by Brian Keenan
Close Encounters of a Bear Kind
Perhaps it was the prohibition the wolves had indirectly placed upon us or maybe it was the incessant yapping of the miniature dogs that spurred my desire to move on. Certainly the prospect of a long drive to a destination called Wonder Lake deep in the Denali parkland hastened our decision to up anchor. But the ‘Wonder Lake’ experience was anything but wondrous, and only whetted my appetite to experience something less controlled and organized.
The bus trip took us some ninety miles deeper into Denali’s parkland. We were advised to bring food to sustain us and enough wet gear to protect us, though there were only two stopping places where we could disembark and make short sorties into the landscape. We decided it was better than nothing. If we were going to have any chance of escaping from our camp compound then this was the only option. We were also assured that it was the best way of viewing the park and its wildlife.
Our bus might have come from the same conveyor belt as the original model T Ford, with its wooden-slat seats, aluminium sliding windows and plasticized, lino-like floor. Overhead storage, which comprised a two-foot-wide section of cord netting, stretched the length of the bus. The vehicle was green with a brown and dull grey interior. Maybe the landscape we passed through was meant to be the inspiring thing and our means of transport was designed not to detract from that. But, by God, it was bloody uncomfortable for five hours on a mountain road that had seen little more than essential safety maintenance.
Yet, as our ranger driver had promised us, it did afford us a fairly in-depth, if brief, experience of Denali. I guess our score sheet for the day’s outing was pretty good. We spotted porcupine, red and grey squirrel, a red fox vixen and her cubs, and beavers repairing last season’s dams at the Wonder Lake. The twenty minutes or so that we stayed there did not reveal to me why anyone would have given it the name it possessed. The only sense of wonder or relief I experienced was when I heard it had toilet facilities. After a long journey in a bumping bus with two small children, that’s wonder and relief indeed.
The trip back was a monotonous repeat of the outward journey, the tiresomeness of it eased only by two incidents. We did encounter bears. The grizzlys out foraging for berries and roots were making their way from the riverbed to higher ground and had to cross our path en route. It was as if we were not present. They paid little heed to us staring at them wide-eyed. It was our first sighting, but like the lake it was uninspiring. My son must have thought so too. Recalling the bedtime story I had read him many times he said that he didn’t think the bear would come home with us as he already had a friend with him. The larger of the bears ambled past our bus and climbed onto a rock some twenty-five feet from us. He collapsed onto his vantage point with slothful grace. I watched him from the rear of the bus while the others concentrated on the smaller bear, which was approaching the bus. He surveyed us with an air of ponderous disdain. Nothing about our presence moved him; our excitement had obviously not radiated itself out of the bus. His demeanour declared nothing more than that he had seen it all before. I could imagine him thinking, ‘Here they are, back again, those strange creatures that stare out of their metal box like the arctic grayling fish that stare out of the Toklat River. Like the fish and the berries and the caribou, these creatures will come and go again, but only I remain.’
‘He’s very grumpy looking!’ I heard Audrey say behind me.
‘Yes,’ I answered, still lost in my own thoughts.
‘I think he’s still not woken from hibernation yet. Look at his big, sad, sleepy face!’
I looked at him again. Maybe Audrey was right. Maybe bears aren’t cursed with the need to think or philosophize too much about the meaning of life.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘let’s leave him to whatever his thoughts are. I’m not so sure he would take too kindly to our idle speculation.’
Audrey began settling the boys as the other passengers reclaimed their seats and we set off again. I tried to imagine how our tiny little green safari bus must have looked passing through the bush. The immensity of the empty landmass roaring at us through the bus window was astonishing. There are places out there, I thought, thousands of valleys and creeks and high plateau lakes, that no human being has ever set foot in. Only bears and wolves and dall sheep with their bleached white coats and their magnificent upturned horns have ever been to those empty places. From the map on my knee, I counted eighteen glaciers flowing out of the immense Alaska Range of mountains that I could see through my bus window. I could take in the huge sweep of their fearsome summits. I looked again from the window to the outspread map and back to the window, unable to resolve the stupefying calculations my brain was struggling with.
