Hurricane Ike, three years later

This week, while everyone else I knew was preoccupied with the 9/11 anniversary, I found myself thinking back to a different anniversary and a different pile of debris.

Three years ago last night, Hurricane Ike made landfall on the Texas coast- my end of the Texas coast. Home.

I rode out the storm's landfall on a sailboat on a lake on the north end of Houston with my best friend, surrogate big brother, EMS colleague, real-life hero, and partner-in-lunacy, David. We were crazy stupid kids, I guess; one of us mostly grew out of it, and the other died of it.

This week, I keep thinking of the crazy, scary, awesome stormy night I spent on a sailboat with an old friend, and the days afterward doing the most challenging and rewarding work I've ever done, with a group of people (and dogs) I will always be proud to know and to have worked alongside.

I think I'm going to post a series of hurricane-recovery stories here for as long as they last.

Here's a start, reposted from my old LiveJournal- the post I wrote on returning from the one-year anniversary memorial in Crystal Beach, where we spent a few days searching the debris for those still missing after the storm.

"Last Saturday, my SAR teammates and I had the privelege of attending the anniversary memorial service for hurricane victims at Crystal Beach.

We arrived by way of Winnie that afternoon, driving in from a fundraiser for the CHASER foundation in Conroe, to have dinner with a friend of my teammates before the memorial. On arriving, we found a pair of FEMA trailers parked next to a partially-reconstructed home surrounded by a dozen or so relatives and neighbors all working busily. The friend who had kindly invited us emerged from one of the trailers, where she had been cooking for the workers all day-- lunch, she told us, had been seafood enchiladas, and the kitchen table when we entered was piled high with freshly baked cookies. She was clearly tired, but bright and full of enthusiasm and energy, which seemed to be the general attitude.

Everyone was gathering around the table set up out back as we emerged from the trailer, and the friend cheerfully announced us as one of the teams that did SAR work here after the storm. We were greeted with applause and a couple comments along the lines, "Hey, we love you guys!" and all did our professional best not to get all teary-eyed. That had been an emotional enough bit of work for those of us who were there, and that day was in some ways the culmination of it.

We all joined hands for prayer-- a teammate on one side of me, a friendly stranger on the other-- and I snuck a peek or two around and thought to myself that this was the Texas Gulf Coast at its best, this was the spirit of those who survived the storm, and I realized anew how proud I was to have called this place home once and to have come back to serve these people. There was mud everywhere, still smelling as it did after the storm-- pungent and probably contaminated-- and debris still littered all the land in view, but here was determination and togetherness and laughter and a pile of delicious food. Here was life, and I found myself grinning a little at that before the prayer was over.

Dinner was beyond incredible-- softshell crab, boudin, shrimp, and gator-kabobs, the latter two of which had been swimming around that morning. Nothing like fresh-caught seafood to remind you that life is still worth living.

We listened to our friend talk of how high the water had gotten, the damage to homes in the area, the process of rebuilding. We were introduced to one of the neighbors, a smiling elderly lady whose home had been completely taken by the storm; our friend informed us that she'd found only a single fork. Yet there she was, bustling around making sure everyone had napkins, telling fishing stories from her younger days, smiling.

I lost track of who was related to whom and how, but one of the relatives, a man introduced to us as the provider of the gator, had found some bones washed ashore next to the channel and wondered if they might be human. Four people from Bolivar were still missing, and their fate lingers in the constant awareness of the residents and rebuilding crews. "I'm an anthropologist," I said, "Not the best, but I can take a look if you like." I left it to my teammates to volunteer the dogs, and we all piled back into the car-- three people and four dogs-- to follow the relatives down to the channel.

Said channel is really the ICW where it passes between Bolivar Peninsula and Goat Island north of Crystal Beach. Those of us who were there after Ike like to tell people that there are only two houses on Goat Island... and before the storm, there were none. Further Ike-deposited contents of the island included a refrigerator trailer full of something very rotten by the time we got there, dozens of dead cows (which we kept making poor Pete check, to his disgust), and literally tons of debris. It was a miserable day's slog across that place-- someday I'll write about it, there's a helicopter story, even-- and my team leader and I were only too glad to curse that godforsaken piece of real estate from across the water.

The bones-- according a committee consisting of an anthropologist, an animal science M.S., and three HRD dogs-- were not human. We all figured they had most likely been dragged ashore by the alligator the relatives told us hung out nearby. It seemed likely that they'd come from its underwater stash, since the relatives also reported seeing a hole dug out in the bottom at low tide. Personally I don't doubt that there might be some human bits in there somewhere-- if not from this storm, then from some of the hundreds they never found after 1900 or from other individual cases over the years-- but these were none of the above. As with our work there last fall, this was as much about putting people's minds at ease as it was about actually finding the victims, and in that sense we did good solid work.

That little adventure involved a short slog through the mud down to the water and back. I have Gulf Coast mud on my boots again, and somehow I feel better about life with that reminder of who I am and why I'm here.

We all made it to the memorial just in time to sneak in a few minutes late. The event was held, much to the surprise of my team leader and I, in the gym of the elementary school we'd stayed at the previous fall. The generator trucks and the small city of temporary showers and porta-johns was gone, and the handful of vehicles smashed up against the pilings in the parking area below the school had been cleared away. The debris that had covered the field across the street (I remember too well standing on the porch in the evenings, looking across at that wondering if it held the victims we had spent all day searching for) had been cleared away too.

