In the Eye of the Storm

Transcript

When we're out in the woods, an ounce of prevention -- and of preparation -- are worth considerably more a pound of cure. Those of us who experience the outback as professionals -- like search-and-rescue responder and AF commentator Ken Chiacchia -- take special pride in their wilderness skills. But as Ken tells us, the full force of nature can make even the best preparations seem scant.
The storm didn't exactly take us by surprise -- but we hadn't expected its ferocity. How we each dealt with it, I knew, would reveal a lot about how well we'd prepared ourselves.

The late-summer downpour began as my volunteer search-and-rescue colleagues and I started climbing toward our planned campsite,... a shoulder on the East slope of a hill in Pennsylvania's Quebec Run Wilderness Area. When we got there, the task of starting a fire fell to me.

Building a fire in the rain is no easy task; some of our companions worried aloud about whether I'd succeed. I was confident, but the groupís level of skill was decidedly mixed, with the naysayers at the low end. To be honest, a few of our group should have been much better prepared, considering their experience. The difference between a rescuer and a victim in the woods often hinges not on personal strength, courage, or any of those chest-thumping virtues, but on being calm, purposeful -- and prepared -- enough.

Under a teepee of small sticks of tinder, I placed two Ikea votive candles, a commercial fire-starting pellet made of petroleum wax and sawdust, and a tablet of trioxane fuel offered by one of my friends -- more or less a slice of plastic explosive. I flicked a propane lighter at the base of the little structure.

That thing was gonna start.

Once we had a fire, we segregated into two groups. The more prepared set up shelters immediately. The others wasted time being miserable and huddling around the fire, for its psychological shelter as much as its warmth.

It's ungenerous, but I was feeling a little superior. No, most of our searches donít require true wilderness skills; theyíre spent popping back and forth between a few hours in a suburban wood and the comforts of a Salvation Army chow truck. But every once in a while we get a real back-country search, and all the preparation pays off.

Like when my one-dog, two-man field team drew a midnight search of about 200 acres of steep, rocky West Virginia terrain for Jacob Allen, a lost autistic boy and the subject of a massive search. Though our skills in navigation, safe night-time travel, and search tactics mattered -- as did our sympathy for Jacob -- the psychological ability that our training gave us mattered more, in pushing ourselves past the emotional and physical fatigue. We didnít find Jacob that night. It was another two grueling days before colleagues on another field task carried him out, tired but alive. Manning the base radio at the time, I helped coordinate the rescue. My ability to keep it together, if barely, at a time when I was otherwise falling apart came from the thorough preparation my training had given me.

I was in considerably better morale as I lay back under my improvised lean-to, and the lightning began plastering the top of our hill. The strokes fell so close the deafening crack, the shudder of the ground below us, and the flash happened all at the same time, rattling my back teeth at the same moment it blinded me. I was grateful we hadnít chosen to camp any closer to the summit -- somebody up there really hated that little knoll, it seemed.

In between the cracks, I could hear the soft pads of my search dog Pip's paw fall as, unconcerned, she rotated among my colleagues to see if anybody had leftovers she could wheedle. Our less-prepared colleagues remained posted around the fire. As its smoke loaned an acrid tinge to the air, I smelled the dirt-wet odor of huge raindrops pounding the ground.

I was a little worried about the lightning; maybe everybody was, but you couldn't tell by looking at the ones who'd kept their training up, and I suspect the same was true about me. Our other companions looked rather less sanguine, and again despite myself I felt a bit superior with my credo: do the job, if you leave worrying until later, you often never get around to it.

At that moment, I sensed a fine mist on my face -- the only part of me not wrapped in Gore-Tex. I realized that it was the rain, hitting my poncho-shelter so hard that it was atomizing its way through the coated nylon.

It struck me then that I wasn't safe -- not entirely. I wasn't warm. I wasn't dry.

At once, a thought tumbled me from my high horse: if that storm had really come to get us, the outdoor skills I'd so high-handedly demonstrated would have meant little. Faced with the power of nature, nobody gets to be Superman. We're all fragile, all ultimately unprepared.

For a moment, I could be a tiny, insignificant figure in the eye of the storm, no better or worse than anybody else on that hillside. Profoundly and completely not the center of the universe, but nevertheless part of it, participating with it, at home in it.

I was, I realized, warm and dry -- and safe -- enough.