...
So soon after we left that guy out in the water because it got dark. I guess two little girls are a bigger deal than some anonymous fellow caught out in a flash flood, possibly trying to save some kids who'd been out in the field, since the search was not called on account of night on the little girls.
I am so glad they were found alive and intact. They'd asked their mom if they could go out for a walk in the woods, and she said no, so they went anyway — according to her report — and got lost following a deer trail. They were found a mile and a half from home, forty-four hours after they went missing, hunkered down under some bushes, having decided to stay put once they realized they were lost.
The search was a huge, hairy deal. Agencies from everywhere, including canine units. Some piece of shit let loose a drone camera that nearly downed a search helicopter, and all the agency heavy vehicle traffic on the miles-long dirt driveway, after so much rain, tore it up so badly most regular vehicles can not get through. The parents started a Go-Fund-Me account to get the money for it to be repaired.
The girls went to the hospital to check and deal with dehydration and got a huge pepperoni pizza and some gallons of soda pop to revive their little systems the all-American way.
I can't feel that good about it because of the poor guy who drowned just the night before those girls took off, and the whole thing put me in mind of when I, and my precious little sister, got lost on one of our many nature adventures, with permission, when we were even younger than these two... six and four.
Even though we really were lost, I have had a very good sense of direction, and able to read maps, since I was three. On every family vacation since I was three, my mother was fired as navigator and I was in charge of the maps. So, when we were lost up in the hills above our house, and alarmed that Mom would start worrying any minute that we were not back for dinner, we came upon the end of a paved road we'd never seen before, I jumped out of my body and made a map in my head of all the roads we'd been on in the area.
I determined that this had to be the top dead end of the road on which our aunt and uncle lived and could even judge how far down the road we'd find it. We went there and called home for a ride.
Yeah, I know, the world was different then, but, this far out in the country, it's not so different. Up on Murder Mountain and down in the towns it is, but this was way out a six-mile long dirt driveway, and they'd followed a deer trail. I do not get how it could have been so hard to merely backtrack the trail, but I have to keep reminding myself that I am weird, NOT normal, that my IQ is way out of range and I can't apply my own standards to others.
It will never stop vexing me and hurting me. Never.
So I hope these two are now cuffed and chained in their room/s until they're thirty, and I'm still aching for that poor man we lost because the helicopter with the light ran out of fuel and did not just refuel and resume the search.
pipe up any time....
