Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Bodhisattvas

"We flew down through Miami to Tegucigalpa," Michelle Keating says, "and this was after five days of terror. There's land mines. There's snakes. There's starving people. The mayor of Tegucigalpa was killed the week before in a helicopter accident."

Looking at pictures in a pile of photo albums, Keating says, "This was Hurricane Mitch. I'd never imagined I would go to a disaster like that."

In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch struck the Republic of Honduras with 180 mph winds and days of heavy rain-twenty-five inches in a single day. Mountains collapsed. Rivers flooded. Some 9,071 people died in Central America, 5,657 in Honduras alone, where 8,058 people are still missing. One-point-four million were left homeless, and 70 percent of the country's crops were destroyed.

In the days after the storm, the capital city of Tegucigalpa was an open sewer, buried in mud and bodies. Malaria broke out. So did dengue fever. Rats carried leptospirosis, which causes liver and kidney failure and death. In this mining city, five thousand feet above sea level, one-third of all buildings were destroyed. The city's mayor died while surveying the damage in a helicopter. Looting was widespread.

In this country where 50 percent of the 6.5 million people live below the United Nations poverty level and 30 percent are unemployed, Michelle Keating and her golden retriever, Yogi, came to help find the dead.

She looks at a photo of Yogi sitting in an American Airlines seat, eating an airline meal off the tray in front of him.

Talking about another search-and-rescue volunteer, she says, "Harry said, 'These people are hungry and they might want to eat your dog. And I was driving home from a meeting with him, I was going, 'I don't want to die! — but I knew I wanted to go."

She looks at pictures of the fire station in Honduras where they slept. Rescue dogs from Mexico had already arrived but weren't much help. A dam above the city had collapsed at two in the morning.

"A forty-foot wall of water had gone through and then receded, leaving just this deep, deep mud," Keating says. "Everywhere the water and mud had touched a dead body, there was the smell. That's what was confusing the Mexican dogs. They were hitting everywhere."

Looking at photos of the swollen, muddy Choluteca River, she says, "There was dengue fever. There was the germs. Everywhere you went, you could smell dead bodies there. And Yogi couldn't get away from it, and he wasn't wagging anymore at all. They had a water shortage, but we'd wash everything down as much as we could."

In the pictures, people shovel the mud out of the streets in exchange for government food. The smell of the dead was "pungent," she says. "You could taste it."

She says, "Ten thousand were killed throughout the whole country, and a good percentage of them were right there in Tegucigalpa, because they had the landslides, too. So there were the people drowned by the forty-foot wall of water coming through town. Then the soccer field caved in."

She shows photos of dim rooms, half-filled with dirt and broken furniture. She says, "The first day, we went to a Chinese restaurant where this family had died. The fire department would have to excavate, and what we were able to do is save a lot of time for them, and grief, because we'd pinpoint exactly where. In the Chinese restaurant we put Mentholatum under our noses and wore masks and a helmet with a light because it was dark. All the food, like crab, was spoiling and the sewers had overflowed, and it was knee-deep in mud. And there were all these dirty diapers. So Yogi and I go back into the kitchen, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what am I going to find?»

In the photos, she's wearing a miner's hat with a light mounted on front, and a surgical mask of gauze.

"There was all their clothes and personal effects embedded in the mud," she says. "People's entire lives."

They found the dead, crushed and twisted. "It turned out they were under a platform. There was a low platform that tables and chairs were on, and the water had forced them under there."

Michelle's sitting on the sofa in her living room, the photo albums on a table in front of her. Yogi sits on the floor at her side. Another golden retriever, Maggie, sits in a club chair across the room. Both dogs are five and a half years old. Maggie came from an animal shelter after they found her, sick and starving, apparently abandoned by a breeder after she'd produced so many litters she couldn't have more.

Yogi she bought from a breeder when he was six months old and couldn't walk.

"It turned out that he has elbow dysplasia," she says, "and a couple years ago I took him to a vet in Eugene who did surgery to allow him to walk. It reseated the joint. What had been happening was, this small joint-it was supposed to be a strut, but it was taking the weight, so it was fragmenting, and it was very painful for him."

Looking at the dog in the club chair, she says, "Maggie's more the red, smaller kind. She's probably about seventy-five pounds. Yogi's the larger, blond, long-haired fellow. In the winter he's over ninety pounds. He's got the typical golden big butt."

Looking at older pictures, she says, "About eight years ago I had a dog named Murphy. He was border collie/Australian shepherd mix, an incredible dog, and I thought, 'Here's a good way to work obedience with him and maybe meet some people. I was working at Hewlett-Packard, in an office situation, so I needed a balance."

She says, "The more I did it, the more intrigued I was by the cases. It started out as this dog-focused obedience thing and evolved into something that I really had more of a passion for."

In the photos of Honduras, Michelle and Yogi work with fellow volunteer Harry Oakes, Jr., and his dog, Valorie, a mix of border collie, schipperke, and kelpie. Oakes and Valorie helped search the ruins of the Federal Courthouse after the Oklahoma City bombing.