The air conditioner was back up and running full blast as well, in the whole school instead of just the set of rooms we'd occupied a year ago, and as I shivered through the service I thought, "I remember this gym when it was almost too hot to move and we were in here playing kickball with the firefighters!" If one is willing to stretch the definition of kickball to include strining a volleyball net across the gym, pulling out every ball the school owned (at least a hundred) and trying to see how many we could keep in the air at one time. Bonus points for hitting each other.

The service itself was part reminsiscence, part memorial for those lost, and part celebration of survival and rebuilding. I found myself in awe yet again of the spirit and resilience and determination of these people. I'd seen the destruction and understood as well as any outsider could how much they had lost and endured, and their attitude in the face of that along with the progress they had made in a year were truly inspiring. No one here was asking for a handout. No one here was protesting because they hadn't received enough help. They were helping themselves, helping each other, and being thankful for the outside help they had received.

Very thankful, in fact-- we were all stunned speechless to receive a standing ovation when we were introduced as recovery volunteers. Again, we all did our professional best to not get all teary-eyed, with mixed success.

The memorial portion was beautifully done, and in the accepted tradition for those lost at sea, included a bell tolled once for each of the dead and missing as their names were read. I don't handle bells so well since Medic 9's funeral, but with the help of a cuddly border collie I managed to sit through it. Two of the residents had recovered the bell itself from the debris several months ago.

As my teammates and I rode the ferry back to Galveston after the service, we stood at the rail and watched the fireworks over Galveston. There had been no one lost from Galveston, either dead or missing, and their service must have taken on a slightly different tone. I thought about what we had just been given the honor of sharing with the people of Crystal Beach, and I saw the fireworks as a sign of hope.

There's a folk singer from Fort Worth named Brian Burns, and he wrote a song about the 1900 storm that I had stuck in my head for most of hurricane callout last year. As we drove home Saturday night, I caught myself humming it again:

"I came here to bury the lost souls who perished that day
When the ocean rose twenty miles onto the prairie
And washed it all into the Bay.

And nothing that stood could escape the concussion
Of an angry wave riding on a hurricane wind..." "

Dogs, and a Great Book

Lately I have been reading Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz.

It's an incredible book- insightful, well-researched, and beautifully and engagingly written. I have been reading it slowly, a little at a time, giving myself plenty of time to think and digest, and frequently as I read I find myself looking up from the page and over at Duke, who is usually nearby when I'm at home, and blurting out something like "Wow, really?" I'm seeing my own dog, much loved but somewhat taken for granted, from a new and amazing perspective.

As an anthropologist, I'm especially fascinated by the idea that the evolutionary divergence between dogs and wolves was almost solely the result of the introduction of a new species into their ancestors' environment- humans. All the deliberate breeding of dogs into wildly varied forms and functions since is not half so incredible as the idea that our mere presence inadvertently turned one ancestral species into two new ones.

However, as a SAR volunteer who works mostly with search dogs, the detailed discussion of the canine nose and its scenting capabilities was even more personally relevant and interesting, as was this note on one aspect of dog behavior:

"Not only do dogs not typically hunt to feed themselves- whether encouraged to or not- but what hunting technique they have is, it has been noted, 'sloppy'. A wolf makes a calm, steady track toward his prey, without any frivolous moves; untrained dogs' hunting walks are herky-jerky, meandering back and forth, speeding and slowing. Worse, they may get waylaid by distracting sounds or a sudden urge to playfully pursue a falling leaf. Wolves' tracks reveal their intent. Dogs have lost this intent; we have replaced it with ourselves." -p. 57

As I read this, I was reminded of an observation from my husband during our least search callout with the canine team. We were driving to our assigned search area during one of our rare moments together on that mission- the dearth of flankers means that he and I do not see each other much in the field- and he commented on how cool it was watching the search dogs move through their areas with such purpose and focus once their search command had been given. He compared this focus to the way our unemployed border collie would run through the same area; Duke would, as my husband noted, have been all over the place, interested in and distracted by everything, but the search dogs- while not immune to a momentary distraction- gave most things only a brief sniff or turn of the head; they remained focused on their intent, the scent they had just been told to look for.

Insights like that are one of several reasons that I enjoy Greg's involvement with the SAR team: he sees these dogs and their capabilities with fresh eyes. After four years and nearly twenty searches (I think I'm getting old; I kept forgetting missions when I tried to count them just now), the abilities, limitations, and nature of search dogs have become an accepted and normal part of my world, and I find myself taking these things for granted; my husband's questions and observations help me, too, see these dogs and our work in general with a fresh perspective and a renewed sense of wonder.

Even so, sometimes they amaze me even at my most jaded.

On Sunday morning of our last search, we found ourselves working an area whose main features were a dirt roadway- really just a cleared strip with tire tracks in the grass bordered on one side by trees that opened into the field we had searched parts of earlier in the day, and on the other by a steep-sided creek bed, mostly empty with just a few shallow pools of stagnant water. My team leader's two border collies were working mostly down in the creek bed, but when they decided that there was nothing there, I expected them both to backtrack to a point where the walls of the creekbed were lower and more sloped and bore less resemblance to a ravine. Instead, the younger of the pair took a running leap from the bottom of the sheer wall about ten feet to the top; she hit with her forelegs above the edge on flat ground and the rest of her body still hanging over the wall, hindlegs scrambling for purchase. It took less time for me to move toward her than it did for visions of a fall and a badly injured dog to flash through my mind, and it took even less time than that for her push and claw her way to the top and look at me like I was crazy for worrying.

