Hector Watch - 2006

This past weekend I went on a wonderful camping trip with my coworkers and some of our participants (that is actually a picture of the sunset on friday night). Southern Kettle-Moraine has a great, completely accessible cabin that we were fortunate to use. We had almost reached the end of our supposed adventure when the real adventure began. We had already gone to the beach, set up tents, grilled hot dogs and played hours of spades. Here's how the rest of our weekend unfolded.

Hector is a 42 year old man suffering from schizophrenia and living with a developmental disability that gives him a rating of mild mental retardation. Regardless, Hector is a smart man. He catches on to pretty complex ideas easily. We never saw what happened next coming.

Hector likes attention. In fact, he needs almost constant attention from others or he feels like people are being mean to him. This is probably the reason he followed my boss to the bathroom. At approximately 9:30pm, Hector was seen standing outside the bathroom door talking at my boss. This being somewhat of an awkward situation, Hector was told to go back to the campsite and to wait. As this story progresses, keep in mind that the campsite was within view of the bathroom, literally 30 feet away.

Later, everyone was getting ready for a dessert in the cabin. It was 10:30pm and Hector had not yet made an appearance. It was assumed he was at the campsite he was told to go to after the bathroom incident. However, upon further inspection, it became quite apparent that Hector was no where to be found.

The time was 10:35 and so began "Hector Watch - 2006."

Phase One involved driving around the campground looking for Hector. It was pitch black and Hector had no flashlight, we knew he could not have gotten far. Soon enough, it reached the point in a missing person search where yelling becomes acceptable and cries of "HECTOR!!??!!" were heard by all.

Phase Two began at approximately 11:30pm when it was realized that something must be wrong. Where the hell was Hector?
The park rangers were called in to assist in the search. They began canvassing the area, driving down all the roads searching for Hector. Perhaps Hector was in hiding though, so at about 11:45 they brought out the loud speakers. "Hector Santos, please come out. You are not in trouble, we just want to know you're safe." Alas, no Hector.

Phase Three involved members of the Sheriff's Department being called in at 12am to find Hector. It was approximately midnight and the search team began going site to site waking all campers in the park up to ask if they had seen Hector. This was also the time during which the Sheriff's Department thought Hector might have come back to the cabin and was hiding. At this point, I was in the cabin with the other participants, most of them asleep. Suddenly, there was a loud crash, a shout of "Sheriff's Department! Stay where you are!" and some flashlights. There was a lot of swat-style maneuvering through the cabin, looking under beds, and scaring one of our participants so badly that he spilt his urinal on himself. The Sheriff told me it was 1am.

Phase Four. Until this time, all searchers were positive that Hector was still in the park. There was no way he would have left the paved roads and walked into the woods in the middle of the night without a light source. However, after two and a half hours with no sign of Hector, anything seemed possible. They called in the police dogs. They called in flight for life to begin an aerial search.

It was 3am and a call came in from a woman who said she had just seen a man walk out of the dense woods across the street from her house. She was having a graduation party for her son and they were still up drinking. This man approached her and said "hello." He was covered in blood, caked in mud, had no shoes or socks but claimed he was fine. The man of course was Hector. The paramedics responded to check on Hector, and his guardian went to pick him up.

Hector had finally been found. EIGHT miles from the campsite. Almost immediately after walking right past the campsite and along the beach, Hector veered straight into the woods and just kept going. With no flashlight. He claims he slid down a hill into mud in which he later lost his shoes and socks. He had bruises and hundreds of scratches and scrapes from walking into trees and through thorns. The most interesting wounds however, were the puncture wounds on his arms and chest clearly not caused by vegetation. Hector had walked into a barbed wire fence.

Of course we were all worried while he was missing, but when he turned up in good shape considering he had just walked through almost EIGHT MILES of the FOREST in the DARK, the whole situation was just ridiculous. How could he have possibly missed the campsite, especially considering we had already been at the park for 35 hours and there was one of those huge, white vans with the automatic wheelchair lifts and all that jazz parked in the driveway? Why didn't he stop any one of the hundreds of campers at the park and tell him or her that he was lost? What in the world makes someone think it's a good idea to walk through the woods in the middle of the night rather than stay on the PAVED trail? When he realized that he was clearly going in the wrong direction, why the hell didn't he stop trudging through the woods and turn around? Or stay put? Or yell for help?

Well, the reason he did none of those things is quite simple. He was following the detour signs. You know, the kind that you see in the pitch black middle of the forest. Oh, and also there were Indian drums leading him. Plus, he likes to get attention.

Hopefully you think this is as funny as we all did. The people I work for - what a riot.