"Valorie, when she smells a dead body-or what she's looking for-she'll start barking," says Michelle. "She's very vocal. Yogi, he'll wag and get very excited, but he barely says a word. If it's a deceased victim, he'll whine. His tail will go down and do the stress reaction."

She says, "Valorie will get hysterical and start crying. And she'll dig, if it's mud with someone underneath. Or if it's water, she'll jump in the water."

Looking at the photos of collapsed houses, she says, "When someone is either stressed or angry or anything, they let off epinephrine. And when violence or death happens, it's just a more intense release of those smells. Plus whatever gases and fluids belonged to the body when it died. You can imagine in the wild why that would be so important to a pack. To an animal that means, 'Something has been killed here. One of my pack members has been killed here. They get particularly upset over a human, because we're part of their pack."

She says, "About ninety percent of the training to do search and rescue is the human recognizing what the dog's doing naturally. Being able to read Yogi when he's stressed.

"Obedience sets the tone that you're in charge," she says. "Then you hide toys from them; I still do that. And they love it. They have a race to see who can find it first. The next thing you do is have someone hold the dog while you run away and hide. You just keep doing more and more complex situations. They're looking on a track. If they haven't seen where you're going, they can smell."

Looking at a photo of a group of men, she says, "This is the Venezuelan fire brigade. We said we were the Pan-American rescue team."

About another photo, she says, "This is the one area we called the 'car graveyard.»

About a vast, sliding hillside of mud, she says, "This is the soccer field that collapsed."

In another photo, inside a house filled with mud, she says, "Walking through this house that had been looted, there were handprints on the wall. All these mud prints where the looters had kept their balance."

In a wide band along all the walls are countless perfect handprints in brown mud.

In other photos are the rooms where Yogi found bodies buried under fallen walls, under mattresses.

One photo shows a neighborhood of houses tumbling down a steep cliff of mud.

"This is up on the hill where all these houses had collapsed," she says. "They had hundreds of stories why people wouldn't leave: they didn't want looters to get their stuff, a woman with kids said her husband had gone to a bar and told her to stay here. Just awful, tragic stories."

Another photo shows Valorie sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, dwarfed by a thick roll of dark plastic bags.

Michelle says, "That's Valorie with the body bags, exhausted."

She talks about her first search, saying, "It was up in Kelso, and it was a fellow whose wife had disappeared. There was word that she was fooling around with all types of different people who were coming up to the house. So we drive up to this immaculately manicured farm. There's horses and a pasture with a bull in it. The dogs did a huge death alert in the barn. Their tail goes down and they pee. They swallow a lot. The natural part is the defecating, that and the peeing and the whining and the crying. It's making them nauseated, I think. Yogi pulls away. He doesn't want to go near it. Valorie goes toward it and she digs and barks more and more, and she gets frantic because she's trying to communicate something. 'It's right here!

"These people's little boy, he was about four, said something to the grandmother about 'Daddy put mommy underwater, and they whisked him away and nobody was able to be alone with him after that."

In another picture from Tegucigalpa, a long slab of concrete lies on its side in the middle of a riverbed.

"That was a bridge," Michelle says.

In all the pictures are scattered little packages of rancid lard, left everywhere by the water.

"The most profound search that I'll still get choked up about was this autistic child," she says. "The little guy was four years old, and they'd locked him in, but he'd found a way to unlock the door while his mom was ironing upstairs. He'd take all his clothes off, too, as soon as he got out the door. So all these people had volunteered to go look. And that's not optimal, because every time one more person walks across the trail, they can track the scent somewhere else."

In these older photographs, Michelle is working with Rusty, another golden retriever. The photos show a heavy woods around a slow, dark slough of stagnant water.

"Within an hour of getting there, we got down to the slough. This is the primary spot because the little boy, he liked throwing a toy in repeatedly, and pulling it out. It was just a little bank above the slough with roots and trees around it."

She says, "By then Rust was real distraught and really sad. That was the first place where the kid went in, so there was a certain kind of scent there that wasn't as strong as when we followed the real slight current in the slough down to where it was getting stronger and stronger. That's when we called the divers in. There was a culvert between two parts of the slough."

Looking at the photos, she says, "What happened was the body had gotten wedged in this culvert, and it was under mud."

Petting Yogi, she says, "This is quite a large water area, and I'm going around, getting death alerts all around this huge marsh area. And I'm marking everywhere we get the hits. All that water that had touched the body had the smell of the death on it. Sometimes you can triangulate and determine where the body is by where the alerts are coming from.

"Putting a tag, and where the wind was coming from," she says. "What the temperature was. Who I was. What time it was. We put it all on a map. To figure out where the body had drifted to.

"Air scenting… In a case where you don't know exactly where the person started, there's still the scent in the air. There's a scent cone that goes like this"-she waves hands in the air-"and you can get the dog to work a Z pattern. They might do it naturally. You want them to go toward the source of the scent."