I probably was; my team leader agreed firmly with the dog's point. That was probably a normal dog thing and no great feat, but technically everything that any search dog does in the field is just a "normal dog thing" in the sense that none of them is using any top-secret alien genetically enhanced superpowers. That in itself is amazing. The canine nose, with its incredible sensitivity, is an evolutionary marvel, though it is a marvel that even the household pet snoozing beside me as I write this possesses. The difference, and the truly extraordinary thing about search dogs, is the drive and the hours and hours of training which produce the focus and intent that so amazed my husband in the field.

The Richness of the Quest

I took a break midway through writing this post, and when I glanced at my Facebook news feed, it contained this quote from Joseph Campbell: "[I]f you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way." (courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).

Thanks for the words of wisdom from beyond the grave, Dr. Campbell. You, sir, are my hero. I'm stealing a bit of your quote for a post title.

A few days ago, Dr. Jon F. Wilkins announced his intention to start up the Ronin Institute, a non-profit research institute for independent scholars. I was immediately very excited by this idea, so I sent him an email asking if there might be a way for me to get involved. He replied positively and inquired about my current status, goals, and plans. What follows is a modified and greatly expanded version of my response, which contains more of my personal backstory than I thought Dr. Wilkins would want to have dumped in his inbox.

I have a B.A. in anthropology from a major university with a respectable department, but at present, I am working as the office girl at a local funeral home (following a miserable stint in college admissions at said university and an enjoyable and rewarding but exhausting stint as an EMS dispatcher, also at said university), and I have been out of graduate school since 2009.

I was already contemplating my escape, in the form of either a semester off or a change of degree program, for a variety of reasons; the singleminded, all-or-nothing focus of the academic department was already wearing thin for me, as I had begun graduate school with two jobs and volunteer commitments as a trainee recovery diver, a SAR technician, and an EMS dispatcher, all of which were either necessary (the jobs) or valued and important (the volunteer gigs) parts of my life, and none of which I was willing to give up to fit in with the all-nautical-archaeology, all-the-time, and-nothing-else-matters culture of my department.

I was, and am, deeply interested in the history of seafaring and captivated by the idea of the physical connection to it offered by archaeology (which, incidentally, I just read a great article about today), but I increasingly balked at the idea of defining my life and my worldview by that and restricting my interests to nothing else.

It also, to be brutally honest, became quite hard to take seriously as a life's work; my classmates' and professors' single-minded focus began to seem sheltered and elitist, especially on the days when I stumbled into class after being up all night sending ambulances to deathly ill or injured people or out all night/weekend/both searching for a missing child who more often than not turned up dead if at all; I could still hear the panicked voices on the other end of the phone, see the bodies floating the in lake and the worried, distraught families huddled at Incident Command- that was the real world, and my classmates knew only their ivory tower, and I began to think of them as naive. I began to see that branch of archaeology as fascinating and fun, something I would like to pursue avocationally, but not something I could dedicate my life to in a serious way after those experiences.

I considered taking a semester off in the fall of 2008 to complete a paramedic's license, having taken the EMT-Basic course concurrent with the end of the spring 2007 semester and the subsequent summer, but I debated and wavered until I ended up sticking with graduate school for another semester. I missed a lot of class (and a lot of my paying job) in the fall of 2008, first putting in long exhausting shifts at EMS helping dispatch ambulances to unload medical evacuees from Houston in advance of first Hurricane Gustav and then Hurricane Ike and ferry them from the DMAT shelter to the local hospitals as needed, and then after Hurricane Ike, out in the field with my SAR team at Bridge City, Crystal Beach, and Anahuac, scrambling over debris and demolished houses searching for the remains of the missing.

That was a pivotal experience in my life, and to this day it's the thing I'm most proud of- not my Cum Laude degree from Texas A&M, not my admission to graduate school, not my involvement in projects while there, but those few weeks in the fall of 2008 when I worked my ass off, walked through hell with a few good friends and colleagues, and made a difference.

I felt a need to make a real difference, not an indirect theoretical greater-good-of-humanity difference but a real, conrete, direct difference in the lives of actual individuals, as I said a few months ago in my response to my SAR team leader's blog post about our reasons for doing SAR work. After Hurricane Ike and a few more missions, my mind was made up; I wanted to do forensics, specifically human remains detection, but I still had hopes of combining it with Nautical Archaeology to work on submerged remains, with the most likely application being POW/MIA recovery (which is also a cause I have long had a soft spot for).

Unfortunately, early in the spring semester of 2009, a very close friend, who I usually describe(d) as my brother, died in a car wreck; the loss and my failure to cope well with it left me too distracted, depressed, and generally useless to finish out the semester, though I muddled through an unsuccessful attempt because I wasn't sure what else to do and wasn't thinking clearly enough to consider it.

I never even formally left. "Oops" might be an understatement.

At present, my intention is to return to school for an eventual doctorate in physical anthropology, but both finances and geography are a challenge; my husband is in the Army, so we don't get much choice about our location, and committing to a traditional academic program at this point would be highly impractical even if we could afford it. My hope is that within the next few years we can some financial issues sorted out and perhaps even get stationed somewhere near a university with a suitable program, and then I can work quickly enough to complete a degree before we get sent elsewhere again. In the meantime, I find that I miss the academic community and involvement in research and the exchange of ideas, even more than I expected that I would. Once I get this graduate school thing sorted out, I hope and intend and plan and want to work in my actual field; I would enjoy working for JPAC, maybe, or an ME's office wherever we end up, but I do not forsee an academic career in my future- I'm not willing enough to sacrifice the rest of my interests and goals for it- but I do forsee and hope for continued involvement in research.

