31 of 100: A successful search

I spent fifteen or so years on the search & rescue team of our local sheriff's office. Often we helped an injured person out of the wilderness (as in, Ventana Wilderness: the mountains south of Monterey). Sometimes we did body recoveries—people who committed suicide off Bixby Bridge, or drove over the side of Highway One. There were not a few searches for lost hikers. 

Here's a little story about one of those searches. I wrote it, potentially, as a part of an essay I'm working on about death; hence the various references to such. Unfortunately, I can't find the photo that goes with (I know it's in my files somewhere), so instead I've included a photo of me, at a training above the Bixby Bridge. I enjoyed those years.

When the call comes in the middle of the night (as usually happens) and we gather in the dark and hurtle down the coast to search for someone who’s gone missing—sometimes, they don’t end up dead. My favorite SAR story goes like that: four of us volunteers, two Steves, Alain, and me, showed up well into the evening at Pico Blanco Public Camp in the Ventana Wilderness of Big Sur, to search for a young man, an exchange student from Azerbaijan. He’d arrived in the U.S. only the week before, and since school wouldn’t start for another few days, his host suggested a camping trip.
      That first morning at camp, he’d woken up early and decided to hike to the top of the nearby peak, experience the sunrise. And then—he took the wrong way down. And continued down the north fork of the Little Sur River. Away from camp. Away from any people whatsoever.
      When we get a call for a search, past searches flash through my mind. Like the fisherman in this same fork of the Little Sur River, whom Alain found by, basically, stumbling over his upside-down rubber boot. Which was still cradling the man’s foot.
      Like Arvin, a slow hiker who simply disappeared—probably by tripping and falling down a steep hillside. Who knows? This country is rugged. It doesn’t divulge its secrets.
      You can’t help but set out on a search hoping for the best but expecting the worst.
      So here we were, Steve H. and me on the faint track of a trail up above the river out of Pico Blanco Camp, and Steve B. and Alain down by (or in) the river itself.
      All we could really do was call his name, Tengiz! We kept on, sweeping the land with our headlamps, calling: Tengiz! Tengiz! Calling, calling: Tengiz!
      We'd been at it a couple of hours when I heard the crackle of my radio. “We’ve got him! He’s okay!”
      Steve B. later told how, as he worked his way along the scrubby bank of the river, he was calling, and this shape, this body, came rushing down from a fire-hollowed redwood tree and threw its arms around him. Weeping with relief.
      I have a photo of Tengiz and Steve, their arms slung around each other, and a few others of us searchers, backed by our bright yellow Search & Rescue truck. Everyone is smiling. The biggest of smiles.
      That boy is now a man whom I follow desultorily on Facebook. Judging from his random posts, he likes music and soccer. He lived in Turkey for a while, spent some time making candles in Geneva. Presently he's in Moscow.
      I wonder how he thinks of his year in California. Of which this adventure was just the start.