I thought back again to the big brown bear sitting aloof and uncaring on his stony throne. He was part of it all and didn’t have to rationalize it. Whereas I could only look from my map to the window and gape uncomprehendingly, he sat and shrugged indolently at it all. ‘Do you know,’ I said to Audrey as our tiny green slug of a bus crawled its way along, ‘I don’t think you should be so pass remarkable about the old bear!’
She looked at me with an expression that said, just what is he going to say next, and is it really worth my while listening to him. Her look was a challenge.
‘The proper attitude to adopt is one of awe, especially if you are a woman.’ Audrey’s countenance immediately changed. ‘Only men can hunt them and eat them. In fact it is a great offence for men to speak of the bear in front of women. It’s even forbidden for a woman to touch the hide of a long-dead animal!’
‘Is that why you didn’t want to humour me when I came over to talk to you about the bear?’
Now I looked at her with the same kind of puzzlement that she had earlier fixed on me. I had not thought of the bear as an avuncular old man who had just woken up. As I considered it now I said, ‘Maybe I was just picking up something from the bear’s spirit.’
‘You’re not the only one who has been reading about bears,’ Audrey said, opening up the park brochure about these creatures. ‘It says here that hikers should have great respect for the unpredictability, aggressiveness, tenacity and power of the brown bear. No wonder you’re picking up things from that old bear, you and him have a lot in common!’
I looked at her, asking if I should regard that as a compliment.
‘Maybe,’ she answered inscrutably.
The bus drove on back to our camp. My thoughts were less and less directed out of the window. Audrey’s tongue-in-cheek remarks had thrown another gloss on my thinking and I wasn’t too sure where it was taking me. At that point the bus stopped and the driver pointed out some dall sheep. He informed us we were exceptionally lucky as it was most unusual to get so close. I looked and saw we weren’t that close. One of the passengers heard me remark how I admired their mantle of horns and lent me his binoculars. I focused on one animal standing proudly with its head and chest facing the wind. For a moment it seemed to be looking directly down the tube of the field glasses. It stared fixedly at me and then abruptly jerked its head back and just as abruptly fixed its stare on me again. I set the glasses down for a moment and thought. Was that sudden tossing of the head a kind of acknowledgement of my presence, a gesture of welcome? But the figure that the upturned horn made as his head flicked back could also have been the animal equivalent of a two-fingered gesture that simply means ‘up yours, pal!’ I had a feeling that the sheep and Audrey were inscrutable companions.
When we were about some twenty-five miles away we were flagged down by three hikers. They had been camping and hiking out on the back trails of the mountain range but had decided to cut short their stay. The problem, as each of them complained bitterly, was the mosquito swarms. They had hoped that by staying in the high trails and criss-crossing the snow line the chill factor would keep these pests at bay. But summer had set in early and with more intensity than they had expected. They could just about cope with the creatures by staying on the move, but rest periods and sleep had beco
me impossible. They had decided to give up and replan their route after stocking up on supplies of repellent and mosquito nets. One of their parting phrases remained with me: ‘Summer’s moving in hard and fast this year and you’ve got to stay ahead of it if you really want to see anything.’ Denali’s six million acres might make it larger than Massachusetts, but it was still the size of a postage stamp on my Alaska map. In any case, no matter how big the place was these tiny mosquitoes had ganged up on the seasoned hikers and put them to flight. I certainly had no intention of remaining to be eaten alive. Having completed what seemed more like a Sundayschool safari to the wholly inappropriately named Wonder Lake, there was little else we could do given the limitations of wolves, park regulations and now mosquitoes. When I suggested to Audrey that we should think about moving on the next day, she seemed relieved.
The next morning we walked to the camp’s entrance. The yapping of dogs met us as we passed each vehicle. A few owners were already out walking their delicate pets. Here were these people, in the wilds of Alaska, thousands of miles from their own homes, doing exactly as they would at home. At the entrance to the campsite a large noticeboard had been erected and on it was a largeish poster informing the traveller about what to do if they encountered a bear.