Where and how I see myself in terms of goals, ambitious, and interests has come into focus in a much more useful way in the past few months, so that I have a good idea of what I want to be doing, and who I want to be, in the short term, on the way to my return to school, and how I would like that to fit into the transition back into a degree program and the shape I would like my career to take afterward. I am beginning to finally take to heart the advice my father once gave me when he said that I shouldn't try to make a career out of every passing interest- but I'm mingling that with my own recent discovery that inability to make a career out of an interest doesn't make it any less a valid and important part of my life, my work, and my identity. I'm a happier person, and a more productive one (in whatever sense you want to define "productive", which I'm learning is also a highly variable word) for that combined realization.

It really is about what Joseph Campbell called "the richness of the quest," and productive endeavors are endeavors that contribute to that for me, whether or they're professional, paid, and/or institutionally supported.

SAR will always be one of those productive endeavors for me. I enjoy the occasional adventure, the fieldwork, the camaraderie, and the dogs; I thrive on the sense of purpose. It's what I live for and an essential part of who I am.

Another of those endeavors, which suffered somewhat during my time in graduate school and which I am only recently returning to in any serious way, is writing. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade; I remember almost the exact moment when I discovered writing was fun, and I have been obsessed with telling stories and shaping words ever since. I need the creative outlet, and I find that I am happier and feel better about myself on days when I get a substantial amount of writing done; only recently have I figured out that I have to let myself see this as a valid productive activity so I can give myself the time for it and feel good about getting it done and proud of the results.

Blogging is sort of an extension of that; it's a different kind of outlet, which lets me tell slightly different stories- true ones- in more appropriate ways; it also gives me a place to vent, a place to put ideas that aren't fully developed enough for other venues and may never be, and a way to stay at least somewhat connected with an intellectual and academic community.

I do miss that sort of connection, and I miss involvement in interesting research. My research interests are somewhat scattered, but my primary interest, the one I hope to focus on in my eventual career, is human remains / clandestine grave detection. This is primarily an outgrowth of my volunteer work, as several years of observations and experiences in the field have both given me theoretical curiosity about these things, and emphasized the need for answers to certain questions and improvements in certain methods and procedures. I can easily see a life's work in finding the missing, bringing closure if not comfort to the bereaved, and maybe even bringing the bad guys to justice.

I have a secondary set of research interests, which I mostly intend to be avocational, in mortuary iconography, gravestone and historic cemetery documentation and preservation, and historic grave detection and documentation. At the moment I'm finding an outlet for that through Find-A-Grave and my related blog Last Words; this is also a much easier area to pursue independent research in than forensics,
so I am currently working on a couple of independent projects on changes in iconography patterns across time and region.

None of that alters or replaces the basic fact that I have to earn a living, and that my husband and I both would like to be living a bit more comfortably than we presently are, so as much as I might like to, I can't abandon all monetary concerns and become a self-unemployed bliss-following writer/researcher/emergency responder/philosopher. That does sound like a lovely retirement plan, but in the meantime, I've come to some realizations about work, as well. First, I can be essentially content with my life, if not my work hours, doing even the relatively unfulfilling, degree-irrelevant sorts of work that Liberal Arts and Humanities BA's often get stuck with, so long as I have those other productive, fulfilling aspects of my life to give me a sense of identity, progress, involvement, purpose, and self-worth.

Second, it's easier than I originally thought to find interesting and/or fulfilling work now that pays decently, even if it doesn't directly bear on either my current or future degree; that's where having a diverse set of interests helps. My job at the funeral home, for instance, has its challenges, but it's not the sort of thing anyone needs a degree of any sort for, and it's solidly below the level of responsibility that I'm technically qualified for- but it's interesting work, and it's deeply fulfilling to go home at the end of the day knowing that I have helped someone, even if only in a small way, at a moment when they badly needed it, so I am content; this is a good place to be for now, on my way to another eventual destination.

In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffett commented that when he was a child, a frustrated adult demanded to know what he wanted to do with his life; the young Buffett replied that he wanted to live a damned interesting one.

Me too.

Looking for some body...

Mission callouts from my SAR team leader all seem to take the same shape these days; the phone rings, and he asks, as usual, "What are you doing this weekend?"

I reply, as usual, "I don't know, but I have the feeling you're about to tell me." I also have the feeling it's going to involve dogs and probably at least one dead person (missing people who might be alive typically won't wait for a weekend; those happen on their schedule, not ours). As usual, I was right on all counts.

I don't get to see my SAR teammates nearly enough since I moved out here with Greg last year; it was a very sudden transition from seeing them all at least twice a week, often more, to maybe once every couple of months if time and gas money fell into place. These people, and most of the dogs, too, are like an adopted family to me, and I miss them, and part of me feels a little guilty about leaving. If this PCS move to El Paso goes through, it may be several more months before I can work with them at all, so when I got the call from my team leader the other day, there was the usual drive to find the missing, solve the mystery, help the family, but also a much more personal and sentimental reaction to getting to spend a weekend in the field with my team again.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I realized I had just done something slightly stupid; the medication for my Crohn's-related iritis dilates my pupil and makes me painfully and ridiculously photosenstive, to the extent that I can't tolerate sunlight even with two pairs of sunglasses on. The only solution, since I wasn't willing to miss the search, was skipping my medication for a couple of days. That went tremendously better than I honestly expected, though not without some moderate discomfort.

I make the comment on every search, and it always applies: "Why am I never following this guy and his border collie through anything pleasant?" Despite being nominally "in town," our search area this weekend was composed partially undeveloped and partially abandoned areas, full of brush and undergrowth as only Texas can do it; Greg came home with an inexplicable spot of poison ivy on the inside of elbow (seriously, how do you get poison ivy there?) and I managed to garb hold of a thorny vine this morning, so I spent a few minutes cussing and bleeding- but honestly, I live for this shit; the messier and harder the better. I'll take my adventures where I find them.

