OYou’re just never going to know when you’re going to need help, but if you do, better hope that somebody like Roger Culbertson is around. Culbertson, a popular member of Mazatlan’s Anglo community for more than a decade, is a good friend of the Canadian whose wife was missing a couple of weeks ago. He was there at the beginning, trying to help the frustrated husband as he was called upon to report the facts surrounding his wife’s disappearance to one public agency after another. The man told his story to the Seguridad Publica police who roam around in trucks with the city logo on them. He also had to tell the same tale to the federal police, the tourist police, the district attorney’s office and last but not least, the Canadian consular agent — all of it complicated by the fact the woman disappeared on a Saturday morning and the following Monday was a national Canadian holiday called Remembrance Day. The woman, who as it turned out was under heavy medication and had wandered off from the couple’s home to the nearby woods called the Bosque de la Ciudad, was eventually found. But it was four days later and she was badly dehydrated and barely alive. Culbertson is a take-charge kind of guy. When the disappearance was first reported, he says he went to the house to get the details and noted that several neighbors — both Spanish- and English-speaking — were already there to help. But amid all the hand-wringing, nothing much was being done. “I saw a vacuum and attempted to fill it,” he says. “ I figured she had wandered across the street and had collapsed over there. The neighbors said they had already looked through the woods, but you can’t search 40 heavily wooded acres with a handful of people. Anyway, I was told it was impossible, she couldn’t be there.” So with the help of neighbors who scanned the woman’s photo, Culbertson printed up 1,000 fliers in Spanish and English and set about rounding up people to help distribute them. “I thought maybe she could have gotten in a passing taxi or pulmonia,” he says, but still, I kept saying to myself, “She’s in that park.”