By Friday, the art teacher and her students had outlined a Spirit Bear on the gym wall. Fourth period, Cole sat at his desk in history class, bored. Glancing out the window, he noticed snowflakes swirling around. All fall, the weather had been mild with unseasonably warm temperatures, but now a bitter wind kicked up out of the north and drove snow sideways past the windowpanes.
When school let out that afternoon, Cole met Peter by the lockers. “Did you see the snow?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, winter’s here.”
“Hey, have you seen the old homeless guy around?” Peter asked.
Cole shook his head. “Not since we saw him pushing that old pine stump in his cart. Why?”
“I’m going to take him the at.óow after school,” Peter said. “He needs it to stay warm.”
Cole didn’t argue. Giving Peter the colorful blanket on the island had been part of his own healing—it showed he was capable of trust. Now, giving it away was also important to Peter.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Peter asked.
“Would it make any difference if I did?”
“No.”
“Then why did you ask me?”
“’Cause I wanted you to help me give it to him,” Peter admitted.
“I thought you trusted the old guy—that’s why you give somebody the at.óow.”
“I do,” said Peter. “But I thought you might want to come along because we’re friends.”
Cole smiled and nodded. “For sure.”
Filled with anticipation, they headed for Peter’s house to pick up the blanket. Neither had worn gloves to school, and their fingers and cheeks were numbed by the bitter, gusting wind. They zipped their jackets up and ducked their heads to protect their ears.
At Peter’s house, Cole waited inside the entry as Peter ran up to his room for the at.óow and also a flashlight.
When Peter returned, the sight of the brightly colored blanket flooded Cole’s mind with memories and emotions. He unfolded the at.óow carefully and wrapped it around his shoulders. Eyes closed, he buried his face in the soft wool and pretended that he was letting all his own ancestors wrap their lives around his for a moment. He felt their presence and their protection.
“Hello, Planet Earth to Cole,” Peter said.
Cole opened his eyes and refolded the blanket. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Without talking, Peter and Cole walked to the old building. “Do you think he’s in there?” Peter asked, his breath showing in the cold air.
“In weather like this, where else could he be?”
Cautiously, both boys slipped between the broken front doors. The grocery cart was gone. Peter snapped on his flashlight at the top of the stairwell. “Hey, mister!” he called. “W-w-we brought you something.”
Cole called out, “Hello, anybody down there?”
Their voices echoed in the damp and dark stairwell.
“Let’s just go down and leave it for him,” Cole said.
“But then I can’t explain to him how special and important the at.óow is,” Peter argued.
“You want to come back?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said, starting tentatively down the steps. He probed the light into the darkness.
Cole followed. “Let me see the flashlight,” he said, when they reached the bottom. He shined it into the corner where the old bum lived, but nothing made sense—everything was gone.
There was no mattress, no cardboard box for a table, nothing. Only wood shavings. The whole floor was covered with fresh wood shavings. Cole shined the light around the empty room. There was simply nothing. The homeless man had vanished with no sign he had ever been there. Cobwebs hung from the walls and ceiling, and dust covered the floor where the mattress had been.
“Where d-d-did he go?” Peter asked.
“Maybe he was never here,” Cole said.
“What do you mean he was never here? We saw him. Let me see the light again.” Peter grabbed the flashlight. Almost frantically, he flashed the beam around the room, searching for any sign of the old man.
That was when they spotted it.
Both boys gasped as Peter steadied the beam of light on a big object sitting in the far corner.
“It’s a bear,” Cole whispered.
“A Spirit Bear,” Peter answered.
Surrounded by the wood shavings stood a magnificent white bear. It looked as if it had been carved from pine, and every detail down to the claws and eyes looked alive. Over four feet tall, the bear had a paw raised and head tilted to one side. It stared forward as if gazing into the future. When the light shined on its face, Cole saw gentleness, kindness, and strength.
Cole and Peter stood speechless for a moment.
“Wh-wh-why did he carve that?” Peter finally asked.
“To replace the bulldog statue,” Cole ventured.
“But how did he know we needed it?”
Cole shrugged. “There’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand. Why does anything happen? Why did the Spirit Bear in Alaska keep following us?”
Peter held up the at.óow. “And what do I do with this now?”
“If this bear is displayed inside the school, maybe you can spread the at.óow underneath for every student to see.”
“To remind us of our ancestors?” Peter asked.
Cole nodded and whispered reverently, “And to remind us that we are each important and a part of the Circle.”
Without speaking, they lifted the old man’s gift. Balancing its weight between them, Peter and Cole carried the Spirit Bear up the dark stairs, through the doors, and out into their world.
