Back at the staging area, I step from light into shadow and again into light, alternately watching the family from the darkness--a voyeur of grief--and chatting lightly with my team members. Someone mentions a silly comment Joe made at the last training, and we chuckle. Miranda reminds us not to laugh too loud. I want the levity, but I also feel respect for the tremendous loss these people are experiencing. And so I keep stepping away from my team and back into the shadows, where I can watch them hug each other, hold one another.

Jesse is standing next to the truck, also in the darkness. “So, Anne, is this what you were expecting when you joined up?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting. But I’ve gotten the impression that Search and Rescue isn’t quite right. Search and Recovery may be more like it.”

“Almost all I’ve had is recoveries,” Jesse remarked. “You think you’re going to help . . .” His soft voice trailed off.

“Well, I think it is a help. No matter what.”

We both stand and watch the family. The mother, I assume--a tiny Asian woman, not five feet tall--has just arrived. Her children shroud her in their arms. They form a tightly clumped tableau.

A while later, as, back in the glare of light at the truck’s rear, I stand with a couple of other volunteers, one of the family--a sister?--comes to us. “Are you the people who looked for him?”

We nod.

“I just want to thank you for my family, for all you did.” She looks each of us in the eyes. Her face is fractured with pain. “Thank you.” She pauses, searches our faces. “Thank you.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just nod again, the bill of my black SAR cap covering my eyes. Miranda says, “You’re welcome.” The woman returns to her small group.

Sgt. Moses appears and says, “Anne, I want you to rig the litter in a four-point low-angle carry.” We’d just finished a three-day training, and we’d covered this. I know I know what he wants, and search my memory. That’s right: four long pieces of webbing, tied into loops, half-hitched through the hard-plastic orange litter through openings at foot and head--the loops long enough to drape over a shoulder and then hold with an outside hand at waist level. I move toward the truck compartment where webbing is stored, glad to have a task. “Rig it up,” he continues, “and then we have to wait for the coroner. When he comes, I want you to escort him to the site. All right?”

Once the coroner arrives in his unmarked car, a clot of us heads back to the site. On the deer path, it gets too difficult to carry the litter from the sides, so I take the front and Brandon takes the rear. The team on site directs us to an easy uphill access.

I look up now, and there’s the body. Five or six SAR team members stand in a semicircle around the man--not close, but somehow sheltering. Someone tells me where to drop the litter. I let go and step back, taking my place at the end of the silent line of workers in glowing yellow shirts. Angels of mercy, hallowing this lost soul.

I hear the words of Pablo Neruda:

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

This is what I see: His feet dangle a foot and a half, two feet above the ground. He wears clean brown work boots, leather with metal eyelets, laced firmly with thin cord. The ground is littered with rust-colored pine needles, pine cones, oak duff, twigs. The boots spin slowly. Headlamps and flashlights flicker over the scene; tree trunks glow dimly in the background. The coroner, a tall, lanky man with white hair, wearing a checkered flannel shirt, steps up and begins to inspect the body. Every so often a camera strobe flashes, sharp, like lightning. Gathering evidence.

Alain, standing next to me, says, “How do you think he got that rope up there?” It’s fastened about 15 feet high, to a smooth, gently curving young oak. He seems to have tossed an end repeatedly over the high branch, winding it around until there was enough friction to hold. I wonder if he tested it, and how. I am glad for him that, however he managed to get up high enough and then jump, he did the job he set out to do. A botched suicide would have been even worse. Wouldn’t it?

The coroner touches him gently, slowly spinning him around. The man’s shirt cuffs are rolled above the elbows; his arms hang straight down, relaxed--though his hands are clenched, as if he’d been trying to fit them into the mouths of jars. Soft dark blue shirt, almost new, well-fitting blue jeans. I avoid looking at his face, which has been distorted by the violence he’s done to himself. His body, though, is pleasant to look at, long and lean; at rest. It spins and spins.