The Precipice
Authors: Paul Doiron
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For my friend and teacher, Ron Joseph
Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
—
The Book of Revelation
There is a sign at the southern entrance to the Hundred Mile Wilderness. It is made out of rust brown wood and painted with white letters, and it sends a stern and unmistakable warning to all who enter:
Caution. There are no places to obtain supplies or help until Abol Bridge 100 miles north. Do not attempt this section unless you have a minimum of 10 days’ supplies and are fully equipped. This is the longest wilderness section of the entire Appalachian Trail and its difficulty should not be underestimated.
The last photograph we have of the two women shows them posed beside this sign with their arms around each other, looking more like sisters than college friends who have hiked together from Georgia to Maine. Their faces are deeply tanned from months in the sun, and they are dressed in well-used backpacking gear—bright synthetic shorts, patterned bandanas rolled around their necks, and heavily scuffed boots. Samantha Boggs is wearing a tie-dyed shirt: a wannabe hippie. Missy Montgomery has on a pink tee with the words
MONSON: BY THE SHORES OF LAKE HEBRON
. They are both smiling like bridesmaids at a wedding.
We know that the photograph was sent at 11:33
A.M.
on Sunday, September 7, by a Samsung Galaxy smartphone. It traveled via cell tower and satellite down the eastern seaboard to their parents, who lived less than five miles from one another in the wealthy community of Buckhead, in the North Atlanta suburbs. Samantha and Missy had e-mailed home many similar pictures since they’d set off on their journey seven months earlier. This one just happens to be the last we have of the two women before they vanished. And we will probably never know who took it.
The accompanying message said they would be in touch when they arrived at Abol Bridge, on the West Branch of the Penobscot River. Cell service is spotty throughout the Maine Highlands, but the
Thru-Hikers’ Companion
(the bible of the AT) said there was a pay phone at the campground store from which they could reliably call home. Samantha and Missy told their parents not to worry; the so-called wilderness was not as dangerous as it sounded. The path crossed logging roads that had been built since the Appalachian Trail was first blazed in 1937. And besides, they were sure to encounter other hikers along the way, including friends who were following the same rugged route from Springer Mountain to Baxter Peak—a journey of roughly 2,200 miles, which the young women intended to finish before the last week of September.
Samantha and Missy said it would take ten days to cross the Hundred Mile Wilderness. They told their parents to expect a call on September 17. The families waited—and waited—and now three more days had passed since the hikers should have arrived at Abol Campground. But still there was no call. Finally, on September 20, the parents gave in to their growing fears. They used the Montgomerys’ political connections to mobilize a massive search on their behalf in the distant Maine woods.
Which was how I came to be involved in the case.
In my four years as a Maine game warden, I had practiced search-and-rescue drills in all seasons and in all weather, and I had taken my skills into the field on more occasions than I could count. There was no aspect of my job that was as rewarding as finding a living person. And there was no experience as heartbreaking as following the calls of ravens to a flyblown corpse that had once been someone’s daughter or son, father or mother.
At the Advanced Warden Academy, my search instructor told me, “You will experience strong emotions. Do your best to ignore them.”
What he meant, I have come to believe, is that passion blinds you to the truth before your eyes. It causes you to miss important evidence. In the rush to find a missing child, you step on the bent blades of grass she left while wandering away from home. If you hope to find a lost person, you need to set aside your emotions. But how do you remain calm when a toddler is lost near a raging river? Or when two hikers vanish without a trace on the most heavily traveled trail in the country?
The truth is, no training exercise ever prepares you for the mood swings you go through when you are hunting in a remote place for actual human beings who might or might not be alive, and you realize that their fate is entirely in your hands.
At the start of a search, best-case scenarios still seem possible. Maybe one of the women twisted an ankle, you think, and they are hobbling back to civilization. Or they simply wandered off a moose path that they mistook for the main trail and ended up mired in an alder swamp, from which you can still rescue them. They might not be in the woods at all. You’d be amazed how many “lost” people are found drinking in bars, eating in restaurants, and sleeping in motel beds, unaware that the state has mobilized a massive search on their behalf because they didn’t have the self-awareness to check in with worried friends and family members. In those early hours, you tell yourself that any crazy thing might yet happen.
