Keeping Hope Alive : Mystery: Wife of Huntington Beach man who vanished Sept. 1 coordinates search while fighting off her mounting despair.

In the calm of her immaculate Huntington Beach home, amid the security of her gate-guarded community, Cheryl Snowdon is wrapped in a nightmare without end.

The torment began more than a week ago when Snowdon’s husband of 27 years, business executive Rowland (Rod) Snowdon, stepped out the front door on his way to work, slipped behind the wheel of his Buick Park Avenue, and mysteriously disappeared from her life.

Now the wife and family of the 48-year-old aerospace executive live in an aftermath of despair and uncertainty as Cheryl Snowdon coordinates a search by friends and relatives from Orange County to the Mexican border. Irvine police, the only agency officially looking for Snowdon, have checked out a host of tips, only to find they lead nowhere.

To help fight off gnawing anxiety, Cheryl Snowdon, also 48, fills her day with the chores of the search.

She telephones everyone she knows, spreading the word about her husband’s disappearance. She types a letter to her congressman, pleading for help in the search. Later she enlists the help of a public relations firm to keep the case in the public eye. And then she scans a map of Orange County stretched across the living room floor, marking in red pen hundreds of miles of highways and streets she and friends have scoured.

But always, in the back of her mind, she is plagued by nagging questions:

Am I doing everything I can to try to find him? How long can I keep the search up? When will I be able to go back to a normal life, if ever?

The search has moved into its second week and Cheryl Snowdon’s thoughts race between the horror that her husband is dead somewhere and fantasies that he is going to walk through the front door as he did during nearly three decades of marriage.

“I don’t want someone to call and say he’s gone. But if that happened, then we could begin to rebuild,” she said. “I’m first praying for him to come home and be found safely and second I’m hoping for some closure.”

As a friend answered a constant stream of phone calls Thursday, Snowdon sat in her living room, her voice sometimes cracking with laughter before quickly lowering to a whisper as she recalled how her husband’s disappearance has affected her daily life in a myriad of small, unexpected ways.

One day this week, for example, she recalled thinking, “Something smells in the house.” The trash compactor, which her husband normally emptied, had filled up.

Plants in their garden were getting dry because her husband usually tends to the sprinkler system. A stack of papers sit on a desk, awaiting his perusal. Snowdon also waits for him to install an automatic can opener.

“That’s one of those little things,” she said. “When he gets home. . . .”

For all her hopes, prayers and careful planning, there are moments--as Snowdon reaches into the unknown to learn more about her husband’s whereabouts--that “I have trouble keeping everything straight,” she said.

She recounted a time when she was driving along Santiago Canyon Road when she suddenly stopped, hopped out of her car and began searching a clump of bushes in a futile attempt to find her husband’s body.

“This morning,” she said, “I had the urge to pull the covers over my head and see if the entire day could go by without me. But you realize you can’t. There’s things to be done,” she said, widening her blue eyes.

Those things involve passing out more fliers, making more calls, racking her brain for more areas to search.

The last people to see Rowland Snowdon, a business director with Parker-Hannifin Corp., were employees of a Union Bank branch at 2001 Michelson Drive in Irvine, police said.

On Sept. 1, he made a deposit of nearly $5,000 in cash his elder son had given him as a loan repayment, bank records show.

No one has seen Snowdon or his car since he left the bank about 9:30 a.m. that day.

Cheryl Snowdon, accustomed to three phone calls a day from her husband, received only one that day and began worrying. She started to look for him before darkness fell.

The search--which has grown to involve circulating more than 25,000 flyers in English and Spanish and a press conference publicizing the disappearance--began that Tuesday night when Cheryl Snowdon and sons Michael, 21, and Rick, 25, searched around the Union Bank and retraced Snowdon’s route to work.

Irvine Police investigator Larry Montgomery, who began looking for the missing businessman Sept. 3, said, “There is no indication of foul play, which leaves open the possibility that he left on his own. . . . Right now all avenues are open.”

One person who called police reported seeing Snowdon’s burgundy 1989 Buick outside a Redondo Beach car wash. Someone else said he saw Snowdon in Mexico. Still another person said Snowdon had been arrested and was being held in Los Angeles.

“We’ve done a lot of legwork without a lot to show,” Montgomery said Thursday.

“We have just had nothing,” said Cheryl Snowdon, who rejects the notion that her husband left on his own accord. “It’s like the car has vanished off the face of the Earth.”

Even as she speaks of hope that her husband is alive, Cheryl Snowdon often refers to him in the past tense. “He was the kind of husband and father who did not think of saying ‘no’ to anything,” she said.

She said supportive calls and offers of help have kept her spirits up. “The humanity has been overwhelming,” she said.

“People have been so good. I can’t imagine anyone going through this alone. I didn’t realize how lucky I was with my boys. They’ve been absolute bricks.”

Looking ahead at a mystery that does not seem any closer to being resolved, Cheryl Snowdon said she was worried that public concern about her husband’s disappearance may fade.

Meanwhile, she said, there is a need to go back to something of a normal routine--for her to get back to her educational consulting business and for her sons to return to their jobs and school.

“There is a need to go on with our lives,” she said. “But we’ll have the feeling that less is being done (to find her husband) and it’s hard to rationalize the two.”

“We’re just praying we can get a lead to work on.”