Here If You Need Me: A True Story - Softcover

Braestrup, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316066311 ISBN 13: 9780316066310

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2008

Synopsis

Ten years ago, Kate Braestrup and her husband Drew were enjoying the life they shared together. They had four young children, and Drew, a Maine state trooper, would soon begin training to become a minister as well. Then early one morning Drew left for work and everything changed. On the very roads that he protected every day, an oncoming driver lost control, and Kate lost her husband.

Stunned and grieving, Kate decided to continue her husband's dream and became a minister herself. And in that capacity she found a most unusual mission: serving as the minister on search and rescue missions in the Maine woods, giving comfort to people whose loved ones are missing, and to the wardens who sometimes have to deal with awful outcomes. Whether she is with the parents of a 6-year-old girl who had wandered into the woods, with wardens as they search for a snowmobile rider trapped under the ice, or assisting a man whose sister left an infant seat and a suicide note in her car by the side of the road, Braestrup provides solace, understanding, and spiritual guidance when it's needed most.

Here if You Need Me is the story of Kate Braestrup's remarkable journey from grief to faith to happiness. It is dramatic, funny, deeply moving, and simply unforgettable, an uplifting account about finding God through helping others, and the tale of the small miracles that occur every day when life and love are restored.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Braestrup serves as chaplain to the Maine (Game) Warden Service. She is the author of a novel, Onion, and several bestselling memoirs. She has written for O, the Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, More Magazine and the Huffington Post. She lives in Maine with her husband, Simon van der Ven, and their six children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Here If You Need Me

A True Story

By Kate Braestrup

Little, Brown and Company

Copyright © 2008 Kate Braestrup
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-316-06631-0

CHAPTER 1

A-six-year-old girl has wandered off from a family picnic nearMasquinongy Pond, and she remains missing after a long day of waiting. The MaineWarden Service has mounted a search. There are dozens of people combing thewoods near the picnic grounds. Some are local guys, volunteers from thecommunity, but most of them are game wardens in green uniforms. Handlers fromthe warden service K-9 unit have brought dogs trained to find people, anddogs—those braced in the bows of boats drifting over the surface of thepond's marshy edge—trained to alert to the signature scent of a cadaver.

The parents may or may not know about the cadaver dogs. They may or may notrealize that when Chief Warden Pilot Charlie Later's plane buzzes overhead, heis scanning the brown bed of the pond for a small, pale human shape beneath thewater.

The parents do know this much: they love their child, and their child wanders inan inhospitable environment. They know the dark is coming on. They have beentold that the Maine Warden Service chaplain has been called. What else couldthis be about but death?

Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumpingtheir backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephonerings.

"Your Holiness!" Lieutenant Trisdale roars. "We've got a situation up here byMasquinongy Pond we could use your help with."

So by four, I am waiting by Chickawaukee Lake. Lieutenant Trisdale has sent aseaplane to fetch me. The lake is a ten-minute drive from my house, so I hadtime to eat a bowlful of supper's chicken stew and to swallow a Dramamine. Ihave heard that Charlie Later takes a dim view of wardens who puke in hisairplane, and I don't want to test his tolerance.

My car is parked in the little lot adjoining what passes for a beach, a mud bankthat the city of Rockland improves in summertime with sand and a lifeguard. Ifthis were summer, there would be children paddling in the shallows, canoes andkayaks on the water, and—increasingly—"personal watercraft," or jetskis, zooming around.

But it is late October. The lake, abandoned save for a small flock of migratingmallards, is a placid gray mirror for the autumn afternoon. The sky boasts anarchipelago of clouds so perfect in their imitation of islands that in the leeof the largest one, I can make out an inlet where a boat might find secureanchorage.

I blow on my hands and tuck them into the scratchy woolen armpits of my uniformjacket. I've forgotten my gloves.

People hear warden service and assume I am a prison chaplain. Theypicture me at the Supermax, counseling rapists and accompanying the Dead ManWalking to the electric chair. "Maine doesn't have the death penalty," Iexplain, and in any case, I work with game wardens, not prison wardens. Gamewardens are law enforcement officers who work under the Maine Department ofInland Fisheries and Wildlife. Finding a lost child in the woods is among themany useful things these folks know how to do.

