by Jon Mooallem
Every fall, a gang of male bears, said to be the largest in the population, hang out at Mile 5, attracted by the dog food. They roam the rocky spit while the dogs cluster together and bark and shriek to challenge them. Ladoon charges tourists who come to see the bears—sometimes $40 per hour per person, I heard; sometimes just a bottle of rum. During bear season, he’s here every day, patrolling the dirt trails in his black pickup, chain-smoking Marlboros, and doing his best to keep the animals from getting too close to the cars of his customers. In town, an acquaintance of Ladoon’s had told me, “He thinks he can talk to the bears. He thinks they understand him.”
Ladoon was expecting me. He got out to undo the chain he keeps slung between two posts as a gate. Then, motioning for me to stay put in my vehicle, he turned around, unzipped his pants, and took a piss. He is fifty-seven and was dressed all in black, with dark, narrow eyes, a white goatee, and long white-silver hair that was kept matted against his head by a black leather headband. Eventually, he cleared off his passenger seat and I got in.
The place is essentially a tumbledown, drive-through safari, and the disorderliness of it was only heightened by this imperturbable guy in the weird headband claiming to have everything under control. “I make sure the bears don’t molest the people, and the people don’t get themselves grabbed,” he told me as we resumed his rounds. Soon a bear rose up from the roadside and walked toward his side of the truck. “That’s a twelve-hundred-pounder right off the hoof, eh?” Ladoon said casually. He slapped his horn twice, but the bear kept coming. When it got within a few feet, Ladoon leaned out his window, revved his engine, and shouted at the animal. His stoner drawl exploded into a deep, low growl. He said, “No, you asshole!”
At that, the bear dropped its head. Instantly, all menace drained out of the animal. I watched it lope away, lie on its stomach, cross its paws into a cushion, and slump its head in them. The bear kept eyeing us, but it looked chastened, like a dog who’d been bad. It was amazing. “He knows,” Ladoon said softly. “He knows.” Often, he told me, all he has to do is pump the action on his shotgun and most bears will back up at the sound of it—he’s got them “trained.” Ladoon grinned at his weapon in between our two seats and the rounds of cracker shells and rubber bullets. “They know there could be anything coming after that,” he said. “You know what I mean? ‘Here comes the salad, boys! First course!’”
It was an open secret in town that Ladoon was also keeping the bears in check by feeding them, which is illegal. He adamantly denied it. But even friends of Ladoon’s, like Paul Ratson and Dennis Compayre, discussed this with me freely. (Ladoon also explained his bear-feeding regimen to Canadian Geographic magazine in 1997.) Biologists I met in Churchill tended to regard him as a low-life bear-baiter who uses his dogs as a front to keep collecting payments at his gate; they worry that he’s teaching the bears to associate humans and dogs with food, which will lead to more encounters and conflict. But many locals just see Ladoon as an eccentric, if unflattering, fact of small-town life. Churchill’s mayor, Mike Spence, suggested I bring my daughter, Isla, to Mile 5 when she and my wife got to town. “It’s like a Sunday drive through the park, so to speak,” Spence said. “She’ll be amazed at how big the bears are.”
As we drove, Ladoon explained that wildlife photographers and camera crews have been coming to photograph and film bears at his dog yard since the eighties. He bragged that some of the world’s most recognizable polar bear pictures, including several magazine and book covers, originated here, and began to explain why the particular access to polar bears he provides is so invaluable.
As photographers discovered Churchill in the eighties and nineties, they also discovered stock agencies and magazines with a large appetite for their polar bear pictures. But eventually, with the advent of digital photography, it no longer took skill to capture a white bear in a white landscape at the right exposure—anyone could do it. By now, one photographer told me, “Polar bears have been photographed to death.” So many photographers shot bears in Churchill that they’d nearly obliterated the demand for those pictures, just as hunters can shoot so many animals they obliterate the supply. More important, photo editors found that they could afford to be picky, and that so many of the pictures pouring out of the town looked identical and somehow wrong. They all peered down on polar bears from the high deck of a Tundra Buggy, minimizing the animal. And their backgrounds were laced with Tundra Buggy tire tracks and dirt roads, spoiling the image of polar bears as lonely rogues in a wide and desolate wilderness.