Heat was a major challenge this weekend; it limits the working time of both dogs and people, but the limits heat places on the dogs are narrower and less negotiable. Even an eager, willing dog cannot do scent work effectively in extreme heat, because the act of panting affects airflow through the nasal passages in ways that bypass most of the important bits for serious scenting, and because the heat changes the extent to which the scent itself emanates from the remains and the way those molecules behave. Our work was limited to half days, which meant early mornings, several hours of searching, and then lazy recuperative afternoons. That turns out to be a really pleasant combination; being clean and cool and lounging around with a good book and a glass of sweet tea is something you never really understand how much you fail to appreciate properly until you're doing it after a morning of sweat and dirt and soreness, and the tiredness itself is that vaguely pleasant kind that comes from having done something fulfilling.

The case itself was too interesting to pass up, and as we worked this weekend, we increasingly found that much about the situation and the information we had were difficult to make sense of (hence my comment on Twitter, during a break at base, that every case is different but some are more different than others). We spent some time at dinner last night comparing notes, exchanging ideas, and debating theories and fragments of theories; our informal version of debriefs, those discussions, especially when we're all loopy and giddy from exhaustion and heat, are always one of my favorite parts of the mission.

I'm really glad, as always, that my husband Greg is willing to do this work with me. Search and Rescue / Recovery is demanding work mentally, physically, and emotionally, and requires a commitment of time and resources that few people are willing or able to make; without understanding and supportive family members, it would be impossible to do what we do. I had hoped for and expected that support, but I'm continually amazed by and grateful for Greg's willingness to be actively involved with the team himself.

His training and competence are tremendous assets in the field. Just today, he ended up running communications at base (at least partially because he was mildly frustrated with civilian radio practices; this was when I learned that the word "repeat" in military radio protocol means "shoot it again" which is not something that comes up a lot in civilian applications). My teammates are like my family, and I don't lightly trust anyone to watch out for them, but I know I can count on Greg.


Besides, my teammates are like my family mostly because of the nature of this work. The hours together, the shared challenges and experiences, the moments of silliness and stress and triumph, and the emotional nature of what we do all form a bond that you sort of have to experience to understand. I'm glad that Greg and I get to share that too.

(cross-posted on my personal blog, One Day at a Time)

Flowers and seashells

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

A few days ago, I was setting up our chapel here at the funeral home for a visitation, carrying flowers from the delivery room in the back of our building, across the hall to arrange them on stands near the casket at the front of the chapel.

It reminded me of another afternoon of carrying flowers, early on in my time here, when I remarked to my boss that the arrangement I had in my arms, and could barely see over the top of, smelled nice. He growled back something along the lines of "They're damn funeral flowers. They never smell nice."

Maybe I haven't been in this business long enough to be jaded, because I still think they're pretty. Then again, I'm a little strange. The whole issue reminds me of doing human remains detection with my canine SAR team in Crystal Beach after Hurricane Ike.

The relatively undamaged elementary school- a big, sturdy building built on huge concrete pylons- where our base of operations had been established was less than a quarter of a mile from the beach.


We had been working the bay side of the peninsula all morning, pretty enough underneath the debris, but plagued by homicidal biting flies that make me itch even now just thinking about them and bordered by the muddy, silty, unappealing banks of the channel, and I hadn't been to the beach in over a year at that point, not since the last coast trip with the Sailing Club back in college. There was no way in hell I was going to be that close and not at least see the ocean, disaster zone or not.

It's bad policy, in a disaster zone, to just go strolling off by yourself. There could be any number of hazards, human and otherwise, and even if you're impervious to damage, like me, it creates a lot of undue stress for those responsible for keeping track of people. So, a teammate- herself a product of the coast, just a different coast- walked down to the beach with me. I've never seen the water at Bolivar look so clear and clean; it was as though the storm had washed it free of the usual combination of Mississippi River silt burden and industrial filth that produced the familiar grayish brown murk I remembered.


A few seagulls had begun to return; we had seen the first few on the ferry crossing, and my team leader declared them a sign of hope. Even with bare foundations and shattered homes in the background, the beach was more beautiful than I had ever seen it.

Perhaps it was so beautiful because of the destruction in the background, because the contrast emphasized that peace and serenity had returned, that the Gulf's fury could wash away everything human hands had made, but not beauty and light.

I always pick up seashells at the beach. Usually I just find one or two in a stroll, a small memento of the day's trip. Most of the ones in my collection, until recently, I could still assign to a specific memory, a specific outing. This one from the afternoon at Follett's Island with my parents on Mother's Day my last year in high school (the day I wrote a haiku about), these from a motorcycle outing with Daddy, and that one from the afternoon my college roommates and I decided to try surfing and I broke my toe.

I have discovered that seashell-hunting with Greg is a larger-scale operation entirely, and the last time we went to the beach, I may have had to whine and throw a tantrum to get the man out onto the beach with me, but once he got there he was insatiable, and we left with two plastic drinking cups full of shells.

I love my husband. Speaking of light in the darkness, he is mine.

Thus, as the sun was setting over Bolivar Peninsula, at the end of a long day of slogging through marshes and brush, and over debris that that once been homes, looking for and not finding the missing dead, I literally skipped over to my team leader, who was as weary and filthy and stinky as I was, and cheerfully announced, "Look, Fearless Leader! I found seashells."

