Fifty Ways to Lose your Children©

George G. Epp

No one could bring himself to go home until a water-colour sunset dimmed to candle-light in the west and the pall of night descended on bush and pasture and the steep and scrubby banks of the South Saskatchewan. A few had brought flashlights and as they’d all regrouped in answer to the search leader’s whistle, four of us volunteered to continue into the night by the faltering and inadequate light we’d brought with us. I was one of the latter. The rest were advised to head back to their cars and home while there was still dusk enough to find their ways.

               So team-leader Aaron Barstow, Edie Clausen, Donavon Epp and I, Danny Schmidt were left to huddle once more to plot our “strategy;” Aaron had used that word a lot since the Mounties had put together groups for the search and Aaron had volunteered to lead ours. Donavon clicked the switch on his flashlight a few times, banged it against his thigh and shined it upward at his face when it flickered on. I remember he looked demonic lighted that way.

               “Save your batteries,” Aaron said. Donavon switched off his light, stepped closer into the circle.

               “Don’t think my batteries have a lotta life left,” he said.

               “No,” Aaron said. “We’ll only have an hour or two at best.”

               The futility of it struck me. I recalled being up in LaRonge on a visit some dozen or so years ago and signing up for an aerial search. A plane had apparently gone down somewhere between Prince Albert and The Pas and search command had assigned Nipawin Air to search an area about the size of a postage stamp on the wall map, a full hour east of LaRonge. I and two local men volunteered to act as spotters and we crawled into an ancient 4-seater Beaver on skis and headed out. How our pilot found the assigned area was beyond me, but we flew and flew due east, then west, then east again, our eyes watering with the cold and intense peering down into a vast, undifferentiated forest broken up only by lakes and rivers. We’d been told to look for anything that didn’t fit: the glint of light off metal, a slash through the trees, smoke that might indicate a signal fire. Anything.

               Needle in a haystack; contact lens lost in a meadow.

               “I don’t see any point in stumbling around on the steep part of the riverbank in the dark,” Aaron was saying. “There’s an open field of stubble between this bush and the road, and beyond that, a pasture with a few heifers. We’ll search those looking for, I guess . . . any signs that she walked across there: Kleenex, a footprint, anything.”

               That’s what we did for an hour, walking four abreast with five feet between us. We walked the margin of a harvested wheat field, then the pasture where a half dozen heifers followed us and days of cattle-making-tracks would probably mean that footprints would be indistinguishable, even in daylight. I shone my flashlight in short arcs in front of me with one hand and turned up my collar, zipped my jacket up to my chin with the other. Last night had been the first autumn frost; tonight would—the forecast said—be even chillier.

               As kids, we’d lose things … a lot. I remember the typical conversations:

Me, “But I’ve looked everywhere!”

Mom, “No you haven’t. There’s one place you haven’t looked and that’s where your pencil case is right now.”

Her name is, or was, Tiffany Sadowsky. She’s eleven, is tall for her age at 5’2” with long brown hair. She was wearing a Pioneers club jacket—blue—and jeans. There were eight kids and two adult leaders on the canoe trip that started in Saskatoon and camped at Fish Creek, where it was discovered in the morning that her sleeping bag was empty and Tiffany wasn’t answering when they called. Unfortunately, they’d chosen a cell-phone dead-spot to camp, and by the time the two leaders had rowed downstream far enough to be in cell phone range, a full hour had passed, plus another until the RCMP were able to get to them. Ordered to stay where they were, the young canoeists had yelled themselves hoarse during the wait, had defied orders by making fruitless, short forays into the bush.

All that was three days ago. The StarPhoenix had ferreted out as many details as they could; the photospread of her family made me feel ill, as if the paper would send a card to Tiffany’s mother thanking her for the boost in circulation the loss of Tiffany had created for them. They were a sober-looking family: a single mom, blond and heavily made up for the photographer, an adolescent boy with long, dark hair and a very thin six- or seven-year-old girl with the same long, brown hair of her sister. And then there was Tiffany, sitting on the edge of the couch with her arm around her mother’s shoulders and a grin that was at once mischievous and . . . well, happy.

The facts were few, and so the speculations were many. Coffee row in Rosthern eliminated the rapture, remained equivocal on drowning and third-party involvement in that order. We were content, it seemed, to simply assume that that Sadowsky girl had just disappeared for reasons unknown. Calloused emotions, blasé responses. I kept thinking about “there’s one place you haven’t looked, and that’s where she is.” Do the Mounties know this?

No material thing, no person, no remains of a person can exist without a place. My pencil case was in my school bag where I knew it wouldn’t be, so I hadn’t looked there.

It was 10:30 when we decided to make the walk back to Fisher Road before our flashlights gave out completely. Sadie was sitting up in bed reading when I went upstairs and she needed to know what the day had been like. But there were no tellable details. We walked, we looked, we found nothing.

I checked in on Jamey and Russell who should have been asleep but were building a Lego fort.

Jamie looked up. “Did you find the girl?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid we didn’t. Maybe tomorrow.”

He turned and turned Lego blocks between thumbs and fingers of both hands, got up, sat down on his bed. “Maybe she’s in heaven.”

“Or maybe she’ll be found safe and sound in some warm place. You guys need to go to sleep. School tomorrow.” Jamey is nearly eleven, Russell nine and already showing early symptoms of the second child syndrome: contrary and acquiescent by turns, unnecessarily competitive with Jamey and the odd hint of pleasure in torturing the cat. Russell climbed up to his bunk after three or four urgings and I made to tuck him in, but didn’t.

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Jamey said and I knew what he really meant, that a lost girl out in the cold and dark must be found before the world sleeps.

I lay awake for a long time myself.

