When You Find My Body by D. Dauphinee

Author:D. Dauphinee [Dauphinee, Dee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

All Leads Explored

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

At certain times, all spoken language is inadequate. This becomes clear when one tries to explain to a family that a loved one is lost and there is no knowledge of their fate. Lieutenant Adam, several of the wardens, and the Maine State Police tried to keep George Largay and the rest of Gerry’s family members abreast of the search efforts. There was pain on all sides.

By Saturday, July 27, the fifth full day Gerry was lost, the major search effort was at its zenith. Helicopters searched both sides of the Appalachian Trail again. Planes were used. And again Gerry heard the planes. Several dog teams split up and combed the woods. Horses and ATVs roamed the tote roads. More than one hundred men and women volunteers bushwhacked through the forests. Dozens of local people searched on their own, feeling they knew the area better than anyone—people from the villages of East Madrid, Barnjum, and Phillips. Maine Forest Service and US Border Patrol personnel assisted the wardens in any way they could. Gerry wasn’t found.

Kit Parks—a woman Gerry had met at Warren Doyle’s Appalachian Trail Institute—had sensed something about Inchworm and enjoyed her enthusiasm; they had quickly become friends. Now she showed up with Jane Lee to join the search. They spoke with wardens and the Largay family. The two intrepid women hiked from Route 27 in Stratton (where George had waited for Gerry to show) to the Spaulding Mountain Lean-To. They spent the next four days looking for her, hoping to be reunited with Inchworm on a trail somewhere.

It was also on Saturday that Gerry’s food supply was essentially gone. She spent some time improving her tent site, but she likely spent a good deal of time in her sleeping bag. She read what precious little reading material she had—including an excerpt from Terry Blue Moon Bliss’s trail blog, which she’d printed out after meeting and hiking with him in late June and early July. She added more pine needles, twigs, and sticks under her tent to build up a sort of platform to try and keep the floor of her tent dry. The woods were very damp from the torrential rainfall three days earlier and from the record rainfall throughout the previous month. In the forest, night is a time for animals and for those people open to the sounds in the dark. Though Gerry feared being alone at night, she was dealing with it the best she could. She carried a rosary . . . perhaps it helped assuage her fears. Without a doubt, people who are lost experience a high emotional arousal, and typically—like Donn Fendler seventy-four years before—they become distraught during the ordeal. The stress can even cause nausea and abdominal pain, which are probably from what is called a vagal response.

The vagus nerve is the tenth of twelve pairs of cranial nerves and is the longest in the body.

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