He looked at me like I was nuts, and maybe I am, but you've got to cope somehow.

We were sitting around here at work the other day, talking about people's reaction to our occupation (the funeral director I share an office with says that she has heard people rudely unwilling to eat anything she baked for her church once they found out what she did for a living, and the girls at the local car wash are apparently annoyingly reluctant to wash the funeral coach when it's brought in). My office-mate told me that someone interviewed her and our boss shortly after she came here, and asked her if working at the funeral home made her sad.

I suppose I can understand the question, but for me the funeral home is not a sad place. The sadness- the moment of loss- happens elsewhere. This is a place for grieving, yes, but that grieving is the beginning of the healing process, and the service we provide, at its most fundamental level, is to facilitate the beginnings of healing. This isn't a place of sadness; it is a place of coping, of comfort, of eventual hope.

That's the underlying purpose of human remains detection, too- to bring closure, and sometimes justice, so that that process of grief and healing and life can begin more easily for those we help.

Part of my role in that, and part of my role in life in general, is to find the bright spots amid the darkness, the moments of levity amid rubble and the beauty in a rite of mourning. The world is full of death, darkness, and destruction, which I walk in by choice to do what good I can, but the seashells and the clear ocean are still beautiful, and the flowers still smell sweet.


It would never be worth it, otherwise.

Always check the shoes.

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

My friend Sarah posted a link to this MSNBC slideshow this morning. When I looked at it then, one of the first few pictures was an image of a little girl's white shoe sitting forlornly on the pavement, with piles of rubble and debris in the background (I've been through all four slideshows now, hoping to find the picture again to post it here, but it must have been moved).

Seeing that shoe brought back a lot of memories of the search for human remains on the Texas coast after Hurricane Ike back in 2008.

The debris piles contained a lot of small personal items; when you hear about "debris piles," you think of pieces of buildings, downed trees, but it's too easy to forget about all the small everyday things that make up our lives: books, toys, knickknacks, clothing. The psychological impact of seeing such mundane, fundamentally human items tossed about and abandoned that way was worse than seeing homes reduced to debris and even worse than the knowledge that the residents might still be under there somewhere. It was jarring, poignant, and sad.

I remember finding several picture frames and photo albums; always, we went through those albums page by page, hoping to find at least one picture to perhaps return to a family for some small measure of comfort, but every time the pictures had been either torn out by the water or disintegrated. Walking through the remains of homes on Bolivar, I had to fight the urge to pick up all the sad-looking children's toys among the debris and leave them somewhere sheltered but visible where a returning child might find them. We marvelled, though, at the sight of glass Christmas ornaments somehow intact, nestled among boards and nails and shingles, and my team leader told the story of the crystal clock he found, intact and upright, in a table in a flooded-out home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Most of our work took place in a county on the mainland, across Galveston Bay from the low-lying barriers of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula which caught the brunt of Ike's landfall. Across the thirty-mile length of the bay and seven miles inland, we found pieces of homes from Bolivar and Galveston carried there by the storm surge. The majority of what made it across the bay and the prairie were lighter, more buoyant items- wooden housing components including a whole porch and section of wall, refrigerators and water heaters, lightbulbs and Christmas ornaments almost miraculously intact, whole flocks of carved wooden pelicans that the local sheriffs collected and tossed into the backs of ATVs swearing they were worth something, boats, foam kickboards and surfboards and life vests, buoys...

...and shoes.

Early on, while we were still working on Bolivar (I have looked and looked for Diamond Street every time I have been back there, and I don't know if it lost its street sign or was destroyed, but I've never found it again), my team leader told me to check the shoes to be certain they were empty. The human ankle joint, much like its counterpart in the wrist, does not articulate as securely as certain others, so hands and feet disarticulate and detach with relative ease. The added buoyancy of a shoe could easily have allowed a foot to be carried across the expanse of water by the storm surge. Police in Canada have seen ample evidence of this.

It became part of my job in the field, in addition to pulling smelly dogs out of even smellier water, carrying extra supplies, and watching for alligators, to flip over any shoes we found in the debris piles and check for feet. There is no tension quite like seeing a pair of children's shoes laying together, upside down, in a pile of debris, and no relief quite like turning them over to find them empty, with a plastic zip-tie with the store's tag attached still holding them together.

Part of a shoe store must have gotten washed up in that area, because all along that section of the debris pile, we found several more pairs of shoes still bound together, mostly upside-down, and it kept us on edge for a while even after we figured out what must have happened.

We never found a shoe that was not empty, nor in fact any actual human remains on that side of the bay, but the memory stays with me, so strongly that to this day, even in my own apartment, if I see a shoe lying upside down, I reflexively kick it over and look inside.

Why am I never following that guy and his dog through anything nice?

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I emerged from my nice warm bed this morning to discover that the Decepticon Maxima's windshield was frozen over with such a thick layer of ice that attempts at scraping it off didn't do more than scuff up the glossy surface of the ice a bit. I tried to get into the car to turn the defroster on, only to discover that the door handle was coated with as much ice as the rest of the car and the door itself was frozen shut. Shivering, I shuffled around to the passenger side of the car, which thanks to being to leeward, hadn't gotten quite as thickly coated. I managed to tug the passenger door open and scoot over into the driver's seat. I was still half an hour late to work, because it took me that long to manage to scrape off a 6inx6in porthole in the ice so I could see enough to drive, very slowly, and then I had to stop halfway there, because the frozen precipitation kept hitting the windshield and freezing there, blocking what little view I had.

