About another photo, she says, "This is the one area we called the 'car graveyard.»

  About a vast, sliding hillside of mud, she says, "This is the soccer field that collapsed."

  In another photo, inside a house filled with mud, she says, "Walking through this house that had been looted, there were handprints on the wall. All these mud prints where the looters had kept their balance."

  In a wide band along all the walls are countless perfect handprints in brown mud.

  In other photos are the rooms where Yogi found bodies buried under fallen walls, under mattresses.

  One photo shows a neighborhood of houses tumbling down a steep cliff of mud.

  "This is up on the hill where all these houses had collapsed," she says. "They had hundreds of stories why people wouldn't leave: they didn't want looters to get their stuff, a woman with kids said her husband had gone to a bar and told her to stay here. Just awful, tragic stories."

  Another photo shows Valorie sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, dwarfed by a thick roll of dark plastic bags.

  Michelle says, "That's Valorie with the body bags, exhausted."

  She talks about her first search, saying, "It was up in Kelso, and it was a fellow whose wife had disappeared. There was word that she was fooling around with all types of different people who were coming up to the house. So we drive up to this immaculately manicured farm. There's horses and a pasture with a bull in it. The dogs did a huge death alert in the barn. Their tail goes down and they pee. They swallow a lot. The natural part is the defecating, that and the peeing and the whining and the crying. It's making them nauseated, I think. Yogi pulls away. He doesn't want to go near it. Valorie goes toward it and she digs and barks more and more, and she gets frantic because she's trying to communicate something. 'It's right here!

  "These people's little boy, he was about four, said something to the grandmother about 'Daddy put mommy underwater, and they whisked him away and nobody was able to be alone with him after that."

  In another picture from Tegucigalpa, a long slab of concrete lies on its side in the middle of a riverbed.

  "That was a bridge," Michelle says.

  In all the pictures are scattered little packages of rancid lard, left everywhere by the water.

  "The most profound search that I'll still get choked up about was this autistic child," she says. "The little guy was four years old, and they'd locked him in, but he'd found a way to unlock the door while his mom was ironing upstairs. He'd take all his clothes off, too, as soon as he got out the door. So all these people had volunteered to go look. And that's not optimal, because every time one more person walks across the trail, they can track the scent somewhere else."

  In these older photographs, Michelle is working with Rusty, another golden retriever. The photos show a heavy woods around a slow, dark slough of stagnant water.

  "Within an hour of getting there, we got down to the slough. This is the primary spot because the little boy, he liked throwing a toy in repeatedly, and pulling it out. It was just a little bank above the slough with roots and trees around it."

  She says, "By then Rust was real distraught and really sad. That was the first place where the kid went in, so there was a certain kind of scent there that wasn't as strong as when we followed the real slight current in the slough down to where it was getting stronger and stronger. That's when we called the divers in. There was a culvert between two parts of the slough."

  Looking at the photos, she says, "What happened was the body had gotten wedged in this culvert, and it was under mud."

  Petting Yogi, she says, "This is quite a large water area, and I'm going around, getting death alerts all around this huge marsh area. And I'm marking everywhere we get the hits. All that water that had touched the body had the smell of the death on it. Sometimes you can triangulate and determine where the body is by where the alerts are coming from.

  "Putting a tag, and where the wind was coming from," she says. "What the temperature was. Who I was. What time it was. We put it all on a map. To figure out where the body had drifted to.

  "Air scenting… In a case where you don't know exactly where the person started, there's still the scent in the air. There's a scent cone that goes like this"-she waves hands in the air-"and you can get the dog to work a Z pattern. They might do it naturally. You want them to go toward the source of the scent."

  Still petting Yogi, Michelle blinks, her eyes bright with tears. She says, "I look up, and they're pulling him out of the culvert. That's the only victim I've ever seen, because most of the time, like in Honduras, they come in and dig the victims out after we've left. But I went into deep shock the moment I saw him, and I had this profound urge to just hold him, this little guy."

  She says, "We got up to the house and did different interviews and then went into the house to cheer up the family-because the dogs are supposed to cheer up the family-and it was like walking through this aura, this energy-like an environmental condition… like being in a fog.

  "We didn't process this like we should have," Michelle says. "I came back home and put Rusty with the other two dogs, to play, and I went off to work. I've always felt like that stuck with him too long because I didn't debrief him, and I don't think I knew how to process it. I don't think I understood what happened-as far as the deep shock-until I went to Honduras.