Still petting Yogi, Michelle blinks, her eyes bright with tears. She says, "I look up, and they're pulling him out of the culvert. That's the only victim I've ever seen, because most of the time, like in Honduras, they come in and dig the victims out after we've left. But I went into deep shock the moment I saw him, and I had this profound urge to just hold him, this little guy."

She says, "We got up to the house and did different interviews and then went into the house to cheer up the family-because the dogs are supposed to cheer up the family-and it was like walking through this aura, this energy-like an environmental condition… like being in a fog.

"We didn't process this like we should have," Michelle says. "I came back home and put Rusty with the other two dogs, to play, and I went off to work. I've always felt like that stuck with him too long because I didn't debrief him, and I don't think I knew how to process it. I don't think I understood what happened-as far as the deep shock-until I went to Honduras.

"You're supposed to let them go find a live person-and I did do that. You make sure, too, that you wash everything. Their jacket. My clothes. Everything that they have on. Wash everything in the car, everything that could've come in contact with the death scent. Just a little bit of that scent and they're depressed again."

She says, "Going back home, the scent pretty much permeated the car, so it would've been good to clean that out as well."

Rusty and Murphy, Michelle's border collie/shepherd mix-like all the victims they found-are dead now. Murphy was put down when he was fourteen and a half years old, after suffering with back problem for three years. Rusty was put down after his kidneys failed.

Looking at photos of children, children hugging Yogi in picture after picture, Michelle talks about meeting a little girl in Tegucigalpa. Her legs running with staph infections, the girl was dipping water out of a puddle of sewage. Michelle put disinfecting tablets in the girl's water. A journalist rubbed antibiotic cream on the girl's legs.

"We had to walk most places because there was the mud, and everyone who saw Yogi would smile," she says. "And if we stopped somewhere, they'd just swarm around to touch him and say, 'Dame lo! Dame lo! Give him to me! And he was just thrilled with it. He loved the attention. I know he understood how important the work was, and I'd tried to explain to him along the way, 'This is very important. You're doing good things for people.»

In a picture of the collapsed soccer field, Michelle points out a crowd that stands at the far edge. "People would stand up here on the edge of the field and just watch us, and this one little boy said, 'Thank you, in English."

She says, "Stuff like that would just destroy me. It was just too heartbreaking to have human contact like that."

She smiles over one picture, saying, "We went to an orphanage to cheer up the dogs. A kid would run and hide, and then the dogs would find him."

Over the next picture, she says, "This is an island. We drove two hours over washboard roads and hairpin turns in the back of a dump truck to get there. This is the back of the dump truck, it's real dusty. We found three bodies."

She pets Yogi, saying, "I think it aged him. He's seen and smelled things most two-year-old pups won't have to go through."

In another photo album, Yogi sits with very thin, smiling men.

"I believe in Bodhisattvas," Michelle says. "In Buddhism, there are beings that are enlightened, and they come back to help others. I think Yogi's purpose in being with me is to help me be a better person and do things. For me, walking into Our House would've been difficult without him, but with him it was like home."

Talking about the AIDS hospice where she now takes Yogi, Michelle says, "I wanted something that was compelling and meaningful, and I kept hearing about Our House from people. At first I asked if they wanted someone to do Reiki, and they said no. Then I said I had this really neat dog, and they said come on over. And that was it. We just started going there every week.

"A lot of them have just lost a pet," she says. "Sometimes that's the mitigating factor: Well, if I have a pet I can't move into Our House. And then the pet dies, and there is a lot of grief associated with that. And anyone who lives there is a little like a refugee. They've lost at least a lover. And, materially, they've lost their household."

Scratching Yogi's ears, Michelle says, "That's just part of his job. The comforting. That's what I mean by the Bodhisattva, that he's more concerned with comforting and helping, almost even more than his own well-being."

She says, "The trip to Honduras was a real seminal moment for me. One of those watershed moments. It was a high in a certain way. You never wondered what your purpose was while you were there because it was so clear. You could just be totally immersed in it."

Both dogs are asleep now on club chairs in this gray ranch house in the suburbs. The backyard is outside sliding glass patio doors, pocked with mud from the dogs running around.

"Prior to going to Honduras, I'd just finished school," Michelle says. "I'd just got my master's, and I'd left Hewlett-Packard. It was like, 'Hey, there's this whole multidimensional world out there beyond trying to fit in stupid corporate culture. Where's the meaning there? One day of searching in Honduras-and I consciously thought this while I was down there-is exponentially more meaningful than twenty years in the corporate world.

"It's just so beautiful," Michelle says. "Part of me cries, still, when I see a dog working, whether it be a Seeing Eye dog or a Yogi when he's at his best. I'm just in awe of it."

She closes the album of Tegucigalpa, Honduras-the pictures of Hurricane Mitch-and puts the album on a stack of albums.

She says, "It was just eight days. I think we did what we could."