Ed Cavanaugh, a teacher at San Francisco’s Downtown High School and a man with a large and incredibly committed community of family, friends, colleagues and students, said goodbye to a buddy visiting his El Dorado County cabin the afternoon of July 17. Then he climbed on his dirt bike and headed out onto a popular trail in the heavily forested hills near Georgetown. He hasn’t been heard from since.
Cavanaugh, 44, has been the subject of an intensive search for the past week featuring search-and-rescue teams from nine counties, a California National Guard drone and hundreds of friends and family members.
“Everyone loves Ed,” said Cavanaugh’s sister, Debbie Cavanaugh, during a break from the search Thursday. “People that don’t even know him are showing love and support that’s just mind-blowing. His strength and his spirit and the person that he is is what’s driving everyone here.”
The kind of person Cavanaugh is, friends say, is someone who would be prepared to deal with almost any emergency in the woods; a dynamic, creative and generous teacher at Downtown, a campus that serves students “who have not experienced success” in the city’s other public high schools; and — a cause for special concern as the search continues — someone who suffers from Type I diabetes and needs insulin.
“Obviously, we’re concerned about his medical condition,” Debbie Cavanaugh said. But she added he was known to have been carrying insulin and food, “and we’re confident that given his skill set, he could survive and find a food source to keep himself going.”
She added that potential leads turned up by Wednesday’s drone flight — the aircraft was equipped with specialized sensing equipment — were being investigated Thursday by search-and-rescue dog teams.
When he ventured out July 17, Cavanaugh was entering territory in El Dorado National Forest that he knows well: a vast wooded expanse of the lower western slope of the Sierra Nevada featuring an intricate network of trails.
Megan Windeler of San Francisco, a close friend of Cavanaugh, said the cabin where he was staying was a frequent retreat, a place to “ride dirt bikes and chill with the bros — just chill.”
The search for Cavanaugh has continued in the air and on the ground for a week, involving aircraft from the California Highway Patrol and National Guard. Search-and-rescue units from nine counties, coordinated by the California Office of Emergency Services, have joined in. The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office says the effort has included a variety of off-highway vehicles, mounted teams, search dogs, and “high-angle rope teams.”
Then there are the droves of searchers from what amounts to Cavanaugh’s extended family — hundreds of people who have walked trails, scrambled cross-country, explored the area on dirt bikes and organized the complex logistics needed to keep the search going.
“Ed has friends from San Francisco, the whole West Coast area,” said Debbie Cavanaugh. “East Coast friends are flying in, we’re rotating people in and out, trying to keep people fresh and focused and just saturate the area.”
Hannah Sitzer, one of Cavanaugh’s San Francisco friends, has helped organize the operation through a “Find Ed Today!” Facebook page. Tasks have ranged from providing food, water and physical comfort to people contending with heat, dust and poison oak to helping set up Internet hot spots and air conditioning and procuring current maps of the area.
“At first it was completely chaotic,” Sitzer said, as dozens of Cavanaugh’s friends traveled to El Dorado County without any clear idea of what was needed for the search or how to organize it. By Thursday, she said, the volunteer searchers had become “a well-oiled machine.”
The need for supplies is nearly endless, ranging from allergy medication to Tecnu — a preparation that helps cleanse the skin of poison oak oil — to external mobile phone battery packs, binoculars and trekking poles. To help pay for expenses incurred in the search, Cavanaugh’s friends have set up a crowd-funding account that has drawn hundreds of contributions.
To get an idea of why Cavanaugh inspires such strong feelings at Downtown and among people in a much wider circle, it helps to take a look at his main project as a teacher there.
Cavanaugh created and has directed Get Out and Learn at Downtown High, a program that emphasizes wilderness-survival and includes a boat-building component. Here’s a scene from a 2011 Bay Citizen piece that ran in The New York Times:
Ed Cavanaugh, the teacher who founded the program, collected the students’ cellphones to minimize distractions, then reviewed the day’s schedule: sailing, working on essays and constructing a 15-foot boat that the group has already spent seven weeks building on the dock.
The class took a few minutes to settle, cracking jokes and laughing.
“Here’s your chance,” Mr. Cavanaugh said, cutting them off. “If you’re not going to do anything, you can leave now.”
The group got quiet.
“A week from today, we’re launching this boat,” Mr. Cavanaugh continued. “Whether we’re finished or not, we’re putting it in the water. You guys know how to swim, so it shouldn’t be a problem if it doesn’t float.”
When the laughter subsided, Mr. Cavanaugh drew the students’ attention to a board that displayed the day’s tide schedule and a quote from Lady Bird Johnson: “Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.” …
… Mr. Cavanaugh said he related to some of the students’ aversion to traditional classroom learning.
“I’m certainly more engaged when I’m building something,” he said. “I’m not trying to make backpackers or boat builders out of them, just to show them that there are applications to the academics. We use boating to teach physics.”
Cavanaugh’s teaching is coming into play during the search in the Sierra, said Hannah Sitzer, the “Find Ed Today!” organizer in San Francisco.
“A lot of his old students are out there looking for him,” Sitzer said. “They’re using the skills that he taught them. If you think about this in another way, he’s getting everyone out to do what he loved — he got all his family and friends and his students to get together outside.”
Sitzer and Cavanaugh’s sister Debbie both imagine how he’d be approaching the search for a friend.
“If you were lost, he’s the one you’d want looking for you,” Sitzer said. “He’s the one who would go to the ends of the Earth. He’s the one who’s in the best shape. He’s the one with the best wilderness skills.”
“We’re here indefinitely until we bring Ed home, because he would not stop if it were us in his shoes,” Debbie Cavanaugh said. “… We just want to keep going until we can say with confidence that we have scoured every inch of this forest.”