“No ropes!”
I squeeze my eyes shut as I struggle. One EMT, a woman, leans in and speaks into my ear. Her voice is low and matter-of-fact. “I need you to breathe for me, Ruth. Breathe in deep, breathe out slowly.”
At first I can’t do it, but I can key in to her voice. She sounds confident, there’s a natural authority to her, and she repeats her instructions until I obey. I breathe until I stop struggling.
“We have to strap you in now. If you struggle, we will do it anyway.” She isn’t unkind, she’s just letting me know how it is. I appreciate that. She reminds me of a horse trainer. I open my eyes. There are no more hallucinations of Wolfman. Instead, I focus on the calm EMT. She in her forties with dyed blond hair. She looks like she’s lived a hard life, like she’s seen things most people never do. It makes me trust her.
I still don’t like those straps, but I stay quiet. They’re like yellow seat belts, and they force me to the board and keep me there. Despite my efforts to breathe in deep and slowly, the panic creeps in around the edges. The woman can see I’m barely holding it together.
“What if we raise the upper portion so it’s like you’re sitting up? You want to try that?” Behind her, other EMTs protest, but she sticks a hand out, overruling their concerns with a gesture.
I lock onto her gaze and nod.
With a crick, the stretcher is popped up like a lawn chair and my whole world changes. I can see what’s around me and I’m overcome in a whole new way. I’ve never seen so many emergency -vehicles in all my life. The dancing lights in the mist are explained. Red and blue lights on cop cars, red lights on fire engines, amber lights on search-and-rescue vehicles—lights swirl everywhere around me. Where there aren’t emergency vehicles or dark green DNR trucks, there are regular cars, and filling in the spaces in between are -people. Dozens and dozens of people.
Most of them wear cheap fluorescent vests. It takes me a second, but I realize these are volunteers, people who have been searching for me in these mountains. In the early sunlight it isn’t easy to see their faces, not from this far away, but I search the crowd and see no one I know. These are strangers who have been trying to find me.
Even if I can’t see them well, I can feel their anxiety. Their energy is like a wave reaching out to me: their concern, their fear. Only then do I see the police tape that has been strung everywhere like holiday streamers. Cops and EMTs are on this side of the flimsy wall, the searchers on the other.
It strikes me—they don’t know if I’m alive or dead.
So far I haven’t felt much in the way of pain. Then they hoist the stretcher from the ground up to rolling height. The sudden jerk sets my body screaming. The blond EMT must have seen my expression because she’s right back beside me.
“Keep breathing, Ruth. Focus on that for me. Breathe in, breathe out.”
It’s good having a job, it centers me, but it all feels so precarious.
We start our journey toward the ambulance. It’s as if the stretcher has no shocks at all. The ground is smooth for a forest floor, but against my injuries it feels like a rumble strip. My whole world is breathing.
After a few feet a cop comes up alongside me and says, “Your family is already on the way to the hospital. They’ll meet you there.”
I see them in my mind, waiting for me. I see them overwhelmed and crying, and I recoil from the thought of it. I can’t make this okay for them. I can’t make it okay for me, let alone them.
My EMT looks concerned. “Don’t worry about anything but breathing, okay?”
I nod, but that nod is a lie. Instead of focusing on my breathing, I remember imagining what it would be like walking out of the woods a triumphant hero. I imagined what it would be like, to cry and hold my family, my heart bursting with relief and joy. I never imagined that this moment would be nothing. I never imagined some stranger named Sean would spark more emotion in me than my own family.
My stretcher keeps rolling. It’s a surreal method of locomotion. I search the yellow sky for the moon, missing him. He’s not there. I need the moon. He’d understand me right now. Nobody else can understand me.
Finally, we reach pavement and my ride evens out. Now I can see the crowd, all the volunteers. Each one is a stranger to me. Then I notice a man without a search-and-rescue vest. Taking him in, his expression, his energy, he feels different from the people with the vests on. It hits me that he is nothing but an onlooker, some guy who saw a commotion and wondered if he’d get to see a dead body or some blood.