Not one of my brighter decisions, honestly, but it's all backroads on the way to work, and I think most of the rest of this town was sensible enough to stay home, especially since they declared a late-reporting day on the base and that place accounts for most of the traffic here. I got to work, and an hour later my boss decided to send us all home for the day because the weather was steadily worsening. Back into the car, more windshield-scraping, and another slow nerve-wracking drive home, and now I'm warm and comfy, looking forward to a whole day off.

I desperately need one, too. It's been a long few days.

Sunday was entirely my fault.

After clearing that chilly but uneventful dive mission on Saturday morning, I was looking forward to the rest of my weekend. I managed to go home and change and spent a pleasant afternoon with my grandma's neighbor (who is also married to a soldier; her husband is due home this week, yay for them!) learning a new recipe and chatting over a glass of wine while we baked.

I had just gotten home, intending to curl up with a good book for a little while and maybe throw together a followup post about that dive mission (this one was written on-scene on my phone), when my phone rang; when I answered, my SAR team leader greeted me with, "Hey, we're in (insert neighboring county here). What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Well, Fearless Leader," I replied, "I guess I'm driving to (insert neighboring county here). What've we got?"

The answer turned out to be a missing toddler; operations had switched to recovery mode and active searching was set to resume at 0700. It was a long drive, so in the interest of not having to leave my apartment at 0400 to get there, I decided to drive up that night and bunk with everyone else in the elementary school gym, where the Red Cross had set up a very comfortable (by search standards) set of living quarters for the searchers.

I got there about 2300, in time to catch a quick briefing from my team leader and the leader of another local team (well, local back before I moved two hours away to be with Greg and work at the funeral home) who was running the canine part of the incident. We had cots in the gym, so I was spared the hassle of getting Greg's spare Army cot out of the trunk and figuring how to set it up in the dark without waking those who had already gone to sleep- I just tossed my sleeping bag and pillow onto an empty cot and settled in.

See, one of the few perks about my husband being in the Army is that he occasionally brings me home spare gear, since he knows I can use it for SAR and he's awesome and supportive like that.

So I have one of those wonderful Army sleeping bags that, if you zip the two layers together, is apparently perfectly comfortable down to about -40f. Well, Greg says that unless it actually is that cold, you really don't want both layers; one can stand alone for slightly warmer temperatures and one is just a liner. Apparently in my rush out the door, I grabbed the liner instead of the sleeping bag proper, because when Fearless Leader tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up in the morning, I was curled up at the bottom of the sleeping bag with my head somewhere near my knees and my pillow pulled into the sleeping bag after me to close off the opening. It was cold.

I also jumped about three feet and tried to come up swinging but my arms were still in the sleeping bag. And I screamed. I am too used to sleeping alone.

We spent the day slogging through a lot of areas that I think are eventually intended to become residential developments but which are presently occupied by lots of really nasty dense brush. Some of it came up to my shoulders, not that that takes much, and I actually carried my hiking stick, which I usually don't do because I like having my hands free, just for the sake of having something to knock the stuff aside with. That didn't do much good with those damn mesquite thorns, though, and my hands are still all scratched up. I need to learn to wield a machete properly.

Oh, and there were open manholes scattered around, which thanks to the brush, you couldn't see until they were right under you.

Why am I never following that old man and his border collie through anything pleasant?

I say that on every search.

It could have been worse, though. Nothing we have ever waded through, except maybe those six-foot drifts of reeds and dead cows, has ever been nearly as rough as Goat Island after Hurricane Ike.

Anyway, it was a good mission.

The case itself was really sad, of course; recoveries are always a little sad, and situations involving kids are hard for everyone, but you learn to look at these things a little more philosophically after a while, and it becomes bearable.

Dad, who is himself a former EMT, once commented that it must be difficult finding all these people dead and not being able to save any of them. I told him that it's actually a little easier to take, emotionally. That probably sounds weird if you've never done this, but there's something less wrenching about going out to look for someone you already know is dead, than trying to save someone and failing. Even in EMS, sometimes someone's fate is actually up to your decisions, your actions, and your skills, but often it's not. Often that person is going to die no matter what you or seven better medics or Dr. Red Duke the God of Trauma himself try to do about it- and you learn to accept that to an extent, but not completely, or at least I never did. There's still a sense of guilt, of failure, of wondering what you could have done differently or if someone else could have made the difference.

With recovery missions, I know that the person's fate was totally out of my hands; it's sad, but the sense of guilt and loss and failure isn't there.

Not finding the body, like this weekend, is another matter. My first mission ever, we went home without making a recovery, and it was really hard for me to take. It later turned out that the information available had led the search effort to be directed at the wrong area. I've finally come to accept that no matter how much we want to give the family closure and/or help justice to be done and/or give the deceased the basic human dignity of a proper disposition, you simply can't find what isn't there. It's just something you have to accept.

It really was a good search though- multiple canine teams worked together smoothly and cordially the whole way through, and on Sunday we were even fielding in integrated units, with members of two or three different teams in the field together. I've never seen that happen on a search before, and it was really great to see that everyone was willing to work together that way and put the mission first; it's something I hope to see more of. We worked with some really great people out there, and I'm hoping we can repeat that too. As much as the case itself was the sort of thing that could totally destroy all faith in humanity, the nature of the response could do a lot to restore it.

Anyway, I say that was my fault, because I left the dive mission on Saturday feeling guilty for standing around the command trailer all day, taking a couple of notes for the dive log, and then eating the nice hot lunch the Salvation Army lady brought us. I felt like a superfluous waste of resources- so of course the universe had to toss us another mission so I could make up for it.

