Last week our community was in crisis.
On Wednesday morning, I noticed on Facebook that a little boy was missing and there was a call for searchers. I thought it would be a quick neighbourhood search and he would be located in someone's house. An hour later, more posts were going up about the search and the need for volunteers. We were almost done our lessons for the day and we were looking forward to going out to find a creek to watch the salmon run. By the time I had read the message 4 or 5 times, my heart felt stuck in my throat and I couldn't concentrate.
Finally, I said to my children, "This is the scenario. There is a little boy a year younger than Rafe who is lost. His family must be terribly worried about him. We would be terribly worried if Rafe was missing. Should we go on our field trip or should we go look for him?" The answer was unanimous...let's go search. I started to find some lunch and I was thinking about the situation. How helpful would my children actually be? We live in a wilderness area - what if we came across the boy after a predator had? Am I willing to have that be something my children are exposed to? The answer of course was no so I phoned a friend who I knew wouldn't be able to go (she had a baby a couple of months ago with another toddler in the home). I asked if she would help out the search by caring for my kids. She agreed and a few minutes later I was out joining the volunteers waiting for an opportunity to search.
I ended up being gone for many hours. Our church was opened up as the command center for volunteers, so after searching for several hours, a group of us ran over to the church to set it up for the influx of volunteers who would be coming in. I felt overwhelmed as I saw within a very short space of time, the halls filled with people waiting to register to search. The line stretched out the door and into the parking lot. Cars were parked not only in our lot but all the way down the streets and the people still came. It was incredible. My husband came home from work and picked the kids up (already fed supper no less) while I spent more hours at the church helping with the organizational aspect of the search. In the early evening hours, there was an Amber Alert issued for the boy and our hearts filled with fear as we thought of the little boy in the hands of someone dangerous. I was finally kicked out (lovingly) by a sister in our ward who reminded me that the search would be going on the next day and I still needed to sleep to care for my own babies.
Thursday morning, I again dropped my kids off with my friend and came prepared to either help in the church or go out and join the search parties. I was assured the kitchen would function without me so I joined a group heading out to the woods to do grid searches. The day time volunteer numbers were definitely down from the day before so I was glad that I had come again. We had a fairly small area for our first search but the brush was dense. We had to head straight through...regardless of what was in front of us. The whole time I prayed that we would find something to indicate the boy was in the area, all the while praying that we wouldn't find his body. A paradox in the highest degree I suppose. We headed back to the church for a lunch break and then joined another group in a much larger scale search. This one was intense...up hills and through dense brush. We pushed our way through thistle patches...that reached our eyebrows. The sun was beating down on us and the heat was intense but no one would give up. We felt desperation to find the boy. In the back of my mind were my own children. I knew they were safe with someone who I trusted and love and that was all I needed to know so that I could focus on the task at hand. We were out for a couple of hours on this search and needed a break when we got back. However, when we heard there was yet another search going out, my friend and I signed up for that one as well. It felt so much better to be out searching than to sit around waiting for news at home. By 6:30 I knew my body was tired and I needed to quit for the day. In fact, I must have looked exhausted because a friend of mine stopped to pick me up for the short trip back to the church. He said that driving by and watching me walk, he wasn't sure I would have actually made it to the church to sign out for the day. I picked up my children and felt overwhelming love and appreciation that I had them to hold in my arms. I needed to decompress so later that night I ran over to my friend's house (the same one I was searching with) and we stayed up til all hours of the morning talking about our feelings and experiences while we waited for her husband to come home from his shift at the church. (We needed men there all night with it being a 24 hour command center.) It was amazing how this experience was changing my life.
