|
I'm a search and rescue volunteer for Nevada County, near Tahoe, and I love the shit out of it. I've been fairly active in my community in one way or another, mostly because it's a good way to meet good people and to offset the regular disheartening misery of online interaction, but search and rescue people are some of the best folks I've ever met. Nevada County does an excellent job of training its SAR members and is generally well-equipped, especially for a rural county, and respected, so I'm fortunate that that's my first exposure to SAR. Whether it's 3 a.m. Wednesday morning or 10 p.m. Saturday night or 6 a.m. some other morning, in town or 30 miles into the woods, a bunch of people will show up with smiles and coffee and bright uniforms and do whatever needs to be done to get the job done. I spent three of the last five days putting down a pile of miles by snowshoe, searching for a missing aircraft. We had air national guard, civil air patrol, CalOES, and SAR crews from counties around the state (and one from out-of-state). There's all the usual stuff that I benefit directly from -- I've received a lot of training, including medical and specialized skills but also in incident command, and SAR in our area pretty well checks off my "regular physical exercise" box -- but the greatest benefit to me by far is the time I've spent with those good folks. It's the perfect counter to all of the shitty cynicism that's so rampant everywhere these days. Bringing the lost, sick, and injured back home, locating evidence in difficult cases, and even retrieving the deceased are all rewarding of course too. |