How old a child? "A little girl," the lieutenant had said. Unavoidably, theimage of my youngest daughter, age eight, comes to me. Her name is Anne, but hernickname is Woolie, with manifold familial variations (Woolie-Bully, Wooglet,Woo), and her cheek was warm and soft against my mouth when I kissed her good-bye.

I dial my house to hear my children's voices. There are four altogether. Zacharyis the eldest, at fourteen, and the rest follow in reasonably tidy, two-yearintervals: Peter is twelve, Ellie is ten, Woolie is eight. "I know. You wouldthink we'd planned them," their father would say, deadpan, when othersexpressed surprise (or was it dismay?) at the monotonous regularity with whichhe and I had reproduced.

Woolie answers the telephone with a complaint prepared: Peter has gone off withthe electric pencil sharpener. He won't give it back, and he called Woolie abastard. Such language is insulting and morally wrong. In addition, it'sinaccurate, and I wonder whether this should be an aggravating factor in myadjudication.

"All right, Woogie-Piggie, I'll talk to him.

"Peter, share the pencil sharpener," I tell him when he comes on the line. "Andno cursing."

"Okay," says Peter cheerfully. I can hear Woolie shrieking insults in thebackground. "Peace, Mom-Dude."

It's early in the search. There's hope—real hope, not the faint hope thatfamilies cling to as days drag on.

By now I know not to bother anticipating or planning for these calls. Hope andgrief make a habit of presenting themselves in novel ways every time, and whatis required in the way of a tender and appropriate response changes every timeas well. It does an anxious family no good at all to have the chaplain arriveworn out with worry or projecting her own parental feelings onto a loss thatdoes not belong to her.

"Incidents can be rated on a scale of one to ten," a Denver, Colorado, policedetective once told me. "Sometime during your career, you might get one or twoincidents worth a ten. A bad murder, maybe a young victim, or you shootsomebody, or maybe go through the death of a friend and fellow officer. Thoseare tens. Most incidents are going to be way down on the scale, like maybe a twoor a three. But you know what? I think it's all those little twos, threes, andfours that add up over time. I think those are the ones that get you in theend."

By my lights, a one is when they find the lost person alive. Ones are good. Aten is—well, a ten is a dead warden, I suppose. Still, line-of-duty deathsare rare, if not quite rare enough. (The Maine Warden Service has the highestnumber of line-of-duty deaths of any agency in the state, a total of fourteen inthe 125 years of the service's existence.)

Where is the Masquinongy Pond search going to fall on that Colorado detective'sscale of one to ten? If the child is dead, it's going to be up there aroundseven or eight for all the wardens as well as for me.

Peace.

My children are all alive and well, if not well behaved. I can count on a solidlittle hit of adrenaline to clear my head when I arrive on scene. So I kick idlyat the gravel, take some deep breaths, blow on my hands, wonder whether Peterand Woolie's issues merit intervention by a shrink, fantasize idly about sailingto the islands in the sky.

Those ducks had better get a wiggle on; winter is definitely on its way. Thereare ice crystals forming around the woody stems of the cattails. Turtles, theirmetabolisms slowed to geologic speed, have hunkered down in the mud for sixmonths of cold coma. It won't be long before the surface of the lake freezesinto a solid pane of ice, and anyone who wants to walk on water can. By Januaryit will be thick enough to drive a truck onto, in theory at least. (Every fewyears, the dive team is called out to retrieve the body of a driver whoseestimate of the ice's thickness proved tragically inaccurate.) When the ice isthat thick, I'll be willing to let my children skate, maybe.

Right now, my four children are sitting at the kitchen table, eating the cookiesthey were supposed to save for after supper, doubtless still arguing over thepencil sharpener or, if they've finished with that, arguing over which videothey will watch tonight if Mom is still away and unable to enforce the "novideos on school nights" rule.

"It would be nice if this little girl turns out to be alive," I suggest outloud.

