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June 26, 2004 - Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels June 1, 2004 An anguished heart By John Darling Tidings Correspondent For four windy, cold hours, Lily Bright, 14, clung to the steep precipice of Fort Rock, terrified and traumatized by the falling death of her friend Tracy Dewey. Balloons given to Lily Bright by many of her friends from school were a turning point, Lily's mother, Jennifer said. Lily spent four hours trapped on a ledge that her friend Tracy Dewey had fallen from. Rescuers talked her through the ordeal and kept away the news that her friend had died until she was safely off the ledge. John Darling |For the Tidings Back home, her parents, Casey and Jennifer Bright found a card - "call us" - tacked by Ashland Police to their front door, leaving them to imagine their worst nightmares for 15 minutes, until police arrived to tell them Lily was alive and being rescued as they spoke. Using cell phones, police here put the Brights in touch with rescuers, who told them Tracy was dead, that Lily was trapped on the narrow rock ledge, that hikers below were shouting encouragement and safety directions and that the first rescuer had rappelled down to hold onto Lily. The Brights leaped in their car for the 3-1/2 hour drive to Fort Rock in Central Oregon - "the longest 3-1/2 hours of my life," said Casey - finding Lily safe now and being taken care of at a remote fire station by Paul Dewey, who had just lost his daughter and was apologizing for placing Lily in danger. Home again Back home again in Ashland, a traumatized but unhurt Lily has been spending most of her time surrounded by her parents and older sister Jessie, a high schooler - "Jessie's a tough cookie, not afraid to joke and bring her out," Casey says - playing video games, watching movies and sometimes just being quiet. An occasional laugh echoes from her bedroom upstairs, as the sisters "hang" hour after hour. But, so far, Lily refuses to speak of the tragedy. "She will. It's going to take time," said Jennifer. "When I try to bring it up by saying, it must have been scary or how brave you were, she just says leave her alone. But she's agreed she will talk about it or at least write it out. She has to get it out of her body - that's the one thing all the grief counselors agree on." It's not time yet for counseling, though, her parents said. It's time to protect her and let the healing start, to come down from post traumatic stress. "It's been horrible, real hard," said Jennifer. "You see the loss at 13 of all the carefree innocence that kids feel. It seems so unfair. You feel anxious about how close you've come to losing a child, then you feel guilty for how your child lived and the other family's child died, then you feel so horrible for her (Tracy) and her family." Friends Disturbed by Lily's seclusion and wanting to cheer their friend, some 50 classmates Friday morning covered her Scenic Avenue lawn with flowers and wrote love notes to her on dozens of balloons. Lily, still sleeping, didn't come out until the kids were gone. "That was the turning point," said Jennifer. "She could barely talk before then. But with that, she just lightened and wasn't so anxious and withdrawn." From there, Lily and her parents decided to engage the outside world in a brief, but full-on way, attending Tracy's Saturday afternoon memorial at the Dewey home, where Lily's classmates, more than 100 of them, had been "waiting for a week just to give her a hug," said Jennifer. "It was real hard. It was very much about kids coming to grips with what happened," she said. "I told her this would be the hardest thing. She was hoping no one would ask her to tell the story. They didn't. They just hugged her and hugged her and were bawling their eyes out. When we got home, it seemed a lot of stuff had lifted." The next big step up is the Wednesday AMS tree planting and the tournament of her soccer team. Lily has decided to play. As for school, AMS teachers have frequently e-mailed Lily and lent "incredible support," freezing her grades at May 21, the day before the accident. If she returns to school, they assured, it will be for "social integration," not academics. Lily, said her father, has suffered the double trauma of witnessing the death of Tracy and then the long, scary rescue in freezing winds. "Only one person knows what happened on that hill," said Casey, "and she's not talking." The rescue However, Lake County Deputy Sheriff Tom Roark pieced it together from Dan Spencer, a witness below, who talked Lily through that first half hour alone, while other hikers unsuccessfully tried CPR on Tracy. "Tracy was trying to climb down a ledge (off normal trails)," Roark said, "She slipped and fell to another ledge 10 feet below, landing on her feet, but her momentum took her over and she fell 60 feet to the base of the rock." Lily "screamed hysterically," according to Spencer's report. Roark, the first of many law enforcement and rescue agencies on the scene, shouted directions for her, so she could take refuge in a small niche just below her. Here she stayed, occasionally "poking her head out to talk to people" until the first paramedic got to her. He wrapped her in a thermal bag and tethered her to his body until, over the next four hours, another half dozen experienced climbers from the Deschutes County Search and Rescue joined the effort and pulled them up. "Dan kept her alive, as far as I'm concerned," said Jennifer. "He'd have her count backwards, he kept her talking. He made sure no one told her about Tracy till she was safe. Paul met her at the top and he was the one who told her about Tracy." The police note left on the Bright's door, an outcome of law enforcement policy against leaving case information in messages, was a bombshell. "I hated it. I got hysterical," said Jennifer. She called her husband, a building contractor and told him to get home, then waited for police to arrive with news of their daughter. "There's only one reason police leave a card on your door and it's never good," said Casey, who lauded police assistance and expressed understanding of the policy. "As a father, it was five minutes of terror till I got home and learned she was alive." As Lily heals, "[Post traumatic stress disorder] is going to be an issue," said Jennifer. "If it's not engaged, it can come up later as anxiety or else the fear - she understandably might fear heights now - can spread to other things and ruin her love of rafting and athletics. She's already introspective, comfortable spending time alone and, if this (trauma) is buried, it could turn into not wanting to leave the house." Her friend Ellie Kuenzel, 13, like most of the kids, feels a sense of unreality about the death and its impact on Lily, but they all are handling it about the same way. "We miss her a lot," Ellie says, "and are just going to be there and support her and when she wants to talk, we want to listen." The dozens of balloons from the Friday gathering express written wishes for Lily, "I love you so much! I am always here for you if you need to talk, cry, laugh or hug," wrote her friend Layla Black. "You have a beautiful mind and an even more beautiful soul." Layla's mother, Feryal Algosaibi, accompanied her daughter to the balloon gathering and the memorial, noting, "It's a bad thing that happened and it's going to take a long time to get over it. God help her (Lily) have a good life. Without the giving and giving of (school nurse-counselors) Belinda (Brown) and Bill (Cross), I don't know what these kids would have done." The trauma to parents is less easy to map. "While we were driving and getting her home, we had a mission," said Casey. "But when we woke up Sunday, it all hit us, a sense of helplessness and overwhelm. We still don't know how to make things all better. You can't fix it. We've circled the wagons and it's going to be a long road back." 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