Maine is a big place, especially its vast woodlands. If you don’t believe it, fly over northern Maine sometime. Even with its elaborate system of lumbering roads, the North Woods is a proverbial sea of fir thickets, hardwood ridges and meandering heaths and dead waters. Not to mention more than 5,000 lakes, ponds and thousands of miles of rivers, brooks and streams.
People get lost in this coniferous labyrinth. Usually they are found, or find their own way out. Every once in a while someone disappears. They get swallowed up. They just vanish from the face of the earth never to be seen again.
Geraldine Largay was a perfect example. An Appalachian Trail hiker from Brentwood, Tenn., Largay was last seen in Maine on the AT near Reddington Township on July 22, 2013. She was supposed to meet her husband for hiking supplies at the Route 27 trail crossing. She never showed up, and was never seen or heard from again.
The state search and rescue arm (MASAR) of the Maine Warden Service conducted one of the largest search efforts in state history, and it took more than two years before authorities had so much as a sniff of a lead.
Nothing. Not a piece of clothing. Not an item from her pack. Not a track. Not a clue of any kind, from fellow hikers or anyone else.
Nobody stepped forward with pertinent information for a very long time. Questions superseded answers. So what happened? A victim of foul play? Did she get lost off the trail and fall into a rocky abyss? Or did she use her “disappearance” as a ploy to run away from a life that she could not face?
In November 1997, when I worked as a media spokesman for the Maine Warden Service, we conducted an elaborate manhunt for missing 70-year-old deer hunter Robert Smith in Garfield Plantation, not far from Ashland. He was never found. The only thing that turned up, as I recall, was a perfect boot print in a bog. There were a number of frustrated searchers who reportedly conducted their own follow up search efforts but to no avail.
Humans being humans, it is our nature to want to solve these woods riddles, not only to give closure for the missing person’s family, but to give credence to our conviction that there is always a rational explanation. For search and rescue people, who keep data banks of missing persons searches and study how humans think and behave in missing person scenarios, getting answers to the tough ones is important. The information and lessons learned can serve to improve the search and rescue methodology the next time around.
Finally, this fall, remains believed to be hers, along with items that helped preliminarily identify her, were found.
Bottom line: the Geraldine Largay case, and others like it, are never really closed until there are answers. And there are answers, however elusive they may be.
The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors.” His e-mail address is paul@sportingjournal.com . He has two books “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook” and his latest, “Backtrack.”
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