by Susannah
Our team requires that new members train first to assist dog units in the field. These field assistants learn and are tested on map, compass, and GPS navigation, first aid, situation size-up, crime scene preservation, interviewing, interagency response protocols, and radio navigation before ever taking to the field to assist on a first search. Advanced training follows, with written and practical tests administered by NASAR (the National Association of Search and Rescue), FEMA, and the U.S. Fire Administration. Field assistants, or the FAS team, perform invaluable services during searches, freeing the handlers to concentrate on their dogs as they jointly work a sector.
Training and testing thoroughly is a long process, and many volunteers are surprised by all that the commitment involves. Pushing through thorns in the sleet isn't fun. Wading through a floodwater debris field poxed with illegal dumping is nasty. If the poison ivy doesn't get you, the blisters will. And then there are the insidious, sulphur-resistant, omnipresent chiggers. A month or so into training, newcomer attrition is high.
It would be easy to think about quitting now. A colleague just ahead of me balks at the edge of the building. She did well rappelling off the ladder tower, but the distance down from this greater height seems a long, mortal drop onto brick and cement. Some loose-lipped sadist ahead of us in line talked about a recent rookie SWAT cop who'd come to grief by being careless during a shorter rappel (two broken ankles and four front teeth gone!), and the story has made a few of us pensive, a few of us a little manic— ha,ha,ha —as we cover our shaking knees.
My teammate feels the pressure of her indecision. No one rushes her, but we all want her to make the rappel. I want her to make the rappel, perhaps a little selfishly. Every success encourages the rest of us, gets us a little further from the image of the limping, gap-toothed former cop who can now hoover peas off a spoon. When I point out to her that she's a flight instructor who routinely teaches students how to recover spins and that this, by comparison, is no big deal, she seems encouraged, and in a swift, decisive moment calls out to Deryl on safety, checks her equipment, and steps over the edge. Her descent is quick and smooth, and we cheer when she lands squarely on both feet. She made that look easy, I think, as I hook onto the line, call down to Deryl, and stand poised at the edge of the roof.
Patience is as much a part of working search as commitment. When you consider the volunteer SAR team made up of adults from widely differing backgrounds, there's strong likelihood that they won't all be good at the same things. A great dog handler may struggle with compass navigation; a hard-charging brush buster who can search in the wilderness for days may get a little claustrophobic training in tight spaces; the compassionate field assistant who can imagine how a lost child might think may struggle with theory involving building construction and collapse. At our best, we are a collaborative team of teachers and simultaneously a team of learners. At our best, we remember what it was like not to know something.
I was fortunate as a field assistant—many of the required duties were similar to those needed to fly an airplane. Navigation, radio communication, and emergency protocols were already a part of my thinking. Translating those procedures to ground SAR wasn't difficult. The dog work was new, however, and I struggled for some time behind handlers in the field, all of whom seemed to want something different— stay right beside me, stay fifty feet back, clear the area ahead for hazards before we get there, let the dog go in first —an inconsistency that frustrated me until the training day when I ran after four dogs in the same sector, one after another in quick succession, and I saw, at last, that each one of them worked a given sector differently, taking to the terrain according to their individual gifts. The quick-scented and somewhat heedless dog needed more help avoiding hazards than the slower, more cautious dog who worked an area with efficient, deliberate care. Some dogs enjoyed moving quickly and, pack-oriented, wanted the presence of their human counterparts just behind them. Other dogs preferred to blaze ahead and communicate back across a half-acre of brush. I must have tried many a handler's nerve with my early one-size-fits-all approach to assisting them in the training field, but not one of them yelled at me for it, a compassion I admire, a patience I have an uneasy feeling I'm going to have to learn.
The young woman who rigged today's rappel system comes forward to me. She is patient, silent for a moment while I stand there, intuiting perhaps that I'm reviewing procedure and making sense of the physics behind the rappel. Or she may think I'm nerving myself up. All of which is true.
"I would like," I say, "not to slam into the wall this time. I understand what's got to happen from the point I step off the edge to the moment I connect against the wall, but somehow I'm just not moving quickly enough to do it."
She says, "If you can get past the idea of the fall, you'll step off and get your feet right. Right now, I think you're stepping off and going into a kind of fetal position, so it's your knees that hit the wall."
Fetal position. Though I don't think I feel scared, I'm amused that when I step over the edge, some part of me still curls up and cries Mommy. I'm not sure what I feel beyond a desire to get down neatly and with no new wounds.
She adds, "Try to think of it the way you would if you were stepping from one building to another over a gap that's seven stories down. Don't fixate on the hole. You want to visualize stepping off with one foot and connecting to the building across the gap. The fall is not the big deal. It's not the empty space that matters. It's the arrival."
That's a philosophy I'll have to remember to pass along to Gerand. "I'm sorry I'm taking so long," I say to the young woman.
She gives a little okay-by-me shrug, then says, "If you feel anxious about the force of the fall on the line—even though we've shown it's safe—you know you can crawl off the side of the building. That might help. Just lie down along the edge, pivot your legs off, bend at the waist, and find the wall with your feet, then establish tension on the line and start rappelling down."
