Hancock House Hotel

“What sort of knucklehead runs away on the coldest day of the year?”  I said to no one in particular when I got the call at 10 AM.  Two boys had taken off from the chapel and were heading north west thought the woods.

It was a rhetorical question.  I love all the students at The Family Foundation School where I work, and I know that many of them act impulsively.  I wasn’t really surprised.  Just worried.  The remark was my way of letting off stress.  These kids could end up in serious trouble.  I knew that because I’m in charge of risk management at the school. I’ve been studying student “elopements” (as they are called ) for the past 5 years, and I am the human half of a K-9 search and rescue team along with my partner, Ripley.  Most of the SAR work we do is at the school.

Similar remarks would be made be everyone involved in the search all that day.  What struck me as funny at the time was the typical response.  I counted at least 5 people including myself who corrected the speaker–  “Actually, I think it’s the second coldest day. I’m pretty sure yesterday was even colder.”

What was this? Amidst all the events of the day, why were we compelled to correct one another and get this one thing right?

None of these editorial comments carried a trace of one-up-man-ship or know-it-all-ness.  And the person receiving the information –today isn’t as cold as yesterday– didn’t seem upset either.  On any other day, little exchanges like that can foster a slightly irritating background noise at work. This was different. For some reason,  the fact that it was 2 or 3 degrees warmer today than yesterday was important to all of us.  Perhaps we were trying to reassure each other that it could have been worse.

We tracked the two students throughout the day.  My team took the first and the third shifts.   At about 3 PM  we followed the boy’s tracks to a rail bed that proceeded down a corridor.  The Delaware river was on one side and mountains on the other.  The corridor came out just outside of Hancock.  We estimated they were about an hour in front of us and we sent people to intercept them and we caught up with them at the Hancock House Hotel.  They had made it out of the woods on the second coldest day of the year, but not safely.  Both were under dressed. One had on only sneakers.  He had to be admitted to the hospital where he was treated for frostbite.

Again, a weird mixture of responses.  Many expressed gratitude that it turned out as well as it did, and sympathy for a boy who will now have feet sensitive to cold for the rest of his life.  Others were less forgiving.

“Serves him right,”  my student-intern said that night as we were squaring away our gear. “He should have frostbite.  Who runs away on the coldest day of the year?”  I let the comment stand.

Tagged as: Delaware River, elopement, Family Foundation School, frostbite, Hancock House Hotel, Hancock NY, Ripley, Rita Argiros, Search and rescue, search dogs, stress response

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