Strangers on a Quest Hunt for Answers in the Wilderness

The librarian, outfitted in camouflage and clutching a machete, wades in first and vanishes instantly. The karate instructor follows. Next, the commercial pilots, husband and wife, are swallowed by the dense brush. The veterinarian brings up the rear.

On a moist morning at the peak of Carr Mountain, 3,453 feet into the Yankee clouds, silence envelops everything. Far below, just visible in a distant valley, the village of Warren is awakening. Just ahead, a thick, downward-sloping wall of evergreens beckons.

In the coming hours, the others in their coterie will join the quest. The cop, the social worker, the dog groomer, the boiler operator, the house painter, the private investigator who leads them. Diverse personalities, enduring a grueling three-hour climb over moss-covered rocks for 10 days of hardscrabble outdoor living.

The reason: This boggy alpine forest contains a mystery, one these men and women have claimed as their own.

They have come from around New England and Upstate New York to the pine-encrusted high ridges of the western White Mountains to find an airplane. The one that vanished on a December day in 1996, taking two young pilots with it. The one that, after almost three years, has eluded authorities and hundreds of volunteer searchers.

But these folks on the mountain right now--well, they do this stuff for fun. You might collect stamps or go antiquing in your spare time; they spend vacations and money getting together to find what’s missing--people, corpses, airplanes. To them, the world is a vast landscape of hide-and-seek.

The riddle of the missing Learjet has gnawed its way to an inexplicable loose end, a folklore-worthy New Hampshire mystery, an excruciatingly unresolved tragedy for two men’s families. And for the intense, dedicated group atop Carr Mountain this morning, this loose end simply won’t do.

On the morning before Christmas in 1996, a 10-seat Lear LR-35-A set out from Bridgeport, Conn. Aboard were Patrick Hayes, 30, and Johan Schwartz, 31, pilots and colleagues at Aircraft Charter Group Inc.

They didn’t know each other well but happened to pull the same shift that day: flying to Lebanon, N.H., to take a family to Long Island for the holidays. Schwartz was at the helm, Hayes at communications.

Landing at Lebanon Municipal Airport can be dicey on the clearest of days. The carpet of mountains, so beautiful from the valleys below, can throw a pilot’s sense of direction out of kilter. Even the airport sits on a ridge overlooking a shopping center; you think you’re headed for the middle of the Sears parking lot and suddenly you’re on the runway.

At 9:45 a.m., as the Lear neared Lebanon and the milky cloud cover above, the plane was cleared for approach. But the pilots lost their bearings. They missed that approach and requested another; they were 4,700 feet above the ground, going about 465 mph. “Lear Eight Lima Sierra is VOR outbound,” Hayes told the control tower at 10:01 a.m., the last time they heard his voice.

Four minutes later, their radar blip vanished and they were gone.

The plane had no emergency beacon. It was winter, and it was rugged terrain. The federal search lasted six days; state agencies looked for seven more before giving up.

Hayes’ family wasn’t satisfied. They requested, prodded, demanded, mobilized. They launched an intricate Web site: (www.ctol.net/~jay/learjet/). Hayes’ brother, Jay, posted a note to hunters in the hills: “Please help us,” it said. “We must continue to search for our loved ones until they are found.”

Regular volunteer searches lasted well into that spring, into crannies and crevices, onto molehills and mountains. Sergeant Hill and Tuttle Hill and Chokecherry Hill. Mount Cardigan and Mount Tug and Mount Moosilauke. Rocky Pond and Windslow Ledge. Nothing.

The National Transportation Safety Board issued its final report. “Probable Cause: Undetermined,” it said. No plane. No bodies. The disappearance receded into local lore like other mountain crashes-- the 1968 Eastern Airlines jet that went down and killed 32 people, or the 1959 small-plane accident that two Dartmouth College doctors lived through only to die in the hills.

New Hampshire’s fabled White Mountains had swallowed the Learjet whole. Nearly three years later, they still refuse to surrender it.

Why Search? ‘Simple. ‘Cause They’re Missing’

How is obsession born? The word often implies something unbalanced. But obsession also focuses and energizes. Van Gogh was a man obsessed when he took oils and brush to canvas. Obsession is simply determination on a particularly productive day.

Ray Siler knows about determination. An amiable karate instructor, he, like the others, has come to Carr Mountain for the same reason he conducts other searches: He is drawn to things that require figuring out.