Extras
GHOST OF
SPIRIT BEAR
Fifteen Minutes
Dream Big
Some Q&A
Fifteen Minutes
Growing up, I was a troubled teenager. I wish I could say it was my parents who turned me around, but I can’t. Instead, I think of three people. There was a pilot who took five minutes out of his day in a DC-3 to tell me that I should be a pilot. There was a librarian who took five minutes out of her day to listen to my problems and put the right book into my little hands. And there was a professor who could have flunked me my first year of college, but instead took five minutes to tell me I was a writer and encourage me to make it my vocation. A grand total of fifteen minutes by three very special people changed my life.
It all started during a trip to Cochabamba, down in the Bolivian lowlands. I crept up and peeked into the cockpit. The copilot noticed me and motioned for me to come in. I thought I was in trouble, but instead, he showed me all the instruments and what each instrument did. Then he stood up and let me sit in the pilot’s seat! It was like sitting in a spacecraft. He showed me how pulling back on the yoke made the DC-3 go up. Pushing forward forced us down. I could even bank the big plane.
It was so cool. As I tugged that big plane around the sky, all the people in the back probably thought we were flying through rough air. When I finished, the pilot knelt down in the narrow space between the seats and looked me right in the eye. “You’ve flown before, haven’t you, Son?” he said.
“N-no!” I stammered.
“Well, you ought to. ’Cause you’re a natural pilot.”
From that day on, I wanted to become a pilot.
The encouragement continued years later. As a juvenile delinquent in middle school, I skipped class one day and was walking around the hallways looking for trouble. I went into the library and the librarian came over and asked me what I wanted. Well, I couldn’t tell her what I was really doing, so I told her I’d come in to look for a book.
“I’ve noticed you,” she said. “You don’t seem to have many friends.”
“I don’t need any!” I said like a tough kid.
“Well, what do you like?” she said.
I shrugged. “I like to fly. I take lessons out at Stanton.”
“What kind of plane do you fly?” she asked.
“I fly a 1967 Cessna 150 with a Co
ntinental O-200-A engine. On a calm day, I can push the nose into a dive and go almost 150 miles per hour,” I boasted.
She smiled. “So you like to fly?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I think I have a book you’d like,” she said.
“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t tell her I could barely read a comic book.
Well, she brought out a silly-looking book with a seagull on the front. The name was even sillier. It was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
“I don’t want to read about a stinking seagull,” I muttered.
“Oh no, this isn’t about just any seagull,” the librarian said. “This is about a little gull that decides he doesn’t want to eat fish guts the rest of his life and be picked on by the other gulls. And so he does the unthinkable and leaves the flock and flies out to the distant cliffs. He spreads his wings and rides the updrafts until he becomes a little speck against the sun. Then he pulls one wing in and learns how to do barrel rolls. He learns flips and snap rolls. Soon he learns to dive straight down at more than two hundred miles per hour, faster than any seagull has ever flown in history.”
“A dumb little seagull would do all those things?” I asked incredulously.
She nodded. “Oh yeah.”
Well, I took that book and struggled with it for almost six weeks, but it was the very first book I ever read from cover to cover. One day, the librarian met me in the hall and asked me if I was done with the book. “Normally you get a library fine after two weeks,” she said. “You’ve had that book a month and a half.”
“But I’m not done yet,” I said.
“How many pages do you have left?” she asked.
“I’ve read it nine times, and I want to read it one more time,” I said. “Is that okay?”
She grinned. “Yes, that’s all right. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you keep it three more days, and you read it one more time.”
“Okay,” I said. But because I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent, I kept it three more days … and read it TWO more times.
After Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I read The Prophet and fell in love with poetry. Then I started reading Hardy Boys mysteries. Once I realized that reading books was a wonderful escape, I was hooked.
However, because my spelling and handwriting were awful, I never thought of myself as a writer. That notion would have to wait many years until I went away to college. I handed in my first English assignment, thinking I had done a great job. It came back with more red marks from the professor correcting it than words I’d written. It looked like a pizza!!! I thought I had flunked out of college, but the professor called me down in front of all the other students and told me that I was a wonderful writer. I was speechless when he told me he had read more than three hundred essays and mine was the only one that had made him laugh and cry.
He really impressed on me that writing is storytelling. Today, I don’t write books like some authors do, by coming up with ideas. I come up with emotions and then find ideas to wrap around the feelings. Over time, my technical skills have improved greatly, but I’ve never forgotten that writing is storytelling.
Dream Big
Almost all of my dreams began early in life. After reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I used to go out to the lake near our home and stand for hours on the shore and stare at the cliffs on the other side. I imagined myself as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I wanted so badly to be special, and I would wonder out loud, “Can dumb Ben Mikaelsen ever be special, too?”
I doubted that could ever happen.
One day, after getting beat up really bad at school, I went alone to the lake after school and sat down beside the water. I stared at the cliffs on the other side of the lake and cried. I was in seventh grade, felt more alone than I ever had in my life, and didn’t know what to do. I was trying to be like everybody else, but I was still being teased. And so that day I decided to be myself. I paddled a canoe across the lake and started diving off the cliffs, pretending I was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. When I began I barely could swim, and I simply jumped into the lake from the lowest ledge, five feet up. But I had seen people on television actually diving into the water. And so I tried to dive. At first I belly flopped, but finally I went in headfirst.