At Ladoon’s, though, the bears turned up just as reliably as in the viewing area where the buggies go, and could be photographed more intimately, at eye level, or even looking up into their harrowing faces. And the property looked pristine and varied. Ladoon is an artist himself—he used to devote a lot of time to painting. From his truck, he started pointing out to me the different backdrops that he offers to photographers: the shoreline, the frozen ponds, the bear trails that wind through the willows. He was the curator of all these real-life landscape paintings for the polar bears to wander in and out of. “There’s so many theaters,” he said, “so many dynamics that can happen in each theater.” What had looked to me a minute ago like bleak and formless nature now resembled a Hollywood back lot. Here photographers could capture polar bears exactly as the public expected to see them.
The more professional photographers I met in Churchill, the more I realized that a good wildlife photograph or film, or at least a marketable one, does just this: shows us an image of nature that’s already lodged in our heads.* However, our imaginative sense of an animal is so powerful that it can also change what we see in pictures.
The German photographer Norbert Rosing first met Brian Ladoon in 1988. He would spend virtually every bear season in Churchill for the next twenty years, often photographing the bears at Ladoon’s dog yard. (Rosing told me that he’s never seen Ladoon feed the bears intentionally but that the polar bears clearly swipe their share of the dogs’ food.) Late one afternoon in 1991, Rosing watched a bear slink hesitantly toward one of Ladoon’s dogs. Its posture went soft. It lofted its right paw in the air, toward the top of the dog’s head, like an old man patting a child. Gradually, the dog got comfortable and approached the bear. Soon the two animals were hugging—actually hugging—with the dog straining on its chain to nuzzle its neck against the bear’s, and the bear enclosing the dog with its fluffy forearm. Ladoon had told Rosing about this bear, which periodically turned up to “play” with the dogs. But Rosing hadn’t believed him. The animals carried on until, finally, the bear was sprawled on its back in the snow, peering up, gazing into the dog’s eyes.
In 1994, Rosing sold a series of photographs to National Geographic, documenting this entire play session. Immediately, he was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls. The public image of the polar bear was still what it had been a decade earlier, when National Geographic broadcast Polar Bear Alert: a fierce killer that terrified mothers in the middle of the night and assaulted cameramen in cages. People assumed the dog had been chained up as bait for the white monster—clearly, the bear wasn’t playing, but springing a sinister trap; it must have gored the dog right after Rosing’s last shot. No one wanted to see the photos, Rosing told me. “People just couldn’t believe it.” After a while, he put the pictures away.
Thirteen years later, the pictures found their way onto the Web site of a public radio show in Minnesota. It was the summer of 2007 now—polar bear fever, brought on by the endangered species list petition, was peaking. The bear had been transformed in people’s minds. It was adorable now, defenseless—less like a marauder and more like a teddy bear, an animal that would be inclined to play. “Now people feel they can touch and pet bears,” Rosing told me, “because they’re just so nice, so cute, so curious.” And because the polar bear looked different, the pictures looked different, too. The same photos that had reviled people in 1994 now touched them. They rapidly racked up three million views on the radio show
’s Web site, then spurted around the Internet, where they’ve cheerfully blossomed in all kinds of contexts since.
Recently, a friend forwarded me a chain e-mail he’d received from a woman he described as “literally a friend of a friend of a friend’s grandmother” in the Midwest. Inside the e-mail were Rosing’s photos of the bear and dog, cuddling in a corner of Ladoon’s dog yard. “It’s hard to believe this polar bear only needed to hug someone!” the e-mail read. “May you always have love to share, health to spare, and friends that care.”