  "You're supposed to let them go find a live person-and I did do that. You make su
re, too, that you wash everything. Their jacket. My clothes. Everything that they have on. Wash everything in the car, everything that could've come in contact with the death scent. Just a little bit of that scent and they're depressed again."

  She says, "Going back home, the scent pretty much permeated the car, so it would've been good to clean that out as well."

  Rusty and Murphy, Michelle's border collie/shepherd mix-like all the victims they found-are dead now. Murphy was put down when he was fourteen and a half years old, after suffering with back problem for three years. Rusty was put down after his kidneys failed.

  Looking at photos of children, children hugging Yogi in picture after picture, Michelle talks about meeting a little girl in Tegucigalpa. Her legs running with staph infections, the girl was dipping water out of a puddle of sewage. Michelle put disinfecting tablets in the girl's water. A journalist rubbed antibiotic cream on the girl's legs.

  "We had to walk most places because there was the mud, and everyone who saw Yogi would smile," she says. "And if we stopped somewhere, they'd just swarm around to touch him and say, 'Dame lo! Dame lo! Give him to me! And he was just thrilled with it. He loved the attention. I know he understood how important the work was, and I'd tried to explain to him along the way, 'This is very important. You're doing good things for people.»

  In a picture of the collapsed soccer field, Michelle points out a crowd that stands at the far edge. "People would stand up here on the edge of the field and just watch us, and this one little boy said, 'Thank you, in English."

  She says, "Stuff like that would just destroy me. It was just too heartbreaking to have human contact like that."

  She smiles over one picture, saying, "We went to an orphanage to cheer up the dogs. A kid would run and hide, and then the dogs would find him."

  Over the next picture, she says, "This is an island. We drove two hours over washboard roads and hairpin turns in the back of a dump truck to get there. This is the back of the dump truck, it's real dusty. We found three bodies."

  She pets Yogi, saying, "I think it aged him. He's seen and smelled things most two-year-old pups won't have to go through."

  In another photo album, Yogi sits with very thin, smiling men.

  "I believe in Bodhisattvas," Michelle says. "In Buddhism, there are beings that are enlightened, and they come back to help others. I think Yogi's purpose in being with me is to help me be a better person and do things. For me, walking into Our House would've been difficult without him, but with him it was like home."

  Talking about the AIDS hospice where she now takes Yogi, Michelle says, "I wanted something that was compelling and meaningful, and I kept hearing about Our House from people. At first I asked if they wanted someone to do Reiki, and they said no. Then I said I had this really neat dog, and they said come on over. And that was it. We just started going there every week.

  "A lot of them have just lost a pet," she says. "Sometimes that's the mitigating factor: Well, if I have a pet I can't move into Our House. And then the pet dies, and there is a lot of grief associated with that. And anyone who lives there is a little like a refugee. They've lost at least a lover. And, materially, they've lost their household."

  Scratching Yogi's ears, Michelle says, "That's just part of his job. The comforting. That's what I mean by the Bodhisattva, that he's more concerned with comforting and helping, almost even more than his own well-being."

  She says, "The trip to Honduras was a real seminal moment for me. One of those watershed moments. It was a high in a certain way. You never wondered what your purpose was while you were there because it was so clear. You could just be totally immersed in it."

  Both dogs are asleep now on club chairs in this gray ranch house in the suburbs. The backyard is outside sliding glass patio doors, pocked with mud from the dogs running around.

  "Prior to going to Honduras, I'd just finished school," Michelle says. "I'd just got my master's, and I'd left Hewlett-Packard. It was like, 'Hey, there's this whole multidimensional world out there beyond trying to fit in stupid corporate culture. Where's the meaning there? One day of searching in Honduras-and I consciously thought this while I was down there-is exponentially more meaningful than twenty years in the corporate world.

  "It's just so beautiful," Michelle says. "Part of me cries, still, when I see a dog working, whether it be a Seeing Eye dog or a Yogi when he's at his best. I'm just in awe of it."

  She closes the album of Tegucigalpa, Honduras-the pictures of Hurricane Mitch-and puts the album on a stack of albums.

  She says, "It was just eight days. I think we did what we could."

  Human Error

  You've probably seen Brian Walker on television. If not, you heard him on the radio. You saw him chatting with Conan O'Brien, or on Good Morning America. Or he was on with Howard Stern one morning.

  He's the guy. That guy. You know, the first person to build his own rocket-yes, right there in his backyard in Bend, Oregon-and shoot himself into outer space.

  He calls himself "Rocket Guy."

  Yes, of course. That guy.

