Still searching

At 60, Marv Maslen still likes to go deep.

No, he's not a football player and his feats are not featured in the front page of the sports section. They are, however, much riskier and important than that.

Maslen just celebrated 20 years as charter member of the grant County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue unit, which performs all sorts of rescue and recovery efforts throughout the county, most of them in tens of feet of water.

A lifelong outdoorsman and Navy-trained diver, Maslen is the only one left from the original search and rescue unit that started in 1984. For more than a decade, he has been the head of the unit. A position that suits him just fine.

As manager of the unit, Maslen's hands are anything but idle. He assesses the scene of the rescue, and he leads a team of about 20 people, performing volunteer work in places where you couldn't pay people enough money to go, namely, the pitch-black waters of the bottom of rivers and lakes in the Columbia Basin.

Not surprisingly to Maslen, the work of rescuing hulks of metal and human bodies has quite a bit of turnover.

"Many people don't know what it's all about," he said. "It's not fun looking for bodies in water where you can't even see your hand."

Sometimes, even those who stick it out have trouble dealing with the rough side of the job. Maslen recalls the sight of an experienced diver finishing a rescue and sitting down to cry.

"He had to rescue a little girl that was his daughter's age," Maslen said.

Such recovery efforts are the worst part of the job for Maslen, who still dives. He says the trick, always easier said than done, is to put personal feelings aside during the rescue.

Maslen said Search and Rescue has become a bit of a misnomer, as most of the operations involve the recovery of bodies and not the rescue of people.

Crisis counseling sessions are available for those involved in the rescue. These sessions are called a "critical incident stress debriefing" and they are open only to those who were there.

Sometimes the rescues are not so wrenching, but they are harder in other ways, like when they try to find an inches-long knife in the bottom of a a mile wide stream.

Evidence searches involve Maslen's rescue unit with every law enforcement agency in the county. This has the Search and Rescue group traveling to Yakima, Spokane and Adams counties, among others.

"We go anywhere our assistance is needed," he said.

For the past 10 years or so, search and rescue has sort of become the family's passion, as Maslen's daughter Marcy joined in as a volunteer. Up until two years ago, his son Mark was a volunteer as well. He has since moved to Spokane.

"You always are a bit worried when it's your kid out there," he said. It was not easy to have an emergency interrupt countless family gatherings, either.

Maslen credits his wife Mary for her support and understanding all those times three people bolted from the table at mid-lunch.

With two decades of rescues under his belt, and his I.D. card showing six decades, Maslen shows no desire of quitting, although he would like some things to change for the better in the unit he helped build.

"Our vehicles are pretty sad," he said. "Our newest vehicle is an 1985 Ford Explorer and our big van is a 1973 Chevrolet. I'd like us to have our own boat, too." The boat the unit uses belongs to the sheriff's office.

Although he has no plans to turn in his wetsuit, certain things have changed for him.

"I am not the first guy to get in the water anymore," he said. "I am not as young as I used to be."