Beyond the Bear (17 page)

Amber continued her effort to blend into the background. The last thing she wanted was to put pressure on me to respond to her in a way I was incapable of responding. She just did what she could to be there for me and my family. She took Maya on walks and drove my mother up to see my place in Bear Valley, my dream of mountain living in a funky little cabin with a million-dollar view and skiing out my front door. She helped guide my mom through the maze of bills, insurance, and other paperwork hoops one climbs through when doing hard time in this country’s health-care system. About the only piece of my tragedy that had any resemblance to good luck was the timing. I’d been at my job six months; my insurance had kicked in just a few days before.

A fondness for Amber quickly spread within my family.

“No wonder you two got together,” said my mom, who’d heard the whole story by then. “That girl’s a gem.”

I just nodded, then changed the subject. There was no way in hell Amber would be interested in me now. I was deformed, scarred, and disabled, hardly boyfriend material. Living any kind of fulfilling life was not something I could imagine at the time. It was best for me not to dwell on what I no longer had.

Then one night, as my time in Alaska was winding down, Amber and I unexpectedly found ourselves alone in my room. I can’t say we got to talking because I couldn’t do much of that, just a few words here and there with fingers covering my trach. We were sitting on my king-size bed with Amber sitting behind me, facing my good side, massaging my neck. When she finished, she wrapped her arms around my waist and laid her head against the back of my shoulders.

“I still have a lot of feelings for you, Dan.”

I leaned into her and felt a wave of sadness wash over me. We stayed like that for an entire Bebel Gilberto song. I then scooted down onto my back, and she lay down next to me, our legs interlocked like pretzels. As we held onto each other, she ran her hand under my shirt and stroked my chest until I wanted to cry. I covered my trach and rasped into her ear, “I wish you could stay the night.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I really do.”

That was not going to happen with my mother in the adjoining room and my brother across the hall, although if he’d known, he would have figured out a way to keep my mom distracted.

“I’ve . . . missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, so much.”

I could not believe she still cared for me in this way. I mean, I really could not believe it. Maybe the lights were out, I didn’t know. The chemistry was still there; we both felt it. But there was nothing at all we could do about it.

As committed as Dr. Kallman was to getting me out of the hospital in time for my birthday, he was equally determined to get me to California in time for the Monterey Jazz Festival. The week after my coming-out party at the Bear Tooth, in preparation for leaving Alaska, I got my jaw unwired, my trach tube removed, and my stoma stitched up. My stomach tube had already been yanked out, not unlike how one yanks a lawn-mower cord, it turned out. So I was good to go. That left finding some way to thank the rescuers, doctors, nurses, friends, and strangers whose collective efforts were the only reason I was still among the living. Although it would never feel like enough, I gave it a shot through an open letter.

“If it were not for the wonderful treatment provided by Dr. Kallman and Dr. Ellerbe’s office and the amazing care of Providence hospital, I would not have survived. The members of this community really came together in my family’s time of need to extend their thoughts, services, financial aid, and most of all their prayers. I have been healing quickly and I attribute this to those Alaskans who have extended themselves and their thoughts to my recovery. I thank you more than words can express. Keep on fishing, and I’ll see you out there next summer.”

Excerpts of my letter, and an update on my recovery, were published on the front page of the
Anchorage Daily News
.

My mother, brother, and I, and Maya in her dog carrier, had an early morning flight to California. Amber showed up before work to see me off. The mutual understanding was that I was setting her free. I didn’t know when or really if I’d be back.

“Just because my life has ended doesn’t mean yours has to,” I told her.

Amber, who doesn’t have a single drama-queen cell in her body, accepted what had to be. We didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again. We did know we both needed to move on. There was no choice, and so we hugged, said goodbye, and promised to keep in touch. And that was that.

The manager of the hotel, who was coming along to help with luggage and see us off at the airport, said it was time to go. I climbed into the shuttle and settled into my seat, and the van pulled away from the curb.

