A new page was created in Facebook for people who are from my home town. It isn’t a tidy page, few people ever search for an existing thread before starting a new one, but every so often one starts where you connect with an old friend (or adversary!) and learn something new. The age/generation thing is compressed – where in high school it was important if you were a year or two older than others, now we’re all grown up and it is generally inconsequential unless we’re trying to figure out if someone went to school with us or one of our siblings.
I’ve published a few stories there but they end up long and I’ve deleted them after a while. I wrote about my mother, undergoing cancer treatment, requesting salmon when the Copper River Salmon came in (her last meal request, she died two weeks later), but decided that for that site it was Too Much Information. A couple of folks were sorry to see it go, but I decided it was too much of the family in that open site. But it would have been fine in a blog.
I wrote another one over there last night that I may well take out, it was also too long, but since I started writing it I finished it. Here goes, and maybe I’ll pick up an illustration for it, but since it was in the dark, it’s probably best to imagine that no one could see much of anything during this event:
I was on one rescue where two of us from the USFS were the first to get to the trailhead (French Creek) because everyone else was driving from Everett and we worked in Darrington. The sheriff couldn’t keep up with seasoned foresters, especially with all of the huge blowdown on the trail, and I was second getting to the woman who had (it turned out) a spiral fracture of her femur. Her boyfriend had wrapped her in all her clothes (after a wall of ice at the creek had collapsed on her- he dragged her away) and hiked out for help. Hours had passed.
I got there a couple of minutes after my partner, who had dropped his pack, put a thermometer in her mouth, and was preparing to do the usual first-aid things to make her comfortable and take vital signs. I thought “what can I do to help? He’s done everything?” and it seemed to me that lying in the total dark, except for the stars, and listening to the coyotes howl in that valley below Whitehorse, that it must seem unreal that we had arrived. So I sat down beside her and took her hand. She gripped my hand like I was hauling her into a life raft – hard, and for a long time. At first dawn a Chinook from Whidbey hovered over the valley and she was lifted into a basket and up and out. We all walked back down to the vehicles.
I saw her a couple of days later in the hospital. Her boyfriend rode up in the elevator with me and we didn’t recognize each other – our entire transaction of several hours had been in dark except for flashlights. When I told her who I was she brightened up – and the first thing out of her mouth was that she hadn’t believed it was real until I took her hand. I was so glad I’d been able to do that for her. Nothing technical about that rescue, just hard hiking and hand holding. 