Crawling off the building sounds almost as bad as fetal position. Her suggestion sounds easy and bloodless, but definitely uncool. I can't be too bad off, I think, if my ego's still capable of wincing. No, I have to trust this young woman, and I have to step over the side. I remember the scores of fourth-lesson flight students who took a deep breath and gave me a thumbs-up before I demonstrated their first stalls, their faith in me overcoming every instinct for self-preservation that screamed, "You're going to make the airplane stop flying?" Their actions shame me now. I look at the young woman and say, "I trust you." I give her a thumbs-up.
"On belay," I shout down to Deryl, who confirms the belay, and then I step backward. This time, there's a funny little whoosh of wind across the flat of my ears, a double buffet, as though the winds at the top edge of the building decided to smack me on each side of the head.
Three seconds of freefall aren't much in the grand sum of life's uncomfortable experiences, but they are memorable. It's a little like touching a fork to a filling while stunt-doubling a crash-test dummy just before the bang. My descent from the high-rise is safe enough—a little jump, an arc of a swing, and then several controlled collisions down and down and down to the ground. I walk away from the rappel with all my teeth intact and no new holes in the knees of my fatigues, but the knuckles of my left hand are scraped, as though I took a swing at the wall somewhere along the way.
The teammates above and below me cheer. Later I may be in for much teasing (was I upside down at one point? I have an uneasy recollection of the ground rushing up), but right now they're all about my success.
I've got to get better at this, I think. After I learn to make my own descents with confidence, there will be a point where I'll be put online with Puzzle, and we'll be raised and lowered together. Dog-and-handler rappelling works differently; it lacks the graceful gaboing-boing of the solo descent, but Puz will do better if the handler holding her on the way up or down is assured.
Puzzle squeaks happily when I open her crate, emerging from it wigg
ly and more overjoyed to see me than ever before. She squirms and mutters as I hold her in my lap, kissing my face and then sniffing carefully every bruised and bloody spot on my arms and knees. Teammate Michele says, "See! She's glad to see you." Birgit adds, "Looks like she knows she's your puppy now." I hope so. What's changed in the past ninety minutes? Perhaps she scents the slightly shaken cocktail of me, post-rappel: the adrenaline, sweat, torn skin, and blood. Perhaps her joy is a matter of timing. She wants out of the crate, and I'm the one to free her. This sudden sure-do-love-you change is another of her dog mysteries.
I take her to socialize with the rest of the team. Some cuddle her, others bend down to rub her belly when she rolls over to expose it. Petting her is not an easy process. Our teammates are dog lovers, but they also know this socialization lays a strong foundation for the puppy who must learn not only to be a partner, but also a member of the larger pack that is our team. These are her instructors, her mentors, and the people who will hide for her hundreds of times, in all conditions and all weathers, as she trains toward certification. But for now the lessons are simpler: this is a fun place to be; trust and affection are the standard; humans are here to be partners and here to be found.
My colleagues try to hold conversations while Puzzle ping-pongs between them. She moves quickly among dogs and humans alike, and while I'm prepared for her puppy bounding and freakish attention span (Is that a treat? What is a cigarette? Did you see that bird? Hey, this dog's got balls!), my height, my center of gravity—and my steady stream of apologies—slow me down. Puzzle trips a teammate, runs completely under the belly of one dog, and steals the last part of a chew treat from another. I arrive just in time to see Collie Misty shoot yellow Lab Buster a thoughtful look. It's a brief communication— discipline this youngster or let her slide? Both dogs turn their heads away from Puzzle, allowing her the thievery. For now.
"That puppy license won't last long," says Fleta with a laugh.
"I'm surprised she's so dominant," I hear over my shoulder. "I expected a Golden to be softer."
She's not soft when it's her turn to search. At the command "Find!" Puzzle catapults from my arms, trips over her own feet while trying to lift her nose and run at the same time, spins angrily at her tail, and then ricochets across the rubble to locate the volunteer victim shrouded by debris and tall grass. We hear a little oof! as Puzzle lands on the young woman's chest. It's a successful find, but not a graceful one. The praise afterward goes straight to her head, and as we leave the search area, she saunters up to one of the senior dogs and starts to shadowbox. I see the wrinkle of his dark muzzle, just a little rickrack showing of bared white teeth. A warning. The four adult dogs standing there simultaneously lift their heads and turn away from her, a doggy snub executed like synchronized swimming. I'm not sure how much of it registers with Puzzle, who bounces off a couple of their backsides before she pogos across the grass to get the toy in her crate.
I look at my dog, now tugging at the embroidered left eye of Lobster. She has him gripped in fat paws, and she's working him over with a will. I hear little pup-pup-pup sounds of black thread pulling free. Every once in a while, she lifts her head to make eye contact with the nearby dogs or humans, her expression a little like a challenge, a little like a brag—a wouldja get a load of me.
A colleague puts his arm around my shoulder. "Good rappel there at the end," he says. "You landed on your feet. And you don't look like you lost too much blood." He grins toward Puzzle. "Fourteen weeks," he says in the same way one would say "tax audit," as though he remembers his own dog, as though Puzzle's age is a statement of condition.