“I’ll tell you one thing: You’re not going to find it if you’re not looking for it,” says Siler, 36. Moments later, he breaks into a run toward a white object protruding from the earth. It is only a broken trunk of birch, an optical illusion.

His companions are the same way. The desire to deduce and pursue and solve is what bonds them, what sends them to a mountaintop with compasses and altimeters and GPS devices and fanny packs jammed with supplies for every contingency.

“Why? Simple. ‘Cause they’re missing,” says Eileen Peterson, a vet from Raymond, N.H.

Offers Sean McFerran, a librarian at the New York State Library: “It’s more tangible than going out and searching for Atlantis.”

“If we can’t do it, it’s never going to be found,” insists Roseanne Perini, who flies corporate Gulfstream Fours and has landed a Learjet at Lebanon airport.

“I want to find this thing,” barks her husband, Rudy, who flies DC-10s for Northwest. “They smelled the fuel. It’s gotta be out here.”

The fuel odor, smelled by hunters in the lower regions the day after the disappearance, was one of several clues that pointed to Carr Mountain, 27 miles northeast of the airport. The most dramatic tidbit came from a man who lives at the bottom. Exiled to the porch for a morning smoke, he heard a jet, then felt the earth shudder. But he saw nothing. Their analysis of sound reverberation pointed straight to Carr.

Roseanne Perini, who wanted to be a pilot since she was 3 and watched her folks fly hobby planes, is pretty sure what happened. She says the word over and over again: “CFIT,” like “see fit.” Controlled Flight Into Terrain. As in, they didn’t even see it coming. As in, they just flew into the mountain.

It happened in Cali, Colombia, in 1995 (160 dead); in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 1996 (Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others); and in Guam in 1997 (228 people). Each plane flew into something its pilot didn’t see. On a mountain, it usually happens in the uppermost reaches --the top 400 feet.

So that’s where they start--from the top down to 2,880 feet. They inch down the mountainside, marking off search perimeters with fluorescent pink and orange ribbon. They hack through wilderness so elevated that wildlife avoids it because there’s no food. Hunters avoid it too, and hikers usually stick to trails, decreasing the likelihood that anyone would encounter the wreckage.

Not much would be left of the Learjet. It probably “telescoped” when it landed, crushing into the mountainside and shattering into fragments. Pulverized wreckage could be spread over a patch no larger than 10 square feet. The most they dare hope for is one, maybe two, big pieces gleaming through 11 seasons of forest mulch.

Beneath their feet, the rain-soaked deadfall can’t decide whether to squish or crackle. Tree-branch daggers threaten every eye. Biting flies swarm, lured by the sweet sweat of something tasty and, at this altitude, unexpected. Shadows, reflections and wishful thinking make nature look man-made. They’re lucky if they can see five feet in front of them; the next step could be a 30-foot sheer drop to another pine-shrouded ridge.

This passes for fun?

“Most people have no idea what we do,” says Mary Marsh, a Worcester, Mass., social worker who once trained to be a nun. “My idea of a search when I started was searching off a trail, not clawing and gouging through brush.”

There’s more. An ice storm shortly after the disappearance broke off treetops, making it more difficult to find the ones the Learjet undoubtedly sheared off. And every so often they find themselves thigh-deep in a bog.

But their data tells them it’s here. So does their intuition.

“You gotta go with what evidence you have,” Siler says. His hand shoots up from his side to grab a biting fly from the air in front of him. “And this,” he says, “is the only mountain with any evidence at all.”

Highest Goal Is Rescue, Not Salvage

Marilyn Greene punctuates each word for emphasis. “This. Is. Not. A. Hobby.”

This woman means business. In a thicket of gregarious personalities, she is the one whose quiet voice carries the authority.

It is early evening, after the day’s search. Most of the people who will spend the next eight days on Carr Mountain are ensconced in their makeshift camp, about 200 feet below the summit. These men and women--from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Upstate New York--are Greene’s flock.

Her roots in search and rescue run deep. She trained with the pioneers in search-dog techniques years ago. For two decades she has found missing people--hundreds of them, living and dead, sometimes so quickly and methodically that she embarrasses the authorities who seek her help.

She can tell you that suicide victims typically go uphill to die and that a drowned person, in the water, can look like a rock. She has written a 37-page document about why German shepherds make the best search dogs and developed a training program to teach authorities to find intoxicated missing persons before it’s too late. She knows what she wants in someone who comes to her and says, “Teach me.”