Rule number one: Do not run! Bears, it explains, can run faster than thirty miles an hour.
Rule number two: Back away slowly, which I thought was reasonably sound advice. But what followed puzzled me: ‘Speak in a low, calm voice or sing softly while waving your hands above your head’. I suggested to Audrey that if a bear was charging me I don’t think I would want to wave at him and sing him a lullaby.
Rule number three: If a grizzly makes contact, play dead! For sure, I thought, if a coronary hadn’t already dispensed with the need for play-acting. This rule concluded with the strong advice, ‘If the attack is prolonged, fight back furiously!’ Now that was real Alaskan mountain-man stuff.
Rule number four was even more macho: If a black bear makes contact with you, FIGHT BACK! There was no suggestion here of waving, singing or reciting poetry, or even play-acting and feigning death. No, sir. When it comes to black bears it’s a case of getting stuck in with fists and feet flying and no quarter given. Both Audrey and I laughed nervously. The wilderness was more ominous than we cared to imagine, and I thought about the bears we had encountered yesterday in a different light.
One of our fellow campers joined us to check some notices and I asked him why it was necessary to react differently to a grizzly and a black bear. He explained that the black bear was smaller and with a determined effort can be scared off. But in the case of the grizzly or brown bear, fighting was a last resort to save your life – but, he added matter-of-factly, ‘If a big brown decides he’s gonna attack you and he gets hold of you, you’d be better praying than fighting because he’s gonna kill you and you’re gonna hope it happens real quick!’
We drove out of the campsite at Denali with no clear idea of where we might head. Circumstances beyond our control seemed to be forcing us to make changes in our planned schedule. Audrey drove while I studied the map. I remembered the hikers’ remark about keeping on the move and trying to stay one jump ahead of the elements and the insects. We were on the main road to Anchorage and it seemed best to carry on in that direction, stopping at a place called Talkeetna to top up on supplies, then onward towards Anchorage but swinging left at Palmer and motoring hard along the Glen Highway to Glenallen. There we could turn south once more and take a secondary road towards a place called Chitina, following the road until it stopped. Audrey listened, then asked pointedly just where the road did end and why we were going there. I began to explain that mostly we were trying to avoid the mosquitoes, and also to get to a wilderness area that was less controlled by rangers and the national park regime. Audrey thought I should be less critical of the rangers.
I changed the subject. ‘It also says in the Denali information pack that caribou are the animal most plagued by mosquitoes. At this time of the year they frequently head into the hills where the colder atmosphere and the mountain breezes keep the insects at bay. The snow banks and the wind-blown ridges protect them from mosquitoes, and they calve there. At these higher elevations their young are safe from bear and wolf predators. So we are heading into the hills between the Chugach mountains and the Wrangell and St Elias mountains. I think Jack and Cal should be safe from predators there and hopefully we should have left the mosquitoes behind us.’
‘Yes, Brian, but where exactly are we going to end up? I don’t want us camping out in the wilderness alone.’ She paused for a moment. ‘What would happen if this vehicle broke down or something?’
‘Well, the road ends at a place called McCarthy. One way in and no way out!’
Audrey’s response was less anxious. ‘I knew it, I just knew it. When I looked at the map two nights ago and saw the name of the place at the end of that road to nowhere I said to myself, I bet we end up there. I just knew it!’
The Long and Winding Road
Audrey was doing the driving and the boys were strapped into the dining-area bay seat playing with some plastic dinosaurs we had bought for a few dollars at an open-air market in Fairbanks. I sat up front trying to catch up on some reading and making notes. I had grandiosely inscribed my notebook with the words ‘Captain’s Log’ and underneath had printed ‘The RV Pequod: Star Date 2001’. The mongrel mix of Herman Melville and the Starship Enterprise had not lost its quirky appeal for me. For some reason I was humming the Beatles song ‘The Long and Winding Road’ to myself as I scanned my notebook making amendments and adding afterthoughts to my observations. The song, Melville’s book and the TV series have the common theme of a journey and they had tied themselves together subliminally in my mind. But it was a particular kind of journey, a journey in search of resolution, revelation and perhaps paradise.