Friday morning, through a massive Facebook campaign, we had a lot of volunteers again. One woman who joined us drove in from a couple hours away, on her own, to be a part of the search. We immediately adopted her into our group because it made a difference to have a sense of belonging while we were out doing this. We did a short neighbourhood search and then we were back into the brush. People were starting to get frustrated at the small amounts of ground that we needed to cover so thoroughly (we had to stand touching shoulder to shoulder). It had to be done though for proper procedure. The heat was intense again on Friday and I was glad that I had found my water pack that morning. By this time, we had started sharing our stories with the people around us. We were opening up to each other and listening to one another. It was an incredible day (except for one angry man who kept letting tree branches go flying into my face!) and I was again grateful to be a part of it. The only thing that saddened me was that I was supposed to meet a blogging friend in a nearby city for a field trip day for school and we had to cancel. I knew that my heart wouldn't have been in the trip and I would have felt a need to return early to find out any news on the missing boy. Thankfully she understood and we can hopefully get together another time in the near future.
Saturday dawned with a lot of hopeless faces at the church. People were fearing the worst...that the boy was gone without a trace and yet there was so much to still inspire us. Searchers had come from far and wide to answer the call for help. It was amazing. I know I use that word a lot in this post but it really was. This was one small boy from a family in a small town and yet the entire country seemed to be praying and sitting on edge waiting for news of him. So many people, myself included, didn't know this little boy or his family. We grouped up again and headed out to the roughest terrain we had been in yet. The slopes were steep and the deadfall was almost impassible in places. Every step caused the ground under our feet to break and we would fall through. A woman beside me leaned her hand on a tree trunk and the entire thing fell over...rotted through. We got tangled in spider webs and got stuck in thistles and wild rose bushes. It was so hot that one of our SAR team members got heat stroke...she had come from another end of our province and it had been a cool wet summer. Her body couldn't adjust as quickly as she needed it to for our dry heat. Finally, under duress we had to quit after many hours. So many of us wanted to keep going. "What if there is a clue in the next pass through the brush? What if? What if?" However, exhaustion makes us careless in searching and moving through the trees and we had to give it up for the day. It was hard to go home but I picked up my kids after their 4th day in childcare, and brought them home.
Surprisingly I was very hopeful that night. The boy's parents had made a plea to his abductor. My prayers changed to pleading that the voices of light would reach through all the voices of darkness and temptation that had hold of his mind. I prayed that the boy would be returned safely and then I thought how he would belong to all of us in some sense when this was over. I even started planning a community celebration. I slept in the living room that night with my son. I woke up early and listened to him breathe trying to decide what my game plan would be for the day. Sunday's search was planned as intense...there would be a fitness test that had to be passed before people could join. I knew my body was strong enough at that point but I also worried about my children. It was a difficult choice to make. And then suddenly, the choice was removed. My friend called at 6:30 am to tell me that the boy had been returned to his home. The joy that filled my heart was overflowing. I woke up my husband and kissed my children and flew out the door to celebrate the good news at the church with my searching friends. I restrained myself from honking the horn and shouting the good news at the top of my lungs waking up my neighbourhood on my way up there! There was still a manhunt going on for the abductor but that was turned over to the RCMP and our volunteer time wouldn't be needed anymore. The best part of the day was when the family of the boy popped over to the church for dinner and I got to see the little boy for the first time...looking only a little wary at the people around him but running around and playing with his siblings. It was the closure I needed.
Part of me worried about dropping school for two and a half days to search. What would people think of me for not putting my children's education as priority in my life? What kind of mother was I for letting someone else care for my children for four days? And then I had to stop and think, if it was my son, would I want people out doing for him what I wasn't allowed to do? It didn't matter what other people thought - I was doing what I knew I needed to do. The kids were excited to know that I was involved in something like this. They watched news broadcasts looking for me and were thrilled when they saw someone they knew out searching in the brush. I think they understood the bigger picture. Yes, we missed a couple days of school but they learned a whole lot about life in those two days. They learned about service, and fitness, and the importance of good food, water and sleep to our health. They learned about trusting people and "stranger danger" and the eternal nature of families. I don't think I could have taught those lessons more effectively had we sat down in school all day.
PS I hope this didn't come out as a "pat myself on the back" sort of post. I needed to record my experiences as part of my closure. So many people did so much to help with this search. People spent many more hours than I did involved in this. My part was just a small drop in a bucket of sacrifice that happened here over the five days that the little boy was missing...but I'll be forever changed by the experience.