I got the call about the lost hikers at the start of what was supposed to be a romantic weekend with my girlfriend.
Stacey Stevens and I had been dating for only four months and hadn’t yet gone away together to the sort of place where a man takes a woman in the hope of impressing her. But I had rented a small, outrageously expensive cottage on Popham Beach, down at the mouth of the Kennebec River. There was a fisherman’s co-op nearby where we could buy lobsters and clams to steam on the propane stove, and a fancy inn farther down the road where we could have a dress-up dinner if we got tired of cooking. The screen door of the cottage opened onto a sandy path that led through dune grass to a mile-long beach with views of Seguin Island in the hazy blue distance. I had visions of sunbathing and skinny-dipping.
Things hadn’t started well. As I was carrying in the luggage, I was bitten on the arm by a greenhead. Then we discovered that the plumbing didn’t work, and I had to wait for the property manager to come while Stacey took a book down to the beach to read.
“You sure you don’t want me to wait with you?” she asked.
“No, you should go ahead. What are you reading, by the way?”
She held up a hardcover volume with the title
Chronic Wasting Disease in White-Tailed Deer.
“I’ve heard it’s a real page-turner,” I said.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she said with a smile. She put on her sunglasses and went barefoot down to the beach.
Stacey was a biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the umbrella organization for the Warden Service. She lived and worked near the New Brunswick border, where I had once had a patrol district. Over the summer, I’d been transferred to Division A, near Sebago Lake, in the southern part of the state, which had turned our relationship into a long-distance affair before it had really even begun. It was now a five-hour drive for us, door to door, although Stacey happened to be a pilot and had borrowed her old man’s floatplane to come visit me.
She was a couple of years older than I was, almost thirty, with hair the color of mahogany and eyes the lightest shade of green I’d ever seen. She had high cheekbones, which she’d inherited from her mother, and a strong jaw, which she’d gotten from her father. She was thin, but not in an unhealthy way, not to my eyes at least. Her natural expression seemed to be one of guarded suspicion, but on the rare occasions when she laughed, her whole body shook. It was as if she worked so hard at repressing her enthusiasm that it came out with the force of an earthquake. I wished I could hear her laugh more. Her parents were such cheerful and optimistic human beings, I knew that she must be one, too. If I worked hard enough at loving Stacey, I was certain she would open up in time.
Her father, Charley, was a retired Warden Service pilot who still volunteered whenever we needed another pair of eyes in the sky. He and his beautiful wife, Ora, had practically adopted me when I was a rookie warden in desperate need of personal and professional guidance.
I’d been infatuated with their youngest daughter from the moment we’d met, but she’d been engaged to another man, the heir to a multimillion-dollar lumbering concern. When I’d revealed that he was tangled up in some bad business, Stacey had called off the engagement. The experience had soured her on men in general and me in particular. Finally, in June, I had mustered up my confidence and asked her out, secretly believing I had no chance in the world. To my surprise, she’d said yes.
Four months later, I was still praying that she would recognize we were soul mates. Stacey Stevens was everything I had ever wanted in a woman. We both loved the woods, and we shared the same disregard for authority, especially when it came unearned. She was smart and capable and feisty as hell. But there seemed to be a chasm between us I could find no way across. The beach house was my best effort to bridge it, and already I could see that I might need a new plan. We’d driven separate vehicles to our romantic getaway, so we hadn’t even had that carefree time in the car together.
When she returned from the beach an hour later, her skin was browner than before, she smelled pleasantly of coconut suntan lotion, and I was still waiting for the property manager to fix the pipes.
“How much is this place costing you for the weekend?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I don’t think you’re getting your money’s worth here, Bowditch. I hope you’re not bankrupting yourself.”
I half-smiled and looked at my bare feet.
“What?” she said.
“I have a confession to make. It’s kind of embarrassing.” I gulped down a mouthful of air to prepare myself. “I have a trust fund.”
“No way!”
“My stepfather set it up for me after my mom died last year. I didn’t want to take the money, but Kathy Frost convinced me. She said, ‘You’re such a Catholic martyr. Give half to charity if you’re feeling so guilty about it.’”
“I’m going to guess which charity you gave it to. PeTA?”