“I have a lot of people who say, ‘I wanna do this,’ ” says Greene, 49. “They have to have a willingness to follow instructions. They want badly to do it, probably without knowing why. They may struggle for a reason, but I think it’s just a calling.”

Only a few make the cut--those willing to transcend dilettantism. Every few months, she leads them and their dogs into the woods to train. Their reward: proficiency.

For this search, members spent weeks studying the crash. They delved into both pilots’ psyches; they profiled the mountain. They digested everything about Learjets and spat it back out a dozen different ways.

Finally they tackled the mountain. They hired a helicopter to drop supplies at the peak, including military “Meals Ready to Eat,” or MREs, donated for the search. And they steeled themselves for a 10-day physical test.

“Someday, what we learn on this job is going to allow us to do a 20-minute job that saves someone’s life,” Roseanne Perini says. That’s what’s most important to Greene--not finding missing planes and bodies, but locating people while they’re still alive. Rescue, not salvage.

It’s a team sport. And the only way to win is to outthink your opponent--the very landscape around you.

“Most people’s perception of search and rescue is that you train in the woods behind your house. That only helps you in a search in the woods behind your house,” Greene says. “I told these people, ‘This is the most difficult search you will ever do. If you can do this, you can do anything.’ ”

*

Two hours after dusk, and everyone’s wiped. The campsite is bathed in the ghostly glow of candle lanterns. A gentle rain taps against the plastic tarp where the searchers huddle.

Some are sleeping in bug-proof hammocks. Eileen Peterson tackles a crossword puzzle. Roseanne Perini studies a topo map. Sean McFerran squeezes the last bit of a bean burrito from its metal MRE pouch and eyes the accompanying vegetable cracker balefully.

Marilyn Greene is talking quietly about her failures, if you can call them that. “I don’t like not finding things,” she says. “But when I don’t find something, I’m learning.”

Greene’s voice drops, and she says this: It’s time to pass her knowledge on. A breast-cancer diagnosis and subsequent successful treatment last winter made her realize she can’t teach people to do this forever; she has to start teaching people to teach this stuff too.

Then Ray Siler has an idea. He asks everyone to discuss what shaped their dreams--what made them turn toward this.

Each Wants to Do Something More

Roseanne and Rudy Perini remember a night, years ago, when they fed firefighters congregated on their block after a car accident. It got them thinking, they said, about specialized community service. Eileen Peterson wanted to be a jockey; Mary Marsh once dreamed of becoming a Boston Bruin. In different words, each cites the same reason: doing something more. Not being average.

And Siler? He was in someone’s house several years ago and saw on the wall a copy of “Desiderata,” a 1927 poem by Max Ehrmann that became a favorite of 1960s pop philosophers. He copied all 300 words on the spot and, within months, had it memorized. Smiling gently, he recites the entire work.

“Many persons strive for high ideals,” he quotes, “and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

The weather forecast is rain tonight, rain tomorrow, rain for most of the week. Carr Mountain on this night is full of heroism. Not the epic kind, but the just-folks variety that inspires people to give up vacations and exhaust themselves so a mystery can be solved and families assuaged.

“Human beings do not deal well with open-ended questions,” Siler says. “We can accept things in our minds as long as we know the final answers. We’re just trying to find some answers.”

It’s lonely this far up--lonely and beautiful. The mountains have a terrible majesty about them; like so much of nature, they are at once beautiful and lethal.

Is this fun? Sometimes. Is it a hobby? That trivializes it somehow. It’s more primal: people drawn to the hunt and to one another, shaped by their searches, compelled in the Starbucks and Wal-Mart epoch to commit good by understanding and mastering nature’s mercurial ways.

“These people are trying to ease the pain of families they don’t even know,” says Jay Hayes, the missing co-pilot’s brother. “And you know something? For now, that’s all we have to comfort us.”

*

Epilogue: After 10 days, about half of the terrain had been covered, to no avail. No airplane turned up, only a few old birthday balloons and a 1932 Forest Service survey marker.

So they went home. Back to real life, for now. But Marilyn Greene and her crew plan to return to search the rest of the area next year. Another grueling week on Carr Mountain.

Of course they’re going back; it wasn’t even a question. After all, there’s something out there that’s missing.