Over the next two years, I must have dived three thousand times, always diving higher, arching my back more, and pointing my toes. By the time I started ninth grade, I was making beautiful arched swan dives from more than fifty feet above the water.
My diving remained my own secret until one day when somebody saw me. I came to school and the bully marched up to me. “I heard you dove off a fifty-foot cliff!” he challenged.
“Yeah,” I said meekly.
He shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he said, and walked away. He didn’t call me dumb or beat me up. He simply said, “You’re crazy!”
I grinned. That was the nicest thing that anyone had ever said to me.
At this same time, I started taking flying lessons. I couldn’t solo the airplane until my sixteenth birthday, but I could take flying lessons with an instructor.
Flying lessons were expensive, and I came from a very poor family. Many times in my family there was barely enough money for food and clothes. And so I started mowing lawns, shoveling sidewalks, and delivering newspapers. It took me three weeks to come up with the twelve dollars it cost for one forty-five-minute flying lesson. Then I rode my bicycle seven miles from Northfield to Stanton to take my flying lessons because my parents said they couldn’t afford the gas. Besides, they thought that flying lessons were a waste of money. But I didn’t care. I wanted to fly more than I wanted to breathe air, and every third Saturday, I rode my bike to the airport. Even in the middle of the winter, when the ground was frozen and covered with snow, I would bundle up and ride out to the airport.
There were bullies from school who used to throw snowballs at me and shout, “Hey, Dumb Mikaelsen, where are you going?” Sometimes they would knock me off my bike. They would laugh and shout, “What’s wrong, Dumb Mikaelsen? Can’t you ride a bicycle?”
Nothing, however, kept me from my flying lessons. Those bullies didn’t know I had a dream and was determined to make it come true. Many times since, I have wished those bullies could have stepped into a time machine and traveled into the future and heard a phone conversation that took place thirty years later because that little boy on his bicycle was willing to follow his dreams. I was invited to copilot an aircraft, all expenses paid, on an expedition to the North Pole.
Did I accept the invitation?
Oh yeah!
Some Q&A
Tell us a little bit about yourself and the way you grew up.
Growing up, I never thought of my life as different or unique. Everything seemed normal because I had nothing to compare to. I never questioned being born in South America, growing up with revolutions, or that I was different than most of the other children around me. I did learn early in life what it was like to be teased for being different. I was reminded almost daily that my skin was a different color than the other kids. I grew up being called a “gringo.” Many times I was held down while mud was smeared on my face. The bullies would let me up and laugh at me. “Now you’re not a gringo,” they would shout.
I remember that as an eight-year-old, I disliked myself solely because of the color of my skin. I grew painfully aware that I was different from other Bolivian kids, but I assumed that this was the life of every white child in the world. To find this wasn’t true surprised me when I moved to the United States of America.
When I was a seventh grader and we moved from Bolivia to Minnesota in the U.S., I was excited. I thought that now I would be the same as all the other students because my skin was the same color. At that time of my life, I didn’t realize that differences were wonderful and went so much deeper than one’s skin. To impress all these students that I thought were just like me, I dressed up the first day of school with my school uniform from Bolivia. I wore shiny black-and-white saddle sho
es, high white socks with red tassels, baggy leather knickers with suspenders, a white puffy-sleeved shirt, greased-back hair, and I even wore a bow tie. You can imagine the teasing.
It took me many years to realize that I wasn’t dumb or a failure. It took even longer to realize my differences were what made me unique and full of potential. The good thing about all of this is it made me a loner. And being a loner, I became a thinker. I began doing the things I wanted. These things included flying, skydiving, cliff diving, and writing. This is now one of my goals in writing. I want my readers to discover the same self-worth I discovered.
What was your school like?
Our home in Bolivia was on the high plains above La Paz, 14,000 feet above sea level. There were no schools. As such, I was never sent to school or home-schooled until fourth grade. Then I was sent away to a boarding school run by instructors who ruled with an iron fist. Minor infractions were punished with a stick. Severe infractions were punished with a leather strap that left your hands bleeding.
If I did my best but failed, the next day I had to do better or get a strapping from the headmaster. Knowing that a strapping was coming and that I had already tried my hardest was probably the most frightening thing about boarding school. It always made me feel like I was dumb and a complete failure.
My escape was to write my feelings on paper. But even that carried some risk. At boarding school, we slept in dorm rooms in steel-framed beds. Every night the headmaster would count down, “Five, four, three, two, one,” before snapping the lights off. “Go to sleep NOW!” he would order.
And you went to sleep, OR ELSE!
Ghost of Spirit Bear Page 12