—
IT WAS A THURSDAY—Ladoon had forgotten—and that meant that his hired hands, two young guys named Caleb and Jeremy, had run into town to fetch the week’s dog food: thirty-three hundred pounds of frozen chicken necks and by-products. There were slabs of the stuff, each the size of a small tabletop, stacked in the back of the boys’ pickup. It needed to be transferred to Ladoon’s vehicle. They also had a dog to chain back up with the others.
It was a high-wire act. At one point, as Jeremy stepped out of the truck cradling the dog to his chest, a polar bear began galloping down the road, attracted to the smell of the food, probably, or of the dog. Or of Jeremy. Ladoon had to jerk our vehicle into reverse to intercept it. As he swung my side of the truck in front of the animal, I saw gelatinous ropes of slobber swinging from its mouth. The bear stopped short, groping for another angle. Ladoon only nodded disapprovingly and said, “He’s off the bear-ometer.”
When it was all done, we returned to the gate and found a blue SUV idling between Ladoon’s chain posts. The driver had slipped through without paying. The same animal that had made a go at Jeremy now stood a few feet away, perched with all four paws contracted under the fat jumble of its body, like a circus animal posing on a barrel. A white-haired woman in the passenger seat was taking pictures of it. I watched as she began to lean through the open window just slightly, extending her lens, then her face, through that last intangible boundary between her space and the bear’s.
“Who the hell are these guys?” Ladoon said. He was about to scold them when the polar bear straightened up and took a single, vaulting step toward the woman, instantly cutting the distance between them by half. The woman reacted late—very late. I watched her hands flub around under the window for whatever button or crank would shut it.
Now the bear skirted around to face the SUV head-on. It stood on its two back legs and raised its front paws. Then it leaned forward and fell, its paws thwacking into the hood. “That’s a rental vehicle,” Ladoon said. His voice was perfectly measured, as though he were thinking about only what a headache this would be for the woman who owned Churchill’s rental-car business. And yet Ladoon was simultaneously revving his engine, cranking his pickup into a shuddering W-shaped turn, and hammering his horn.
The road was so narrow that he had no room to maneuver and scare the animal away. So he gunned straight ahead and kept driving, slapping his hand against the outside of his door to lure the bear and clear the area. Turning quickly, I saw it and another polar bear clomping after us. Then I heard a thud and felt our truck bobble on its suspension.
One of the bears had hurled itself onto the back of our truck. It was going for the blocks of frozen chicken in the backseat. “He almost got it.” Jeremy laughed. “He got one tooth on it, but slipped!”
Ladoon fumed. He clearly wanted to do some hollering. But by the time he drove back to the gate to scold the people, the SUV was gone. “These bears aren’t cute,” he later explained. “Look how big these fuckers are! Everybody wants to get close to the bears. Well, there’s a time to get close to the bears and there’s a time to—you know—maybe stay far away from the bears.”
Eventually, I found out who the older woman in the SUV was: Margie Carroll, an ebullient, retired schoolteacher from Georgia who’d come to Churchill to sell copies of her self-published children’s book Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish. I met Carroll later, when I was invited to dinner at one of Polar Bear International’s rental houses in town; Carroll was a friend of the organization and was staying there. After dinner, she scurried upstairs and returned with another of her books, A Busy Spring for Grandella the Gray Fox, and read most of the book to our end of the table out loud, in her melodious Southern accent, rambling into extemporaneous asides when they occurred to her. On one page, for example, the father fox brings his children something to eat. The text reads, “Daddy is such a good hunter,” and all the characters peek hungrily down at the ground near the father’s feet. Carroll pointed out how she’d stopped short of showing the mangled prey; the characters only stare at blank space. “I wanted to show the family unit nurturing the children,” she explained, “but I didn’t want to have a bloody bunny saying, ‘Help me!’” She understood that nature is violent, but felt that violence worked at cross-purposes here. Kids need to see that animals’ lives are enriched by the same family values as their own, she said, and that wildlife therefore deserves our compassion. She was an heir to Ernest Thompson Seton, in short. “I wanted to show children to value nature. Don’t just go kill something! It’s part of a family,” Carroll said. Then she flipped to the next page.
Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish is an equally syrupy and meandering tale about a polar bear cub who feels very insecure about her crooked feet. Her birthday wish is “to be normal.” Carroll told me that Portia’s experience is supposed to show kids that they shouldn’t obsess about their tiniest imperfections; it’s okay to be unique. It’s a parable, trying to universalize the woes of one particular animal, she explained. In that way, I realized, it wasn’t so different from the story that Polar Bears International is telling to adults. I bought a copy for Isla and asked Carroll to sign it.
Reading it at bedtime one night, I found myself thinking back on the incident at Mile 5, how gripping it felt in retrospect: how the actual polar bear rose up to threaten the author of Portias Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish, punishing the hood of her car. It was as though the bewildering distance between something imaginary and something real had finally collapsed, if only for a second.
—
MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER arrived in Churchill early on a Wednesday morning. The one-room airport terminal was thick with bear tourists who’d streamed off the same flight. Among them was a stylish Canadian late-night host named George Stroumboulopoulos. Strombo, as he’s known, was coming to Churchill with two Canadian rock stars to film a polar bear special with Polar Bears International after Martha Stewart’s crew was done. My wife, Wandee, had noticed Strombo posing for photographs with all the stewardesses and airport gate attendants in Winnipeg and assumed he was merely an uncommonly enthusiastic tourist, documenting every leg of his trip.
Isla was a little over two years old. It had been ten days since I last saw her. I’d left before dawn on the morning after Halloween, having taken her around the neighborhood the night before. I wore the Winnie-the-Pooh costume she’d decided at the last minute not to wear, stretching its hood around my face so that the yellow bear-body swung in front of my chest like a fleecy beard. Isla went as an eggplant with wings. Seeing me at the airport now, she tucked her head into her shoulder and cemented her face into an unimpressed glare—my punishment, it seemed, for being gone. But then something occurred to her and she flung out one leg, showing me the pair of blue long johns under her pajamas. (She’d never worn long underwear before.) I yanked up the leg of my jeans and made a big show of revealing that I, too, was wearing long underwear, and her face broke wide open into a grin. With that, we seemed to have worked through any hard feelings.
My trip to Churchill became a working vacation now. I was free to be the same sort of sentimental polar bear tourist that so many of the folks I’d been meeting in town felt ambivalent about. The truth is, I’d arrived to see polar bears with the same jumbled baggage as did other classic tourists—emotions I couldn’t quite sort out and, frankly, wasn’t comfortable delving into. The fact that something as large and autonomous-seeming as a polar bear might stop existing, an
d the even more tremendous fact of climate change, made me viscerally uneasy whenever I allowed myself to truly think about them. So I usually didn’t. And it was this very detachment that troubled me most—how easy it was to watch the future of the planet, Isla’s future, spool ahead like a negligible fiction. I couldn’t do much to stop the disappearance of polar bears. But I figured that the least I could do was force myself to pay it some very serious and deliberate attention—to put myself, and my daughter, near some sign of the upheaval under way.
I worried that Isla wouldn’t do well trapped on a Tundra Buggy for an all-day tour, so I’d finagled the three of us spots on a half-day supply run out to Frontiers North’s Tundra Buggy Lodge, a chain of stationary buggies in the center of the viewing area that the company has remade into an inn, with bunks and a galley. (A five-night package at the lodge can cost close to nine thousand dollars; the chance to see polar bears wander by the window over one’s morning coffee, before the other buggies arrive, commands a premium.) But at some point on our school bus ride from the hotel to the buggy launch site, those plans suddenly fell through. Before I knew what was happening, we were bounced onto a buggy with the staff of Polar Bears International and the winners of its annual Project Polar Bear competition. Climbing aboard, we found a hive of amped-up young people and a very drowsy-looking Robert Buchanan crumpling himself into one of the backseats. “These are our carbon footprint–reducing whiz kids,” he said.