It’s 7 p.m. the day after Columbus Day, and I’m on my first call-out on the Monterey County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team. An hour ago, the car of a suicidal subject, reported missing by his family two days before, was located at Veterans Memorial Park, an oasis of campsites and picnic tables in the middle of the city of Monterey, surrounded by wild ravines, oak-pine forest, and deer trails. A call for assistance was immediately issued, causing pagers to beep countywide. I phoned Sgt. Moses to say I’d be at the substation in ten, jumped into my uniform, and headed out.

My first mission. I am nervous and excited both.

When we pull up at the staging area in our big yellow truck, over a dozen people are already assembled: two Monterey City police officers, who found the car; five sheriff’s deputies and a like number of volunteers; and SAR volunteer Miranda with her search dog in training, Izzy. Most of us wear screaming yellow shirts with our purpose silkscreened on the back--just like on TV: SEARCH AND RESCUE.

The missing man’s car, a dark blue late-model BMW hatchback, hunkers in the middle of this scene. A policeman and two deputies peer inside with flashlights. “There’s his jacket,” one says. Another, on the passenger side, comments: “There’s a piece of paper on the seat. I sure would like to see what it says.” They try the doors. “I suppose that little red light on the dash means if we break a window, the alarm will sound.” “Yeah, and keep on sounding until the battery dies,” responds the other.

Sgt. Joe Moses appears out of the dark, says to Miranda: “You probably won’t get much scent; the site has obviously been compromised.” He jerks his head toward the men with flashlights circling the car. “But I want you and Brandon to head up that path”--he gestures toward a gap in the darkness--”with the dog, see if anything comes up.” She nods, then gets busy fitting Izzy, a barrel-shaped Queensland heeler, in a bright orange vest with a neon-green light-stick. A few minutes later the threesome heads into the night.

As I watch them take off, I sense motion to my left and turn. A short, stocky man with prominent cheekbones and a sturdy jaw veers toward me from across the street. He’s carrying two high-power flashlights with handles, one in each hand. “When are you going to go down into the canyon?” he asks, jerking his chin to indicate the darkness out of which he emerged. “What?” I say. He repeats his question, edgily. He isn’t one of us. I say, “We haven’t gotten any orders yet,” and turn away, not sure whether I should have said even that. He turns and goes back across the street, disappears back into the dark.

A policeman approaches the BMW with a fingerprinting kit and pulls out a soft, squirrelly brush that he dips into a metal canister. He swishes the brush over the driver’s window, over the handle, over the edge of the door.

Soon Sgt. Moses comes over and points at me, Todd, Sierra, and Jesse: “You four, head that way.” He jerks his head to the right, indicating the direction Miranda and the deputy had gone. “Two of you stay on one side of the path, the other two on the other side. Look all around you. Look down. Look up. Jesse”--he singles out the deputy--”you’re team leader.”

We switch on our headlamps and set off. The four beams of light float through the darkness, picking out branches and bushes, a sandstone outcropping up a steep ravine, slippery slopes of pine needles. A slight trail heads up to the right. Todd follows it, and I trail behind. Nothing. Back to the path. We walk slowly, searching for a clue. Jesse peels off to the left, then reappears. We don’t speak. We just peer as deeply as we can into the dark forest--the big stage, unlit tonight except by our headlamps, a dance of shifting images. Though eventually, perhaps, one of these feeble lights will become the spotlight that reveals the main act.

On the ride over, Brandon had joked with Sgt. Moses, betting five dollars we wouldn’t find the subject. Moses bet we would. In this rough terrain in the dark, I am siding with Brandon. My hopes go in that direction too, because if we do find him, I’m expecting the worst. I’d heard muttered remarks from the officers in charge: “back doing drugs;” “feelings of hopelessness.” He told his family twice, on Friday and again on Saturday, “This is no way to live.” Then on Sunday he was gone. And a rope was missing from the garage.

A brief detour takes us up a long flight of wooden steps to a quiet neighborhood. Nothing there, so we drop back down and head across a slope, through a network of shrubbery with bedding-down spots for transients--empty now, save for discarded food tins and scraps of cloth, a wadded-up plastic tarp. Again nothing; we return to the path. Todd points at a chain-link fence that marks the boundary between Monterey and the U.S. Army’s Defense Language Institute. “I’ll see if there are breaks in the fence, any way through,” he says. As we watch him scramble up the hill, pairs of shining green lights punctuate the night’s blackness: raccoons; they’ve stopped their nighttime rambling to watch. Perhaps they know the secret we seek the answer to.

While Todd moves along the fenceline above us, I move onto what looks like a deer path, a slight ribbon of dirt between a tangle of blackberry vines on my left, the start of the slope up to the DLI on my right. “Does that keep going?” Jesse asks. I proceed a few yards farther, past a clot of fallen limbs. “Yeah, it even opens up.” I step into the small clearing, listening as Jesse and Sierra follow me. To my right is a steep hill that, flattening out a ways up, is topped by the DLI fence; oak trees give the scene texture. To my left is a short rise.

