by Doug Horner
Steerforth Press
2024/$29.95/320 pp.
Gene and Sandy Ralston are a married couple from Idaho who spend their retirement years in an unusual way: searching for and recovering the bodies of drowning victims. In Back from the Deep, Calgary-based writer and editor (and Alberta Views alumnus) Doug Horner joins the Ralstons, who are in their mid-70s, for several search missions that turn out to be both thrilling and tedious. Horner gets to know these self-taught underwater search-and-recovery specialists in great detail, as well as learning about the victims they’re searching for and the families left behind. It’s those family members, or sometimes law enforcement, who call the Ralstons for help. Since their first search in 2000, the Ralstons have located 130 victims from lakes and rivers across the US and Canada.
The Ralstons travel in a motorhome, hauling a specially equipped boat (named the Kathy G, after a young woman whose body they found in Alaska), enduring long days on the water and expertly using side-scan sonar technology to illuminate the secrets far below. Volunteering their time and equipment to conduct searches for complete strangers, they’re “an ordinary couple doing an extraordinary thing and not trying to get rich in the process,” as their veteran deckhand explains.
Using the sonar technology requires a specific skill set, and over time the Ralstons have learned to do things most people working in search and rescue can’t. In Horner’s retelling of one of the couple’s early searches, “It took five hours for the Ralstons to help solve a case that had haunted a community for more than 70 years.” But, as Horner witnesses in his own time on the Kathy G, not every search is successful. Interviews with friends and family members of drowning victims detail that agony; what happens when their last best hope fails. Still, as Horner writes, even the act of looking can be cathartic.
Exploring why the Ralstons do this work leads Horner down varied yet engaging paths, including the cruelties of ambiguous loss and our need to make sense of death. “A corpse on the bottom of a lake takes place at the intersection of two profound mysteries, the alien experience of the deep and the age-old question of what happens after death,” he writes.
The topic at hand—locating bodies underwater—is grim, and the few resources available to help families of drowning victims in North America will leave readers aghast. But Back from the Deep is not a dark book. It’s an expansive look at the fascinating world of underwater search and recovery, told through a detailed portrait of a one-of-a-kind couple. Horner approaches his subjects with curiosity and compassion, ultimately telling a vivid story that will stay with readers for a long time.
Cailynn Klingbeil is an editor and freelance journalist.
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