Barely audible at first, above the adenoidal agreement of the ducks, a faintbuzz grows steadily louder. The warden service seaplane suddenly pops up abovethe high blueberry barrens at the far end of the lake. Its appearance breaks theisland illusion; the clouds are clouds again. The plane gives a friendly wing-waggleand swings toward the water. It is aimed at the wrong shore, but I knowby now not to jump and wave. The pilot has to land the plane nose into the wind.When the pontoons have made contact, flinging up twin plumes of white spray andcarving sleigh tracks in the lake's silvery surface, Charlie will turn the planearound, and it will grumble gently to my shore.

Once I'm installed in the passenger seat, Charlie drives the plane hard into thewind, the pontoons skid off the water, and we ascend over the peak of RaggedMountain.

"The lieutenant is going to meet us at Masquinongy Pond," Charlie says. "I guessit's not looking so good."

I nod, looking carefully out the window at distant objects to forestall nausea.Penobscot Bay lies to our right, gleaming blackish blue around the shreds ofland that form Islesboro, Northaven, Vinalhaven, Isle au Haut, and myriad littleislands. I can pick out details: Owl's Head Light, the break-water in RocklandHarbor, the square hull of the ferry backing out of the slip at LincolnvilleBeach. Old mountains, smoothed by glaciers and time, roll off to the north andwest. Charlie turns westward and flies behind the sun.

Charlie's hands rest lightly on the plane's steering wheel. I have an identicalyoke in front of my seat that tilts in tandem with his as Charlie makes smalladjustments to the variable air. Charlie's father was a warden service pilottoo. Charlie grew up flying all over the state, and his relationship with anairplane seems at least as natural as my relationship with my feet.

And so, though I am prone to motion sickness of all varieties, I do like flyingwith Charlie. I like to look at Maine from this new angle and from the skyrediscover its familiar features—seacoast, church spires, winding roads,huge tracts of forest, silver lakes, trailer parks, rolling meadows. The tree-lined edges of the pastures below us are accented with a startling yellow, as ifa giant artist used his thumb to smudge the vivid dust of a pastel landscape. Ittakes me a little time to realize that the dusty smudge is where the fallenyellow leaves of the maples have drifted.

"It's harder when it's a child," Charlie is saying, and I remember again thewarmth of my daughter's cheek.

The parents of the missing girl are standing, stage lit, within a cone oflamplight at the far end of the Masquinongy Pond Recreation Area parking lot.Insects whirl drunkenly above their heads, and among them I note thedisconcerting, flitting motion of little brown myotis bats taking their eveningmeal.

Perhaps thirty yards away, a modified RV belonging to the Salvation Army castsits own circle of light and supports its own rave of light-drugged insects, itsown dance of bats. Through the open back door of the vehicle, I can see BrianClark, a plump, walleyed veteran of many search scenes, washing pots. He willhave spent a long afternoon cheerfully dishing up coffee, doughnuts, and DintyMoore beef stew to search crews as they came in from the woods. Most of thevolunteer searchers have reluctantly gone home for now. In the darkness, theycan do no more than spread their scent, contaminating the area that the K-9swill continue searching through the night.

"I'm Reverend Braestrup," I announce. "I'm the chaplain for the Maine WardenService."

"Ralph Moore," the child's father says. "This is my wife Marian. We're notchurchgoers." The woman smiles apologetically as if I might have been offendedby her husband's abrupt tone.

"I'm not a church minister." I shrug and smile. His face does not relinquish itsskepticism, but Mr. Moore tugs once on my proffered hand, like a man testing thestrength of a knot.

"Actually, I should probably tell you: we're atheists."

"Ah."

"No offense."

"I'm not offended," I say. "What a long, hard day you two have had."

"Yes," he says.

"I'm so sorry this has happened to you."

Mr. Moore looks away, toward the edge growth that fringes the parking lot. "I amtoo."

Mrs. Moore stands still, but her eyes scan constantly for signs from thesurrounding darkness, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest. It's work towait this way, aching physical labor.

"It's miserable to wait," I observe, and she nods, still scanning, her mouthtaut.