I was off to begin the daunting task of learning to live as a blind man. My indoctrination came sooner than I expected, before our plane backed out of the gate. As passengers were settling in and fastening their seat belts, a flight attendant came up to me.

“Excuse me, sir, are you Mr. Bigley?”

“That’s me,” I said in my hoarse, newly restored voice.

“Mr. Bigley, just so you know, the emergency exits are located three rows in front of you. In the event of an emergency, just remain seated until one of us can assist you. You’ll need to be the last one off the plane.”

This was my welcome to the world of the blind.

CHAPTER 15

Arboleda Sessions

I bolted upright in bed, crying out, arms windmilling at nothing
but the night. Again. I’d had this same nightmare so many times I’d lost count. I dropped my arms, grabbed fistfuls of sweat-soaked sheets, and waited for my heartbeat to return to idle. I pushed the button on the side of my talking watch to get my bearings.

The time is 3:12 a.m.

What else was new? For whatever reason I’d developed a habit of waking up at 3:12, if not exactly, then close to it. The precision timing was eerie, and I could make no sense of it. The nightmare responsible played out in chops, its images more like a series of snapshots than a movie rolling inside my head. The final moments I could see would come to me in a freeze-frame replay of the seconds between John diving off the trail and me getting slammed, just me and the bear, its huge head getting closer and closer, its eyes locked on mine.

Typically, I’d bust from sleep just as the sow made contact. But I’d dreamt every aspect of my mauling and from every possible angle—up, down, and sideways. In some dreams I could feel the bear’s weight upon my chest, my lungs deflating like punctured inner tubes. In others I could hear the scraping of teeth against my skull. Traumatic memory can be kind or cruel that way. People remember either too much or too little. I remembered too much. On nightmare nights, which were most nights, falling back to sleep was out the window. Even if I could, chances were high the bear would be waiting for me.

My dreams weren’t always about bears. I’d dream of being chased by thugs with Glocks, or militia with assault rifles, and me with nothing to defend myself. I’d run and run through city streets and alleyways, through shopping malls, through jungles. In one version, the militia would catch up with me, throw me to the ground, and spray me with lead. I’d feel the bullets hit one after another before finally lunging up in bed and gasping for breath.

Over time, with the help of distance and coping strategies prescribed by a trauma therapist, the dreams became less frequent and less terrifying with infinitely better outcomes. The bears, almost always a sow with cubs, would appear farther way, then off in the distance, then no longer in the woods but in a fields of flowers, then in the outfield of a neighborhood ballpark grazing on dandelions, the sow as docile as a Holstein cow. My role would shift from being eaten alive to being to startled to being wary to admiring them the way I had before. In one scenario, I would see the bears in the outfield from atop the ballpark’s chain-link backstop, watching from above with no fear at all. But those dreams didn’t come until much further down the road.

I hadn’t been in California long, and was still adjusting to a new landscape of sounds. I was still adjusting to the walls and corners and tables and chairs and sleeping dogs not used to being stepped on.
I was still getting acquainted with the doors and their jambs, sometimes finding them abruptly with my face, feeling at times like a pinball, bouncing off one thing into another.

As much as it smarted learning the lay of the land, I loved the place, my family’s second home called Arboleda, Spanish for “grove of trees.” After my grandparents passed away, my mother, aunt, and uncle sold the lakeside cabin in Ontario, and for years my mom had dreamed of buying another getaway closer to home. The two places were the antithesis of each other, but the moment she pulled into the circular driveway she knew Arboleda was it. While my grandparents’ home away from home had been a hand-hewn log cabin with bats in its rafters, Arboleda was a two-story, passive-solar, Mediterranean-style country house on five acres in the hills above San Juan Bautista, an hour’s drive from Carmel, where my mom and stepdad lived. With its gardens, manicured lawns, grape arbors, and old-growth sycamore trees, the place had operated
as a bed and breakfast and retreat house for small groups, family reunions, and weddings. Trails meandering through the property came upon benches tucked between live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. A pathway lined with grapevines led to a lower lawn with a meditation labyrinth made of white pebbles and ringed in abalone shells. Behind the house was a lawn terraced down to a small pond fed by a trickle of a creek that I could hear out my bedroom window, along with the owls and frogs and crickets
of the night. The property even came with a dog, a mutt named Cloey, short for Inspector Clouseau of
The Pink Panther
series, who showed up when the construction crew was building the place and never left.