I’m a dreamer. My dreams extend the worries of the day into rabbit holes and down dark alleyways. Sometime that night I woke up, my pajamas wet with sweat. I’d been looking, not for Tiffany with the long, brown hair, but for Russell, and then not Russell but Jamey. I ran down long corridors with door after door, all locked and rounding a corner, I ran into Donavon. His face was the face I’d seen in the semi-darkness of the Fish Creek almost-wilderness, demonic, almost sneering. He laughed. Said nothing. Laughed again and then ducked into a door marked MANAGER. I tried to move, shouting ”Tiffany! Tiffany!” but my feet wouldn’t move. And then I fell. Down into a deep well, somewhere like the farm where as a boy I watched my dad and two neighbours pulling a dead calf out of the well. I woke up when I hit the water.

Sadie turned on the light. “You screamed,” she said and wrapped her arms around my head.

I felt breathless, and the familiarity of the art on the walls, I think, the reassuring sameness of the room and Sadie’s caresses slowly brought my heartbeat back to normal. Or near to it. I told her in chopped sentences about my nightmare; she’d been here before. She knew me better than I knew myself.

“I think I’d die if that was Russell . . . or Jamey lost out there,” I said.

“It’s not Jamey and it’s not Russell,” she said. “And it never will be.” She sounded so sure.

Sadie persuaded me to go to church the following morning. “You can go hunting after lunch,” she said, and I acquiesced . . . reluctantly. During sharing and prayer, Pastor Christy prayed that Tiffany would be found, and for her family that they would be comforted. My soul rebelled, do we not know that Jesus will not plow through the shrubs, the rocks and the stones to find a lost girl?

“I’ve got to go,” I whispered to Sadie. She nodded.

“I’ll go home with the Brookses,” she said.

I drove back, parked the car on a field driveway and walked the short, winding trail down to the old, collapsing Fish Creek Church and on toward the river. The campsite was obvious. Police, searchers, thrill-seekers had trampled the grass there and a circle of grey ash remembered the fire around which the Pioneers had gathered for their dinner. A log had undoubtedly served them as a seat as they watched the sparks soar into darkness. I sat. Maybe at the exact spot where a young girl sat gazing into the fire and then did, or didn’t, go to sleep under the stars.

I closed my eyes and sat, just sat. Nothing to do. We’d looked everywhere. The only voices speaking into my silence were the lap, lap, lapping of the water eddying around a rock and the almost inaudible whisper of poplar leaves twisting in the wind, green-tinged with the muted yellow that heralds the dying of summer. In time I sensed a presence. So close that it might be my mother sitting beside me on the log. And the poplar leaves and the eddies seemed to say, “There is one place where nobody has looked, and that’s where Tiffany is.”

“There’d have to be a million places where no one has looked,” I thought. “What’s more, I’ve no idea what places have been searched and what places have been missed.” By now, the RCMP would be telling Sharlene Sadowsky that missing children not found within twenty-four hours are seldom found alive.

In the gentlest of ways, Sadie had hinted to me that my emotional reaction to the missing child of strangers was . . . well, more than usual. I countered that as a father of two children and a mid-grade teacher, I couldn’t help but see my children and my students’ faces in the lost girl. I even recited the last verse of John Donne’s prophetic poem: “Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “You need to accept that you’ve done what you can. You’ll need to let it go. If not sooner, than later.”

It was early afternoon when I finally left the place that by now had become haunted for me. I had known this place long ago; paddling the South Saskatchewan downstream from Saskatoon to the junction with the North branch had been mine and Donovan’s boyhood goal as adventurers. Twice, we’d put in at Gabriel’s Bridge and then hankering for a change, had Donavon’s dad drive us and his canoe to Saskatoon where we put in at the CPR Bridge.

Our first night’s bivouac that time had been at the very spot where the Pioneers had lost their friend, and probably also their innocence. It was also the place where a snuffling black bear scared the hell out of us, where we disembarked so fast that our provisions got left behind and we had to restock at Batoche—on bags of peanuts and a dozen chocolate bars.

 

Classes had just gotten underway the week before and unremarkably, Tiffany’s story faded with the day-to-day of organizing, teaching, coaching, cajoling and encouraging the twenty-three Grade Sevens I’d been assigned. But it all came back when the StarPhoenix and CTV reported cursorily that Tiffany had been found safe and sound, that a custody battle, a stalking and a nighttime kidnapping were involved and charges had been laid.

Safe and sound. Probably a medical check was done and all her organs deemed to be functioning normally and she had no visible contusions, no broken bones, so “safe and sound.” An answer to prayer.

I didn’t think so, and still don’t.

In about the middle of October, Russell was suspended for two weeks for laying a vicious beating on his best friend, Raymond. It had to do with a Tooney one of them had found in the playground at recess. We left his counselling to the school psychologist but removed most of his privileges at home, hoping for some kind of “born again” change in his attitude. Sadie and I were left with the feeling that Russell would grow up like a kite, picking up on and riding the crests of winds over which neither he nor we had control, possibly crashing with an unanticipated lull in the breeze. How would we live with that? Would we be up to it?

And then there was Jamey. So easy, like a puppy on a leash and so happy to be contained in the radius of that restriction. He never loses his pencil box.

Paul Simon is responsible for an ear worm that recurs for me often, that being the catchy tune in “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.” When I sing it in my head these days, it goes, “Fifty Ways to Lose your Children.”

I mentioned this to Pastor Christy. She’s very wise. She said, “I guess we can only lose our children if we assume we owned them in the first place.” For me, this was a poignantly powerful answer. Also, for me at that, at this time, it was no answer at all. Maybe it will be some day.

So much in this world depends on whether or not Tiffany has been truly and lovingly found. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

There’s another parable that was forgotten by Writer/Apostle Luke. In it, the Prodigal Son never returns, is never found.