"She's a natural disaster," I say and smile at her.
"A force to be reckoned with," my teammate amends. "But count all the plusses. You're doing good," he adds.
We both look at Puzzle, who has now beheaded her toy and makes ack-ack-ptui sounds, spitting out soggy bits of red plush. She smiles up at us with a wreath of Lobster's former innards around her muzzle. She appears to be having a very good day.
But I must look dazed. I can't imagine ever being able to step over a ledge and descend placidly with this dog. At this point, I can't imagine taking her off lead and expecting to ever see her again. After a moment, my teammate shakes his head and pats my arm. "Don't worry," he says. "It all works out. Remember she's got you. And you've got us."
8. SIX DAYS DOWN
A STEADY RAIN is falling when the pager goes off this morning, a rain that continues as we make our way out of town twenty minutes later, a rain that silvers the highway in the light of traffic inbound for the city. It is early and still very dark, and the rainfall—slow and insistent—is the kind guaranteed to make us sleepy, even though we've got coffee in a Thermos, oldies rock on the radio, and a cryptic note on the pager that indicates we will be looking for a drowned man likely six days down.
Which is unnatural, this failure to surface—a big man, we've learned, believed drowned in a small body of water in warm weather. According to our refloat tables, his body should have appeared days ago. A teammate and I discuss this as we drive. The situation suggests many things the team has seen before, among them the possibility that he's tangled in something beneath the surface, that heavy clothing has affected his buoyancy, or that his body did refloat days ago unseen and is now caught in shoreline debris, that local wildlife may have claimed and dragged him, and—apart from all of this—the chance that he may not be there at all.
The calling law enforcement agency believes he is.
I consider the effect of water on a victim submerged six days. If we do find the body of this man, the distortion will considerable. Horrific. I feel little internal latches begin to flip as the analytic part of my thinking steps forward and my other, more vulnerable responses head for cover. I have never seen a tidy death, and this one is unlikely to be the first.
A body under water still produces scent available to a dog.
"What are they smelling?" a reporter once asked me. "Perfume? Garlic? Laundry detergent?"
Yes, perhaps, but more so the distinctly human tissue byproducts that rise naturally to the surface and are released into air passing over water. Blood may be part of the scent artifact too. Unless in motion due to current or caught and suspended by something underwater, drowning victims always lie face down in the water, heads hanging, which causes blood pooling and any post-death injuries to seep. Some theorists suggest that the friction of water against skin and the friction of human body against underwater objects actually cause more scent production from a water victim than would naturally be produced by a victim on land.
The scent of underwater victims is also subject, like a sailing ship, to multiple forces. The scent of a victim in rivers or moving floodwaters is carried by current before it is released into the air, where it moves according to wind direction and terrain friction. The scent of a lake victim may be fragmented and distorted by the chop of passing boat and ski traffic. Additional factors like water temperature and composition, depth of water, and depth of victim sometime complicate the relationship between the victim and the rising point of the victim's scent.
Dogs working water are rarely able to hover directly over the location of a body in the water. Rather, from boats or shoreline they indicate the location where scent is first available to them above the surface. Our team uses multiple dogs for this effort, ruling out certain areas as "null"—or no indicated scent—and defining areas by GPS where more than one dog has indicated scent source, dogs and handlers ideally refining that information to determine areas of faint, stronger, and strongest scent. The teams work "blind," meaning that they do not know the nature or location of information passed on from the previous canine unit, the better to ensure that similar indications are not influenced for one handler by the handler who has gone before.
Not yet a handler with a certified dog, for this search I will be working along the shore or on the water with another dog unit. Buster, Belle, Shadow, Hunter, or Saber: all are experienced
water and shoreline recovery dogs, partnered by handlers long with the team.
While my colleague drives, I inspect my worn gaiters by flashlight. Warm weather has encouraged the snake population, and though I have a live-and-let-live philosophy about them, I know our blundering press through the brush along a shoreline can provoke a snake to strike in self-defense, if not aggression. On scene, an officer confirms this. "Lotta snakes out there," he says, with a gesture of disgust across the lake.
The rain has stopped, but the air is heavy and close. The area we will search is small by our standards—a wattle-shaped inlet off a thick neck of the lake, a good fishing spot that doesn't take much effort to get to, bordered by a sheltered boat dock. The shoreline is ugly and unkempt, a tumble of yellowish brush and trees fighting dumped garbage for space. The winning trees extend awkward branches over brown water. Thick bramble competes below. The shoreline appears impassable from where I stand.
During a momentary wind shift, I can smell rotting debris and the stench of something dead from the opposite bank. The dogs lift their noses but do not react. One of the officers tells us this is a prime crappie fishing spot; locals have been dumping old furniture and Christmas trees, dead cars and small boats here for years to give the fish a place to shelter and breed. Plenty of folks dump along the shore too, not to improve the fishing, but just because they can. "One-stop dumping," he calls it: do a little fishing, drop a lot of trash.