As a teenager, I was self-conscious of my family’s financial resources, and would get embarrassed when my mom picked me up in her snow-white BMW. In college, I’d prided myself on being a minimalist, on my plastic milk-crate bedside table, my freebie dresser, and my second-hand and Dumpster-dive household scores. If I could have, I would have awarded myself a merit badge for being able to fit everything I owned into the back of my pickup. Of course, my pickup wasn’t exactly a handcart. The pretense wasn’t lost on me. I couldn’t have been more appreciative to have a wonderland like Arboleda to do my healing, or the resources to get the extraordinary help I got along the way.

As Dr. Kallman had hoped, I made it back in time for the Monterey Jazz Festival in late September, and was able to rally for a few hours each day. It was my first time in a crowd, and this festival drew a massive one, forty thousand people over three days, nearly ten thousand more than Alaska’s third largest city. With all the swelling and bandages, my left leg stiff as a baseball bat, I looked like an escapee from
Night of the Living Dead
. If people stared I didn’t know it.

The festival did my spirits good, especially when the funk-jazz trio, Soulive, heard my story, then gave me, my brother, and Jeremy, our friend and caretaker at Arboleda, the VIP treatment by setting up chairs for us on the side of the stage, then coming over after the show dripping with sweat to give me full-body hugs and wish me well. But one day I overdid it, walking farther than I had since the night of the bear. Fearing my leg wounds were opening up, I asked Brian to check me out. We opted against inspection in the men’s restroom. Two guys in a stall? Pants hitting the floor? Ah, no. So we went to one of the festival’s medical tents and asked for a spot where I could drop my drawers and Brian could take a look at my leg. It seemed like such a simple request, but there was that liability thing and paperwork to fill out. We tried to explain that we just needed some privacy where we could do this one little deal and be on our way. No paperwork, no service, the attendants insisted.

Paperwork. What was I going to put on the form? That I’d been mauled by a bear? It just seemed ludicrous. Out of context, a couple thousand miles from Alaska, I felt even more like a freak.

Even in Alaska, people had no idea what to say to me. I heard some of the strangest things. “I know just how you feel. I had a friend who had an eye shot out by a BB gun,” was one of my favorites. And I loved this: When I signed in as an outpatient for my fourth surgery, the woman behind the computer at patient check-in asked the purpose of my visit.

“I’m here for surgery with Dr. Kallman and Dr. Ellerbe.”

“And the nature of the surgery?”

“Closing up the wound in my forehead.”

“And the cause of the injury?”

“I got mauled by a bear.”

The woman paused, studied her computer screen a moment, then asked: “Was it an accident?”

At Arboleda, I devoted myself to healing inside and out. Brian took a leave of absence from his ski-area job to be with me. Jay again put his Portland massage therapy practice on hold and arrived soon after I did. Jeremy added looking after me to his list of caretaker duties.

He and I had met as neighbors in Prescott, Arizona, my junior year of college. He’d see me driving by and would nod and raise a beer from his porch, until one day I stopped to join him. We’d been friends ever since. He also befriended my brother, and was visiting him at Arboleda when my mom offered him the job caretaking the place. Studying to be a winemaker, he’d planned to tend to the house and grounds for just a semester or two, but once I arrived he stayed on indefinitely. Among other alterations, he set up a system of ropes so I could find my way alone across the driveway to the vegetable garden, and from there across a little creek to a lawn lined with fruit trees and lavender bushes that I called the Secret Garden
.

Many others helped out here and there, but those three had my back. They did wound care, drove me to and from appointments, cooked for me, and cleaned up my messes. When I would throw up, sometimes without warning, from the ongoing antibiotic warfare against MRSA, I’d try to deal with it myself, but sometimes I needed a little help.

