What's It Like...

I was asked recently what it's like to do volunteer search and rescue with my dog.  An easy enough question, but not so to answer.  Thinking about it now, and forming an answer to myself, I have to wonder why I do it even... 

The map above shows the searches I've responded to in just Virginia.

There's the commitment:

So many people contact my team interested in joining. One of my responsibilities with the team is to answer their inquiries. In doing so, I briefly outline the level of dedication that will be needed. Time, money, sweat, mileage, and more time. A large number never respond back to me. Others more daring, and feel it is still something they would like to do, arrange to come out to a training to see what goes on. Of those, many never come back out. But still some do. Of those that come several times and decide to embark on this journey they will put in an application and join the team and start training with their dogs...for upwards of 2-3 YEARS before they become certified as a dog team with their canine. And from joining to certification, I have been told before in the past that a mere 9% make it to becoming certified. Of those that become certified, even less stick around long enough to train a second dog when the first one retires or passes away. It's rare to find anyone that's been involved in search and rescue for longer than ten years. The turnover rate is fairly high. Anyone that has been doing it longer than ten years becomes a "dinosaur"...a highly trained, highly skilled, highly dedicated dinosaur, but a dinosaur none-the-less.




There's the impact on personal life:

Along the road to becoming certified, comes the obvious issues...buying gear, traveling far, and managing time. The biggest issue would be time. Consider that I train pretty much every Sunday of the month and once during the week if possible. Sometimes there are weekend long and even WEEK long trainings. This makes it hard to spend time with my fiancé, hard to schedule things with family and friends, and hard to feel like I've had a relaxing weekend before heading back to work. Usually what happens is my one true day off each week is reserved for catching up with work around the house. For my first dog, Hero, Lori did an amazing amount of training with me, which really helped minimize the times that I would normally not have been with her. Together, she and I trained Hero. And this is just trainings...Then there are the searches...

Above are two missing persons fliers that I've received at searches.  As you can see, some are professionally done with tons of information, and others are done on the fly with just scanning a photo and handwriting information before copying.

Searches:

One thing I said in answer to the person asking me about SAR was that I've seen the best in humanity and the worst in humanity...often times during the course of the same search. When I was in full swing with responding to searches, I would get called out for a search on average once a month. Sometimes it would be more frequently, sometimes a month would go by with nothing. And when you get called out, here are the times that it happens:

1) When you're at work
2) When you've JUST gotten home from a long hard day at work
3) When it's 1:00am
4) When the weather is blizzarding, or hot and humid
5) When you're in a movie theater
6) When it’s New Years Eve
7) When it's 2 miles from home or when it's 250 miles from home.

In a personal search report, you can see I was celebrating Hero's birthday after just getting home from work. And while on the way, the missing person was found.

When responding to a search, a large portion of the missing people are found before you can get there. You might just be leaving your house after having packed up your gear, suited up (and not to forget your dog!), and hitting the road ~ which is nicer than, getting turned around when you're just a few miles from the scene. It's great that they were found, and even better if they were found alive and well...but there's something inside that is still just a little disappointed that I wasn't able to get my dog out and do a task. More often, I would make it to a search scene and it would be any number of environments. I've arrived at a search where it's set up like a small city, with hundreds of people. Searchers, law enforcement, management, media, family, and general public all doing whatever they can. Other times I've pulled up and been the first responder there and having to be the first one out into the field. When that happens, you get to make your own task, and leave information on where you went and for what you might recommend for the next searchers to arrive. Some searches are based out of fire stations or churches...others are based right out of the missing persons front yard....and others out of a squad car at the beginning of a trailhead.

A web article of a search after very high temperatures that caused one dog to have to get carried back in out of the field and me only working Hero in short 20-30 minute segments at the risk of him overheating.  Ironically, this search was in an area where we used to train all the time!  So we were pretty familiar with the area.  This article also mentions all the agencies and teams that responded together.

Some searchers don't really want to read the news stories about the missing person, or get to know too much about them. I'm not one of them. I like to put their "human-ness" to them. That helps with motivating me to get out of bed in the middle of the night to head out on a search, or makes me take that much more care with looking for clues and completing my coverage of my assigned sectors. But the toll is that you see some really bad things that really bad people can do to others. Family members sexually assaulting family members, children killed for making a simple mistake, children raped and buried, a mother killing her own daughter and saying she was abducted, a family friend killing a daughter and stealing her money out of an ATM. And the tragic things, like a small boy visiting the area running away from the house he was staying at because he was afraid of dogs that lived there and being found too late, or a man that drowned because he jumped off the boat to save a child that had flipped off an innertube being towed behind and panicked, or two teenaged youths stealing a canoe for a quick "joyride" around a lake and flipping it and drowning. Even a man that for whatever reason went off on his own to end his life with a handgun. And also a woman that shot herself while sitting under a tree with a picture of her family in her lap. Some tragic things can even be done by Mother Nature. Responding to the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans after Katrina & Rita showed me peoples lives being washed away...literally. Seeing where their last moments were in an attic waiting for help with nothing but a bag of Cheez-Its and a bible or being washed into a fence with thousands of boards and debris, or even under a house, makes me appreciate what I have and makes me think how I might go out and would I have any control on how when it's my time. Coming home from these searches is always very emotionally draining. But the UPSIDE is seeing the best in humanity, like the older neighbors that aren't fit enough to go hiking about but are able to carve hiking staffs for the searchers, or set out food and drink. Or the children that aren't trained searchers, but remembered seeing the photo of the missing woman and stumbling across her in the woods and getting a cab to drive them into the base camp to say they saw her. And even better are the times when the missing person is found alive, when a dog catches scent in the middle of the night and takes off 200 yards to the missing people and jumps around on them all happy, or the searcher that looks where you wouldn't expect to find someone (like in a culvert under a road) and finding the person who answers back "I'm okay" when asked if they were alright...like it was nothing but just being normal laying under a road!

You may have noticed, but I was able to pull out of my head way too many "sad endings" than "happy endings"...all too often, that's just the case really. But bottom line, people are happy that we either bring closure, or help them START closure, by bringing their loved ones home one way or another.

A picture of Hero and I about to head out on a search task.

There's the reward:

All the people on my team are people that I would normally not ever have met from the circles I run with. Pretty much everyone comes from a different background, or enjoys different things. The only thing we have in common is our drive to do the volunteer work with our dogs and enjoying the outdoors and using our skills to help people. But of all the people on my team, and the others that I've met on other teams, every single one of them is doing it for the right reasons, and I would be comforted to know that they would be looking for me if ever I was lost. They are the best group of people I could ever hope to meet.

Then there's the thanks we receive from the community.  Getting a personal thanks from a family member, even after the results of the search may not have been what all had hoped for, is a very touching thing.  One mother of a drowned child said afterwards "This was my sons last gift to give...that it brought all the people of the community together".

And working with my dog is amazing. I enjoy having the relationship with him where he is my pet where I can laugh at him and scratch my head wondering why he does half the stuff he does, but also where he is my partner and I'm seeing him grow into his own where he's learning his skills, and has a working mentality when the orange vest goes on and the words "Find ‘Em" is said to him. If he's going to be anything like my last dog, then I'll be extremely lucky. He's what's keeping me doing this. He's what turned me into a dinosaur last year. Doing this for a hair under eleven years is all because he enjoys what he's doing, and because he is, I am too.