  Now you remember. In the hundreds of radio and television spots, in the newspaper and magazine articles, you're heard the logistics. How his rocket is fiberglass, powered by a 90 percent solution of hydrogen peroxide exposed to a screen plated with silver.

  "It's like when you mix vinegar and baking soda," Rocket Guy would tell you. "It's a chemical reaction. The peroxide hits the silver and it causes a catalytic conversion that changes it into steam. And the steam then expands. Basically, the peroxide turns to superheated steam of about thirteen hundred degrees and expands six hundred times in volume."

  A blast of compressed air will assist the rocket's launch. It will go fifty miles straight up, then fall down, slowed by a parasail.

  He's the rich toy inventor. Engaged to marry the beautiful Russian woman he met on the Internet and dated while training with Russian cosmonauts.

  Yes, of course you've heard of him and his "Project R.U.S.H." Meaning: Rapid Up Super High. The guy with just a high school education. You probably heard him on Art Bell's radio show and then sent him an email. If you did, then you got an answer. Rocket Guy has answered thousands of your emails. Asking for advice about your inventions. Telling him how much your kid loves his toys. And, what's amazing is, he answered you. Maybe even sent you a toy.

  He's your hero. Or you think he's a big-mouth fraud.

  Yeah, that guy… What ever happened to him?

  Oh, he's still there. Well, he is and he isn't.

  If you sent him an email-at www.rocketguy.com-chances are it's still on his computer. If you sent him an email, you're a little part of the problem.

  In December 2001, Rocket Guy was working in his shop, working on the hydraulic lift part of the trailer that would haul his rocket to the launch site. It's thirty degrees outside, and the high desert is ankle-deep with snow. The twelve acres where Brian Walker lives, a one-song drive from the center of town, is mostly pine trees and lava rock. He lives in a big log cabin. A short walk downhill are his garage and his shop buildings. Beside them is his "Rocket Garden," an array of equipment he built to train for his trip into the atmosphere.

  Sticking out of the snow, you'll see bright red and yellow, foam and fiberglass prototypes for missiles and capsules and rockets. In his shop, the white walls are hung with the prototypes for toys he's invented. Brian Walker is big and bearded, and his part-time helper, Dave Engeman, is small and clean-shaven, and, with the snow and the toys, the pine trees and the log cabin, the two men suggest a workshop somewhere near the North Pole. More like elves than astronauts.

  If you ask, Rocket Guy will take toys down off the wall and demonstrate the ones that he could never sell. "It's tough, trying to make toys these days," he says. "The Consumer Product Safety Administration is so anal about how something could be misused. In the good old days, you could buy toys that, if you misused them, you could lose an eye or a finger."

  Here's a tented stretche
r he designed for the army. Here's a go-cart the size of a suitcase. Showing you the failures, hundreds of plastic and wood prototypes stored in crates, he says, "I want to do a line of toys called 'The Better Tomorrow Toys. They're going to be designed so that if a child had an IQ below a certain level, they wouldn't survive the toy. So you weed out the gene pool at a young age. Stupid kids are not nearly as dangerous as stupid adults, so let's take them out when they're young. I know it sounds cruel, but it's a reasonable expectation."

  He laughs and says, "Of course that's all a joke. Just like the line of toys I want to do for blind kids, called 'Out of Sight Toys'…"

  At the rear end of the rocket trailer, he's mounting a steel tank. It sits below four tall pipes that will slip up, inside the rocket. At takeoff, high-pressure air from the tank, channeled through the four pipes, will give the rocket its initial lift.

  "The blast of air gives it momentum," Brian says. "If I have a twelve-thousand-pound thrust motor and a rocket that weighs a thousand pounds with nine thousand pounds of fuel, then I have a takeoff weight of ten thousand pounds, and twelve thousand pounds of thrust. If the air launch gives me a boost, then I have zero weight, so the twelve thousand pounds of thrust is immediately applied to thrust so I leave the ground with a more positive attitude and a much more stable launch."

  In a nutshell, that's rocket science. At least for the first test flight. Inside the rocket there's no controls so there's no chance of human error. Simple as that.

  "I'm not a rocket scientist," Brian says. "Everything I'm doing is public knowledge. I'm using information gleaned from fifty years of the space program. My rocket is more or less a giant toy. It's a big toy on steroids."

  He says, "The moment I open the valve to the engine, that's when you launch the air. I want the engine at full throttle before I release the air pressure. If for some reason the engine didn't fire at the moment I launched, I'd get about fifty feet up and then come back down. The parachute wouldn't help, and the weight would be so much I couldn't even separate the capsule from the fuel tank. The moment the engine throttle is opened, the compressed air goes."