Beyond the parking lot, the edge growth gives way to mixed deciduous woodlandthat rolls on for miles, interrupted only by an occasional swamp or swiftlyflowing stream. It's been nine hours since the family dog returned and Alisondid not. The Moores are tourists on vacation from a large Massachusetts city,but even if they were locals, the forest and the nearby bog and water would seemincreasingly menacing as the hours wore on past mealtime, past bedtime. Thepeople with uniforms, guns, and dogs had arrived in their emergency vehicles,blue lights flashing, as well as airplanes and boats, verifying the seriousnessof what is, the awful plausibility of what might be.

"Look, Reverend," Mr. Moore says, gesturing into the darkness. "I know all theseguys have to keep looking. I can tell they are putting on a brave face forMarian here. But you can tell me the truth."

Unbeliever though he may be, Mr. Moore is not asking the lady in the clericalcollar for an objective assessment of a practical situation. He wants the God'shonest truth. He wants me to tell him, with all the weight and authority mypresence conveys, that his daughter is not dead.

"Do you think she's dead?" I asked Lieutenant Trisdale after Charlie Laterlanded me safely on Masquinongy Pond. We were driving to the search scene in histruck, bouncing over the old roads, the lieutenant's paperwork, coffee cups, andcollection of cell phones leaping about my knees. Fritz Trisdale has nearlythree decades of experience behind his assessment. Whatever he says, I willbelieve.

Fritz scrubbed thoughtfully at the five o'clock shadow on his jaw. "I'll tellyou what, your Reverendship," he said slowly. "I think she's still okay, to behonest with you. It's not like the kid was retarded or suicidal or something.She's just good and lost. Those woods have been cut over so many times thatthere's plenty of scrub and low growth to keep her hidden from us. Hell, you'dpractically have to step on someone to find 'em in there. She's probably scaredof the voices she hears, if she hears 'em at all. I think she's alive. RonnieDunham's bringing his dog Grace up this evening, and Grace'll have a freshnose." Fritz stopped and gave it another thought but came to the sameconclusion. "Yeah," he said. "I think we're going to find her."

"Listen," the child's father is saying to me. "I'm an engineer. I work withstatistics. You don't have to bullshit me."

His wife is holding onto my hand, tightly, and her hand is cold. She turns hereyes to me as her husband continues: "I know that the longer this search goeson, the greater the chances are that my little girl is dead." Mrs. Mooreflinches sharply at the word, and grips my hand even more firmly. Later myknuckles will ache, and I'll find the marks of her fingernails in my palm.

"I have been on many searches with the wardens," I answer him. "These guys aregood at what they do. They have a lot of experience between them. And I've beenwith them on searches where they really don't think they are going to findsomebody alive."

I pause and both parents lean closer, as if my voice might suddenly softenbeyond the reach of their ears, but I speak boldly. "If the wardens have toldyou that in their professional opinion they think they will find your daughteralive, I believe we're going to do just that."

Mr. Moore's knees visibly wobble. Mrs. Moore gives forth with a weakexclamation, and her hand softens in mine.

Oh, please, Jesus, let this be true. Let the little girl be alive.

If it isn't true, then one of the searchers will find the body. It is a smallbody to begin with, no more than fifty-five pounds according to the report, andit will have dwindled in death. There will be no vital signs, no spring of skinor tapping pulse beneath the warden's gentle fingers at wrist or throat, nowarmth. The clothing will correspond to the description each searcher carries:khaki pants, light blue jacket, blue sweatshirt with a picture of Elmo on thefront, gym socks, and Teva sandals.

"I wish we had better news for you," the lieutenant will have to say to theparents. "Oh, I am so sorry," I will say. And the wardens will make theirassessments of the scene, consider the possibility of foul play, takemeasurements and photographs, note the condition of the body, call the medicalexaminer, inform the news media. When the medical examiner authorizes removal,they will place the little body in a body bag and carry it from the woods. Thenthey will go home, hold the warm, living bodies of their own children, and knowtoo well the risk they take by loving in such a precarious world.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. Copyright © 2008 Kate Braestrup. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316066311
• ISBN 13: 9780316066310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224