It was late on Sunday night when I got home, and Monday I walked right into a busy day at work, most of which I got through accompanied by a persistent icepicks-in-the-eyeballs headache. At twenty minutes until 1700 that afternoon, I was almost desperately looking forward to going home and taking a nap- and then the phone rang.

See a pattern here?

A friend's baby was very sick and she needed to go the ER, so off we went and didn't get home until a little past time to collapse into bed, headache and all.

Yesterday was a nice recuperative day; most of the day at work was spent reading, and most of the evening was spent napping and taking a bubble bath and finally getting to enjoy the avocado I bought for myself Saturday afternoon.

And now I have a day off!

I think I shall write the second chapter of this story. It seems fitting, because the events that take place in the second chapter are centered on the day being the anniversary of something, and today is, strangely enough, the anniversary of the real-life basis for that.

Perhaps that someone's way of telling me that now is the time.

Field notes

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

It's a cold morning, though one of the warmest we've had all week- forty degrees according to the form I filled out when we arrived on scene, but with a stiff cold wind out of the west-southwest. There is still snow on the ground in the shady places and the edges of the little cove near the boat ramp where we've set up IC.

The actual dive site is around the peninsula to our north, and the support crew are all huddled here, keeping scene logs by radio and waiting to help warm and hydrate the divers as they return by boat.

The generator for the command trailer spent the hour of the morning sputtering and dying every few minutes, and it's cut off entirely now. We were using the gas stove in the trailerfor heat, carbon monoxide be damned, but we gave up on that, and now we're standing around a police car, using it for a base radio and the trailer as a windbreak.

Just waiting. It's unusual not being at the dive site to tend and count bubbles and document things in person, but every operation is different and we adapt well.

Us civilians are listening to the two cops on the support crew swapping stories, waiting for word from the dive crew. Documentation is my job today.

Obviously we're doing a lot of waiting, since I have time to write this. When we get busy it's urgent, but there's a lot of downtime, especially on this end.

Brrr. I'm glad I wore my husband's wool socks today.

Sad news

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I was just informed by my team leader yesterday afternoon that one of my teammates' dogs has been diagnosed with cancer and has only three to six months left to live.

We are a small, close-knit team, and have been told repeatedly that to outside viewers we look more like a family than a search and rescue team (albeit a really morbid and insanely focused family with some strange hobbies), and after three years and over a dozen missions (and I'm the newcomer!) it feels that way. None of us can feel the loss quite as deeply as the handler who now faces losing her partner, but we all feel it, in ways that would probably surprise outsiders.

There is no connection quite like that between a working canine handler and her dog. They share hours in training filled with the shared challenge of teaching and learning- both their respective tasks and the much more complex process of teaching each other to communicate and understand- as well as the laughter and play of fun and reward and the thrill and pride of success. Then they share grueling hours in the field, in heat and cold, in wind and sun and rain, through mud and brush and water, over rocks and rubble, hungry and thirsty and tired but united by shared trials and shared dedication. At last they share the profound fulfillment of a find. It is the dog with whom the handler first shares the rewarding knowledge of having brought closure to a family and dignity to a lost human being. If there is no find, it is with the dog that the handler first shares the frustration and disappointment of failure. It is the dog with whom the handler also first shares her reaction to the emotional nature of the work- the fact that even the joy of a find is a grim thing, and that the things we find are almost never pleasant. And in the end, it is the dog for whom the handler reserves her pride. If the handler has succeeded in anything, it is in teaching, for it is the dog upon whom all else relies.

The other members of a team form their own attachments. Every handler and flanker assists in some way with the training of every dog on the team; all of us share at least some of those hours in the field, some of those victories and defeats and the challenges and joys along the way. That sharing binds all of us, human and canine alike, into something very like a family. The word "team" for me will always carry that connotation, and "teammate" will never mean merely "colleague" or "friend"; it means something more like "brother" or "sister". Now we all grieve the loss of one of our teammates, and we also grieve for the suffering of another teammate as she faces the loss of her partner.

Aspen and her handler have been my friends and my teammates for three years now. I've followed that dog over rubble piles after Hurricane Ike and feared for her safety at every step. I've fallen asleep in the car on the way home from missions using her as a pillow, and I've watched her sleep with her head on my knee on those same trips, drooling down my leg. I've sat behind her on a boat, trying to gauge whether she might be about to alert by counting the wrinkles in her forehead (that worried, hyperfocused expression Rottweilers do so well) and suffered no end of teasing because the resultant picture looks like I'm sniffing her butt. That dog has stepped on my head more times than I can count during training, when I was lying underwater playing simulated drowning victim and she chose to mark my position by walking over me. She has also very patiently been there when I needed a hug- there is nothing in the world quite so solid and reassuring to hug as an amiable Rottweiler.

I remember one search last spring, when we had been out all day in the heat and a group of us accompanied Aspen down to the water for a cool-down. Her handler was tossing a tennis ball into the water for her to retrieve, enjoying a nice cooling swim in the process. The victim's family was on-scene not far away, and a little boy- a younger cousin or nephew of the victim, I think- walked up and asked if he could throw the ball for the big dog. The kid's father was hesitant, not wanting to bother the busy rescue team, but Aspen's handler assented- Aspen is a certified therapy dog in addition to SAR, and the kid was, for a few minutes, not an anxious family member, not languishing in the heat, not wondering why the adults were all so sad- he was just a happpy little kid playing in the water with a big happy dog, and I've always thought Aspen probably changed his entire perception of the day.

Aspen has been a good dog, a good friend, and a good teammate, and we will all miss her.