“Man, I hate to ask you this. I did it again. I cleaned up the best I could but I don’t know if I got it all. Would you mind taking a look?”

They also kept me from spending too much time alone with my thoughts. We went for walks on the beach and to as many music shows as I could handle. When people made comments like, “Cool glasses, dude,” because I was wearing sunglasses at night, they set them straight. When people raised their voices and spoke slowly, they reminded them that I was blind, not hard of hearing. When servers at restaurants asked, “What does he want?” they’d say, “Why don’t you ask him? He’s sitting right here.”

Mornings were my favorite time of day. I’d rise at five with the roosters, pour coffee into a cup as big as a cereal bowl,
and sit in the sun listening to the pickup chorus of birds and the roosters harassing the chickens. Jeremy was another early riser, and we spent many a morning out there together, greeting the sun as it peeked over the ridge, talking about pretty much anything and everything except what had happened to me. Jeremy didn’t know the details, didn’t want to know them, and would walk away when others asked.

Throughout the fall I had a steady stream of Prescott and Alaska friends coming and going, to help out and play music—artists and musicians and grad students and ski bums and a freeloader or two. In addition to the conventional route, my healing path included acupuncture, meditation, massage, homeopathic remedies, craniosacral therapy, and a couple of sessions with an “intuitive healer,” which was where I drew the line—too woo-woo for me. I also did a little time at Esalen, a 120-acre healing and retreat center founded in Big Sur in the sixties, called the birthplace of the New Age movement, a term I’ve heard is now despised at the place. Those who’ve led workshops there include such literary, philosophical, and spiritual heavyweights as Aldous Huxley, Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Carlos Castaneda, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Andrew Weil. Although many would agree with the graffiti artist who once spray-painted at the entryway, “Jive shit for rich white folk,” I was in dire need of nourishment for my body and soul, and I got it there through massage, soaking in spring-fed hot tubs perched above the Pacific, and just absorbing the restorative energy that permeated the place.

My massage therapist at Esalen, Ilene Connelly, mother of Academy Award–winning actress Jennifer Connelly, it turned out, took one look at me our first session and said, “Okay, we need to talk.” She ended up becoming a great source of support and a great friend who would work on me at Arboleda and then refuse to take my money. She talked me through my first panic attack, when my heart rate went ballistic and I was convinced I was dying. She helped keep me present rather than off on some distant walkabout in my head. She gave me healing beads blessed by the Dalai Lama. I’ve kept them close to me ever since.

Staving off dark thoughts took vigilance and a concerted act of will. I was tested hard and often, beginning soon after arriving at Arboleda when I came within a heartbeat of getting my brains tenderized. Jeremy and I were hanging out in my favorite nook called Bella’s Garden, a circular clearing ten feet in diameter tucked away in a thicket, with wooden benches and chairs and a table with a stone top. Jeremy was telling me about some of the improvements he wanted to make around the property.

“Those fruits trees need a lot of work. The nectarines, I’m pretty sure, are toast and . . .”

An ominous commotion cracked above our heads. I leapt to my feet; he grabbed my arm and yanked me aside just as a huge branch off a willow tree came crashing down onto our chairs with a BOOM.

“Dude, you’re not going to believe this,” he said.

He led me back over to inspect the impact zone. I ran my hands over the bark and up the length of the
huge branch. The thing would have creamed us both. I had a constant headache back then, and just thinking about the closeness of that call added another on top of it. Back in my previous life, I’d often felt the universe was looking out for me. I had many reasons to feel that way. After the bear and the branch, I really had to wonder.

My efforts not to go to the dark side began back in the hospital, or even back at the river when I promised never to regret my decision to live. When my mother gave me the book on tape
There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
, by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, I listened. But listening to a spiritual tape doesn’t make a person spiritual any more than swimming in a lake makes him a trout.
While the book is not particularly profound, at the time it was exactly what I needed, and not so much the spiritual part; I’d believed in forces beyond the tangible long before the bear, confirmed every time I stood on a mountaintop or watched a sunrise.