Reading (For Dummies)

Two Days in the Valley

At an invitation from Henry, I went to a Volunteer Search and Rescue function over the weekend, where trackers, K-9 handlers, and amateur radio operators got together to do drills searching for people in the wilderness.

First, I should back up. I had lunch with Jae on Friday, and he said to me, "Reid, you need to get away from here. If you stay too long, you're going to turn into a redneck." I hadn't told him of my weekend plans. Jae is what I like to call a Sage Advisor...

Anyway, to get back to the point. I went down to Highland Forest to volunteer as a victim for the tracking dogs on Friday night. When it got dark, I had to wander into the woods at predetermined GPS coordinates. Sitting at 10PM under a log, wrapped in a camo net, the handler doing his night dog training was unable to find me. He was navigating by compass (a requirement) and got quite lost. So I sat for two hours in the cold drizzle with just my thoughts to keep me company. It was quite interesting.

After they called it a night, I walked out of the woods without a flashlight (not allowed to give away my location to the handler) and met up back at base camp, where I got about 2 hours of shut-eye. Then it was up at dawn for more rescue operations.

Henry bright and chipper^W^W^W at sunrise

Saturday's activities involved placing us into a scenario involving a bear fight, in which I left my wife Annie (no kidding, that's what they named the dummy that we deposited in the woods) and a few friends to fend for themselves. As the story goes, I was drunk and ran off, she got killed by the bear.

After a placement at a bit after 8am, a fake dispatch was placed to the volunteers to find some missing persons, with no other info. So the search area was the whole park (which is quite big). After about a half hour of searching, I was found by one of the dogs.

Good boy

It was pretty interesting. Once again, I was covered with a bit of camo. The dog caught my scent, ran up, nuzzled my face for a second, then grabbed the radio out of my hand. It ran back to its handler (quite a ways away), deposited the radio in front of him, then picked it up and ran back to where I was, leading him right to me. I was pretty impressed with the intelligence that the little critter showed.

The rest of my 4-party crew was not discovered for another 4 hours. Odd, since we weren't that far dispersed.

As with most things, the searching needed a serious injection of leadership. The dog handlers and grid searchers/EMTs seemed to work pretty well, but the authoritative base type people kept crawling all over each other, not letting the Wilderness EMTs practice extraction and what-not. Over the years, I've been developing a much deeper respect for the modern military system, simply because one of lower rank does what his/her commanding officer says, generally without question. If only all volunteer services could operate so smoothly.

After spending a night sleeping in a ditch and an afternoon lazing in the chilly sun, I was ready for a real bed again. Or at least a futon. But first, I had to have a last meeting with my group before our Encrypted Filesystem presentation.

Karan, Myself, and Yuhua

So in the end, I think Jae is wrong. I am constantly gravitating towards foreigners and new viewpoints. It can't be helped in academia...even when Syracuse is involved.