I saw the sunrise this morning.
That rarely happens on Tuesdays, when I get home around 11:45 p.m. from the late night police-reporter shift I work on Mondays.
But the big gray pickup truck picked me up at 05:45 so we could go back out on the water and try to find a guy.
We spent yesterday out there too, before I went to TJTP. I spent the midday with my hand marking waypoints on GPS screens so we could better triangulate the position of the missing man, hidden from us under more than 100 feet of water. Each time the dog barked, I marked.
Our job was made trickier Monday by the presence of other people on the lake, a big, heavily-populated recreation haven. As we tried to get our K9s in the best position to work, we had to dodge water skiers and inner-tubers, fishermen and pontoon boaters. They seemed oblivious to our presence, or couldn’t really care.
They knew, though, why we were there. Conservation officers, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters had been patrolling, diving, pinging with SONAR for days in an attempt to find the man. One game warden told me that it had been nearly impossible on Saturday and Sunday to get any work done with all the boats and the wakes and the people.
They couldn’t close the lake, though, because the people would be too mad.
Too mad.
Too concerned about what they wanted to do to let the family do what they needed to do: find their loved one and mourn.
This is where we are: pulling your kids across a grave site in a tube behind a speedboat on a sunny Monday is more important than a body recovery.
Our connections are so frayed anymore, I really don’t know how we hold together at all. We shoot police officers guarding protesters, we assume the worst about our neighbor, we are impatient, unkind, and concerned only with pleasure.
We play Pokemon Go in the Holocaust Museum.
I’d like to pretend I don’t know what’s wrong with us, but I do.
We have no framework anymore for our connection to each other. The individual has been all that mattered for so long, we don’t see anyone anymore.
We’re all invisible.
It’s time we wake up and take a look.
Go. Find. 