Disappeared

 I was winding down a busy day, laying in bed, reading a book.

Thw phone rang. A phone call after 10:00 usually means bad  news.

It was my friennd and neighbor from up the road.. He said the police were caanvassing the area, asking if people had seen or talked to another of our neighbors, Dan Brewer. He had not been seen since early in the day, when she had said said goodbye and went into town to run some errands. Dan was supposed to go over to a friends place to help work on a tractor. This was at about 9:00 in the morning.

His wife came home in the afternoon, and Dan was not around, so she assumed he was still over helping with the tractor, so she laid down to take a short nap.

When she woke up from her nap, Dan was still not around, so she called the friends house to see if he was still around. He was not there, in fact he had never been there that day, had never called or showed up.

she began calling the neighbors and friends. Still no Dan.

She called thee hospitals then the police.

The police came out and started contacting people in the in the neighborhood. We border on the Olympic Forrest, so the police put up a helicopter who ran search patterns in the area. About that time Search and Rescue was brought in. They brough in a whole group of volunteers to hit the brush and do a search of the woods. A couple of people  brought drones but by that time it was getting dark so they called off the search for the night, but were back as soon as it was light.

They searched for a couple oof days, but they found no sign of Dan. The weather had been nasty with mixed freezing rain and snow, and low temps at night. After three days, it became a recovery search as opposed to a rescue.

It haunted me that maybe he had taken a fall and could not get back on the trail, was maybe laying in a ditch somewhere freezing stuck in a ditch with a broken leg or something. 

After a couple more days with absolutely no sign of him, they called off the search.

It still haunts me for some reason.