I suppose it could be summed up as a spiritual quest that would hopefully conclude in some kind of personal transformation. Such quests have a long history, but in contemporary times such transformations are linked to a spiritual homeland where the weary old rationalist and traditional ideas of self and salvation are cast off as powerless impediments. This search for a renewed experience of authenticity was the objective of writers such as Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, each of whom found in their desert landscapes a sense of beatitude and timeless quiet in which their spirit was cleansed and nurtured anew.
My favourite travel writer in this genre is Freya Stark. Her book Beyond Euphrates, an autobiographical account of five years’ travelling and living in Iraq and what was then Persia, is a vivid example of finding a place of belonging, somewhere that was totally alien to all her European upbringing. Beyond the great Euphrates lay the uncharted mountains and valleys she mapped for the British Embassy. Freya found her soul-home there, a place and a people that inspired and stilled her. Many of these writers found their cathartic home in the Islamic world. But in my own mind, if there was such a place that could heighten, enrich and ultimately transform my understanding I was sure I would not find it in those parts of the world where religion had deeply embedded itself. I wanted to discover somewhere that still might be pristine and elemental, untainted by well-wrought belief systems, dogmas or regimented codes of ethical and religious observance handed down by religious elites. Yes, I wanted paradise without proscription, liberation without a leash. I felt I might find it in the wilderness where the law was not man-made and enlightenment was not revealed in a holy book – in short, in a living encounter.
Samuel Johnson defined ‘wilderness’ in 1755 in his Dictionary of the English Language as ‘a desert; a tract of solitude and savageness’. But wilderness has a dual aspect, as recorded in fairy-tales. I remember particularly from my childhood the stories of the brothers Grimm. Their woodland wilderness had a twofold emotional tone: on the one hand it was inhospitable, alien, mysterious and threatening; on the other, beautiful, friendly and capable of elevating and del
ighting the beholder. Involved in this second conception is the idea of wild country as a sanctuary in which those in need of consolation can find respite from the pressure of civilization.
This was near to my own understanding of the place. For me, Jack London’s books had only extended this sanctuary metaphor of wilderness. Dictionaries and logistic analysis are only holding pens for language. Ultimately an understanding of wilderness is as complex as it is partly contradictory. It elicits instinctive responses, can awaken feelings that are preternatural and emotional. It can reveal a new psychological persona and a more expansive communion within its quiet. It disinters parts of ourselves that domesticity has consigned to some dusty attic of our being. For wilderness is primarily a state of mind, a response more than a place apart. But whatever it was, it was out there waiting for me to enter into it and to draw from it whatever authenticity it offered me. My cerebral musings were in any case creating their own kind of wilderness and I was happily ready to jettison them for the real thing.
Our arrival in Talkeetna brought me back down to earth. The small town apparently took its name from a Tanana native expression meaning ‘river of plenty’, and it turned out to be just that after our Spartan experience in Denali. It had retained much of its frontier character with small log and clapboard cabins lined along narrow dirt roads. The main street, which is no more than about 150 yards long, boasts a sign which reads ‘Welcome to downtown Talkeetna’. Downtown comprised a handful of coffee shops and restaurants and a gem of a general store called Nagleys which hadn’t changed a lot since it was built in 1921. Inside, huge rusty bear traps lined the walls along with an assortment of bric-a-brac from the early establishment of the town as the engineering centre for the railroad north. The assortment of rusty iron railroad fittings made for a curious accompaniment to the piles of fresh bread, baskets of berries, jars of homemade preserve and sacks of dry beans. At the other side, across from the food, were stockpiles of everything a homestead community would require, from hatchets to headgear. There was even a display case full of handguns.