Saturday, September 3, 2011

how it works

so we couldn't see really what the smell was. We hung over the guard rail and parted the screen of branches and there was nothing down there. The smell at that vantage was more like old garbage than death, and we cut ourselves some slack, no need to go verify that this was either runoff from Mount Rumpke, the local landfill operation, or someone's idea of a compost heap.

We spent the next few days coming up with new places to search, meeting up with other unofficial search teams, roaming around contracting poison ivy and chiggers, mostly. There was literally nothing to find. We saw parts of this town that I hadn't found in16 years of living there and looking for places to hide from everyone else who lived there, including my parents. At one point, my sister and I were poking around the woodsy banks of yet another dry creek bed, another party spot hidden under the arched brush, I told her I wished I'd known about all these places when I was a kid. And then I thought-- maybe it's better that I never did.

We stayed for over a week, till my mom was sick of looking at us, till we had run out of places to look, till we couldn't stand another minute of walking eyes to the ground, wondering what exactly we could possibly be looking for. There was nothing. We would run into other searchers, one the family of some kids I'd gone to school with-- their mother had been at my mother's birthday the year before. "I grew up walking up and down this creek," one said, of the run that intersected Groh lane.  He had been friends with my brother, but I hadn't seen him since he was 11 or 12. It was hard to accept that that burnt brown, skinny little boy with the mop of dark hair was the same person as this 45 year old dad with the greying goatee.  I guess because it meant I was old. I couldn't afford to be old. Not yet.


5 comments:

  1. How is your nephew? Are the police still interrogating him? What are the police doing/saying about this case? What is your nephew thinking as far as what happened? What was the tone of the picture she texted to him that night?

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  2. Sleeping in your own bed again will help but maybe only a little. How is your nephew holding up? News stories seem to go nowhere.

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  3. topazz, no interrogations, he's not a suspect. They're saying everyone is a person of interest. He's been cooperating and they're saying he's being honest and helpful. We can't really talk about what happened or what we think happened. The internet crazies are everyhwere. Some of them even show up at the searches and then go back and "report" that they just know John is guilty because he shook their hand and personally thanked them for helping. The picture was of a photo that John had admired and asked for a photo of.

    Michael-- ok, let's call it sleep. He's ok, we don't let him go online bc they're everywhere. And there really is nothing. A lot of what's in the news is false reporting because they were interviewing some kook neither family knows, who showed up at the searches and told the media she was the "press liaison." Batshit everywhere you look.

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  4. I'm so sorry this is happening. It just seems so hopeless, and yet we have to have some kind of hope don't we??

    Are you home? Going back and forth? Oh I just hate this .... for all of you!

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  5. Hopelessness is kind of a relief. There's nothing I can do, literally. Right now my only hope is that my sister doesn't keep searching, she needs to rest. I'm not going back for the time being. The suspicions and rumors are an epidemic and I don't want to be made sick.

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