I choose left, climb, then drop into a ravine clogged with fallen branches. Downstream, I see the lights of a car on the road a couple hundred feet off. I stand enjoying the silence, the moment alone. Do I know what I’ve gotten myself into, volunteering for Search and Rescue? Not really. But that’s part of the allure. Life is uncertain. I’m glad to be able to do something. I watch as another car shines its lights my way, then turns and moves up the hill, the drivers unaware of the drama being played out so close by. I look up the ravine. The going gets more tangled, but I decide to check it out and start off. Just then Sierra’s voice comes wafting down: “Anne? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“You can come back.”

I slip and slide back up the hill. “What’s up? Did we get recalled?”

“No. We found him.”

Dropping down to the path, I join Sierra and Jesse. “Where?”

“Up there.” Jesse shines his light up the opposite slope, illuminates a yellow rope. It’s all I can see: a taut rope moving in the still air. Jesse says, “It was the only straight thing around. And then I saw his shoulders.” Jesse is taller than me, with a different perspective on the scene. I step a foot to the right, and then I see the man’s head, wavy brown hair. I step back to the left.

That’s enough. We found him. It has taken just under half an hour.

For another 20 minutes I stay planted, waiting to direct whoever comes along next to inspect the scene. Eventually the two Monterey policemen show up, and a couple of SAR volunteers. They clamber up the steep slope, slipping on the dirt, reconnoiter a flattened wire fence. I watch as their lights paint the trees, listen to them as they talk softly, unintelligibly. One has brought a digital camera, and occasionally a sharp flash of light reminds me that this is a crime scene. Just like on TV.

Miranda arrives. “We were right here,” she says, “but Izzy didn’t scent it.” Izzy hasn’t been working on cadavers for long--just a couple of months--though she has mastered the art of finding live subjects, at least on trainings. Miranda is upset, disappointed. She wanted her dog to find him.

It turns out the brother--the guy with the two flashlights--stood right here too, in this same spot, and shined those big lights around. Maybe he stood in not quite the right spot; maybe he was a little too short to catch a glimpse of what he was seeking. Maybe he didn’t really want to see that anomalous straight line slicing through the organic oaks. One thing I’m sure of: he wasn’t disappointed not to find him. He still had hope at that point. He had hope right up until Jesse radioed to the command center, “We found him,” and that message was relayed to the family, who were standing close by.

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.

After 20 minutes, half an hour, the coroner has finished his examination. Two team members lift the white body bag up over the dangling figure and zip it closed. Our tallest reaches with a sharp knife and cuts the rope. The body slumps into the men’s arms, and they carefully lay him in the litter, strap him in.

I stand on the wire fence to keep it flat. The six men surround the litter and lift it, slinging the webbing over their shoulders for support. They head down the incline, and I follow. Glancing back, I see the coroner ’s flashlight shining on the dangling rope.

At the clot of tree limbs, the men slow, lower their burden to the ground, inch it under and through. The blackberry thorns grasp at their clothes. They struggle along the narrow path, then emerge onto the asphalt trail. One by one they switch their headlamps off as their eyes adjust to the overcast night, to the contrast the trail makes as it flows between soft mounds of pine duff.

We walk slowly, reverently. It is very quiet. No wind to clatter leaves. No talk. Just our soft footfalls.

But then, from behind us, a melody rises. A trumpet, muted. Two slow notes and a longer one, two more and a long--floating upward, soberly, hauntingly, to dissipate into the darkness. Day is done, gone the sun, from the hills, from the lake, from the sky. All is well, safely rest. God is nigh.

“Taps.” As it plays, we slow to match the pace of the lone bugle. It is spooky, eerie. Beautiful.

There is an easy explanation for this haunting bit of serendipity: every evening at ten, someone at the Defense Language Institute punches a button and sends the tune wafting through loudspeakers--a farewell to the day just past, perhaps an acknowledgment of the conflicts around the world where American soldiers are at risk, and are dying. It’s one of the local sounds, along with the barking of sea lions and the chatter of gulls; a reminder of this town’s history.

Tonight, though, the explanation doesn’t matter. Tonight, we have all--all of us--been blessed with a solemn, and affirming, moment of grace. It is the hour of departure, oh abandoned one. For those of us who remain as well, it is an hour, if not of departure, then of reckoning. Yes, of reckoning. We are all touched by this grace.

Since this first call, Anne Canright has been on the Monterey County Search and Rescue team for two and a half years. There have been more recoveries, but also many rescues. The work and the team camaraderie continue to be satisfying and stimulating, and to teach ever new lessons in life.

Excerpt from “The Song of Despair” from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin, published by Chronicle Books. Copyright © 1969 by W.S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of W.S. Merwin. All rights reserved.