If you like short adventure/drama stories, I wrote a whole book of them for you! These gripping stories come from my first dozen years on an active search and rescue team.

Okay, so they're not entirely fiction. They're MOSTLY not fiction. But I did expand on the backstories of our patients, details I couldn't possibly know, in order to set the scene and make the stories seem all the more real. So I don't feel bad about advertising them on this site :).

Get your copy from Amazon at bit.ly/rescuestories , and here's a chapter for your enjoyment while you wait for your book to arrive:

Chapter 48: The Body

I was working from home when the pager went off at 11:30 on a Thursday morning in April. 02-02-69 - code for River-Provo-Missing Person. I changed quickly and jumped in the car.

A motorized wheelchair had been found tipped over near the river’s edge. We didn’t know if someone had fallen – either accidentally or intentionally – into the river. While Provo PD and Tom followed up on clues and leads, we began a thorough search of the river.

Lookouts were stationed on bridges to peer through the turbid water. Fishermen lining the shore were told about the search and asked to let us know if they saw anything. One of them had just been rescued from Utah Lake the weekend before and voiced his strong support for our efforts.

My team started at the lake and searched the shoreline for a body caught up in branches. Once we finished our area, we jumped into the river and floated down in case a different view would reveal something we missed.

The Provo ran as high and fast as I had ever seen it. A long, wet winter piled some stations above the Provo River drainage with over 150% of normal precipitation and climbing. Water managers emptied mountain dams as quickly as possible to make room for the anticipated spring run off.

Boats and watercraft passed us as they made their way up river on their search.

After completing our assignment and checking the jetty protruding a hundred yards into the lake, Darin drove us a mile up river and had just dropped us off for another floating search when a request came over the radio.

“We need more people in dry suits up here,” Tom said. “We may have something.”

Our ride turned around and we climbed back into the pickup for a quick lift up the river trail. We grabbed ropes, webbing and ‘biners from deputies to build a rope system across the river if needed.

The current upstream ran much faster than what we had searched near the river mouth. The lake began to dam up the river there and it ran deeper and slower. Here, it swept by dramatically, and floating down it would very likely wrap anything or anyone around a strainer – a log or stick in the current – that would prove next to impossible to escape.

Lucky for us, the white object – about the size of a t-shirt – that glowed eerily two or three feet below the water’s cloudy surface had caught against a log that divided the swift current from a shallow eddy. Four of us waded carefully to the protected side of the log and peered down.

“What do you think?” asked Swiftwater Sergeant David Lynton.

“It feels like a body,” assured Chris, one of the two team members who had already investigated, poking the body with a stick like an avalanche probe. Curiosity then got the best of him and he leaned over the log and down into the water. His eyes widened and he exclaimed, “I think I’ve got a hand!”

With a grip on the body, Chris didn’t want to let go and risk losing it. At the same time, we knew better than to simply pull. We stood no chance of winning a tug of war with the river once the body was dislodged from whatever hung it up. The river would rip it from our grip and we’d have to begin the search all over again.

Having already searched for three hours, there was no urgency to extract the body. This would not be a rescue but a recovery, and caution and safety was the name of the game.

Someone on shore tossed us the end of a throw bag rope and David reached down to attach it to the body. As soon as he bent into the river, however, the water pressure against his arms threatened to knock him over.

“Hurry,” Chris admonished, “my hand’s going numb.”

“Steady me,” David requested. “The current keeps shoving me too close to Chris’ whining.”

We grabbed onto his PFD and held him in place while he wrapped the rope several times around the body - what must have been the wrist - to hold it fast. At last we were ready to pull it free. Even if the current caught it now, we had fifteen feet to pull it into the eddy before the current swept around the next set of strainers.

Chris and David tugged on the rope and up came not a body, but half a body.

By the look of it, it had spent several months in the river. Its skin was bleached white, and large eyeballs protruded from their sockets.

Also, it was a goat.

The hand Chris thought he felt turned out to be the roof of its mouth. We joked about notifying next of kin and dragged it from the river.

We soon got word that the wheelchair’s serial number had led to the owner, who informed us that it was stolen the previous weekend. The thief had probably gotten tired of it (or the batteries wore down) and abandoned it near the river. The entire search had been a wild goat chase.

To read the rest of the stories, get your copy from Amazon at bit.ly/rescuestories