Braestrup - Here if you need me: a true story

Copyright 2007 by Kate Braestrup

Cover design by Mario J. Pulice

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ISBN 978-0-316-00778-8

E3

B angor Theological Seminary, where I trained for the ministry, requires that masters of divinity students study one of the two biblical languages, Hebrew or Greek.

I chose Greek for no particular reason, but my more orthodox classmates approached the class with eager anticipation. They wanted to read the Gospels in the original. Secrets masked by translators of suspect skill and motivation would be revealed, and they would know what the Good News really consisted of. They would know what Jesus really said.

What we discovered was what anyone who tries to translate one language into another discovers: many words have no precise cognate. Moreover, a Greek word often has more than one possible cognate in English, sometimes half a dozen or more. Using one rather than another yields subtly or sometimes wildly different meanings. Thus, the assiduous study of Greek offered explanations of but, alas, no resolution to the discrepancies that exist between biblical translations. In short, we students of Greek learned what so many before us had also learned: the Word is a slippery thing.

My favorite example is the word word itself. The Gospel of John begins: (In the beginning was the Word). Theres a reason this translation is so common: its a good and reasonable one, given that English doesnt really have a word that means precisely what , or Logos, means. Still, there are other, equally plausible cognates for Logos, including discourse, speech, message, theory, motive, reason, wisdom, andmy personal favoritestory: In the beginning was the story, and the story was with God, and the story was God.

A minister in the Christian tradition must give voice to the Logos: she is a teller of stories. On the other hand, as an ordained minister and a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, it is my sacred obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the game wardens and the citizens I serve. The roles of confessor and storyteller are in tension.

I have attempted to resolve the tension between confidentiality and storytelling in this book by renaming most of the game wardens, other law enforcement professionals, and ordinary citizens, and by altering significant details of gender, appearance, and life circumstance to render them unrecognizable. Maine is a state of small towns, where everyone knows everyone and everything, so I have taken liberties with the geographic locations and details of events so as to further protect privacy.

Along with four small children, three hairy dogs, a life insurance policy, assorted size 10 shoes, and a set of iron barbells I cannot lift, I have inherited the bulk of my late husbands Logos, or story. A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself. I hope I havent betrayed Drews implicit trust in me by how I have represented him here.

A -six-year-old girl has wandered off from a family picnic near Masquinongy Pond, and she remains missing after a long day of waiting. The Maine Warden Service has mounted a search. There are dozens of people combing the woods near the picnic grounds. Some are local guys, volunteers from the community, but most of them are game wardens in green uniforms. Handlers from the warden service K-9 unit have brought dogs trained to find people, and dogsthose braced in the bows of boats drifting over the surface of the ponds marshy edgetrained to alert to the signature scent of a cadaver.

The parents may or may not know about the cadaver dogs. They may or may not realize that when Chief Warden Pilot Charlie Laters plane buzzes overhead, he is scanning the brown bed of the pond for a small, pale human shape beneath the water.

The parents do know this much: they love their child, and their child wanders in an inhospitable environment. They know the dark is coming on. They have been told that the Maine Warden Service chaplain has been called. What else could this be about but death?

Around three in the afternoon, as my kids are trooping into the kitchen, dumping their backpacks in the mudroom, describing their school days, the telephone rings.

Your Holiness! Lieutenant Trisdale roars. Weve got a situation up here by Masquinongy Pond we could use your help with.

So by four, I am waiting by Chickawaukee Lake. Lieutenant Trisdale has sent a seaplane to fetch me. The lake is a ten-minute drive from my house, so I had time to eat a bowlful of suppers chicken stew and to swallow a Dramamine. I have heard that Charlie Later takes a dim view of wardens who puke in his airplane, and I dont want to test his tolerance.

My car is parked in the little lot adjoining what passes for a beach, a mud bank that the city of Rockland improves in summertime with sand and a lifeguard. If this were summer, there would be children paddling in the shallows, canoes and kayaks on the water, andincreasinglypersonal watercraft, or jet skis, zooming around.

But it is late October. The lake, abandoned save for a small flock of migrating mallards, is a placid gray mirror for the autumn afternoon. The sky boasts an archipelago of clouds so perfect in their imitation of islands that in the lee of the largest one, I can make out an inlet where a boat might find secure anchorage.

I blow on my hands and tuck them into the scratchy woolen armpits of my uniform jacket. Ive forgotten my gloves.

People hear warden service and assume I am a prison chaplain. They picture me at the Supermax, counseling rapists and accompanying the Dead Man Walking to the electric chair. Maine doesnt have the death penalty, I explain, and in any case, I work with game wardens, not prison wardens. Game wardens are law enforcement officers who work under the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Finding a lost child in the woods is among the many useful things these folks know how to do.