Beyond the Bear (19 page)

“I’ll give you a call when I get back from fishing,” I told her.

She’d heard those words before, and they gave her a chill. But unlike the summer before, I not only called after fishing, I came home to her with a forty-pound king in my cooler and a humongous grin on my face.

CHAPTER 17

Life Plan, Take II

Back at Arboleda, I rose as usual with the roosters, poured
myself a cup of coffee, made my way to the front porch mine-sweeping with my feet, settled into my favorite morning chair, and began formulating a new life plan for myself. I’d made a major decision on my trip to Alaska. I was going to move back up and reclaim my life. I was going to give my relationship with Amber everything I had to give, which at the time wasn’t much. That part had to change.

I’d said I intended to make something good out of the grenade life had tossed me. Now that I had someone besides myself to consider, I was highly motivated to make that “good” part happen. I had no idea how—I couldn’t even match my socks—but I was determined to figure it out.

Enrolling in a school for the blind was on the horizon, but I wasn’t quite ready. First, I had a lot more letting go to do. It wasn’t always up to me to decide what to let go of or when to let it go. I was taken off guard on a regular basis, like getting a call out of the blue from the Alaska State Troopers regarding a certain box with my name on it.

“I have some things here that belong to you, some clothing you had with you the night of your accident,” the trooper told me. “What would you like me to do? I could put them in the mail or I could dispose of them for you.”

“Well, what have you got?”

“There’s a green pile jacket, North Face, but it’s in pretty bad shape.”

“Like, does it just need to be washed or . . . ?”

“No, not really. Sorry, but it’s, ah, it’s a mess.”

“No, I don’t want that.”

“There’s a gray sweater here, but I don’t think you’re going to want that back, either.”

“That’s fine. Get rid of it.”

“There’s also a green ball cap.”

I perked right up. “Definitely send me
that
.”

“Hey, guys!” I shouted to Brian and Jeremy. “My Bonfire hat still lives! Wahoo!”

When the box arrived and Brian opened it and looked inside, there was nothing to celebrate.

“Geez, Dan, I really don’t think you want this. I don’t even want to touch it.”

It had clearly been through the mauling with me. My chest sank. It was just a hat, but that hat had been such a big part of me.

“Just toss it,” I told him. “Get it out of here.”

I had to let go of certain friends, too. Some of my hardcore ski buddies were just that; all we ever did together was ski. They’d come around for a while but eventually they’d fade out of my life. I knew that. I understood. People move on.

Already I sensed a distance between me and John, but for a much different reason. It couldn’t be easy for him to look at me. He’d stared that same bear in the eyes. He’d heard me being torn apart and had been powerless to stop it. I don’t know how anyone could ever be the same after that. On my comeback fishing trip, I swear John, Jaha, and the two other fishing buddies with us that day, Nick Ohlrich and Nigel Fox, pooled their fishing karma and willed me to catch not just a fish, but that fish, my forty-pound king. John whooped and hollered along with the rest. But the night before when we’d all stayed together in Cooper Landing, John seemed unusually quiet and kept disappearing out the door. He had a hard time watching me bump into things, I think
.
He had a hard time seeing me need an escort to get to the outhouse and a cane to tap my way around a room.

After the bear, he left his ski-resort job, and several months later, his anthropology program at the University of Alaska. I worried that the bear had altered the course of his life. I’m pretty sure he’d disagree. I’m guessing, because we’ve never talked about it. As close as we had been in our philosophies, in our reverence for the land, in our understanding of the ways of the fishing junkie, we were opposites in that regard.
I needed to explore every square inch of the emotional terrain surrounding my bear attack, to turn over every stone. John was more of the mindset that you leave that stuff alone. I needed to talk about it. He needed not to.

I missed him; we’d had so many laughs together. But if I thought too much about all that I missed, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.

Amber was the exception to that rule. Missing her was like motivational rocket fuel. I was goofy in love with her, from her tenderness to her obsession with shoes. After craving her every day through four more months of long-distance phone bills, I planned my second trip up to see her over Thanksgiving. By then I had prosthetic eyes. My droopy right eye was still mostly swollen shut, and neither set of eyelids worked, so I couldn’t blink, nor could I close my eyes when I slept, which I worried would be disturbing. Still, I kept hearing that my new eyes were a big improvement over my freaky green ones. That, I assumed, would be easier on Amber, although she never said a word about the way I looked. Not once. It would only be down the road that I’d find out how squeamish she had been about my wounds, especially early on when my newly rebuilt eyelids and sockets were oozy. I’ve never known anyone so willing to overlook that which is impossible to overlook.

Amber had done some upgrading of her own since my first visit. She’d moved out of her tiny cabin in Bear Valley and into a real house just across the way, a two-story with big windows and a deck overlooking Cook Inlet. She’d moved in as the housemate of a seldom-seen, North Slope oil-field worker with kids in Oregon, so he was rarely around. Besides having a place with lots of room and dependable heat and doors that didn’t blow open and pipes that didn’t freeze, her creaky twin bed was history. She now had a double futon, and I was eager to get to know it.

My spirits were flying as she drove us from the airport into the Chugach Mountain foothills toward Bear Valley, my left hand on her knee, her right hand on mine.
Then the season’s first snow began to fall.

“Oh, man, it just started snowing,” she said, leaning toward the dashboard, gripping the top of the steering wheel with both hands.

“Really? Is it dumping or just flurries?”

“It’s snowing pretty good. Big, fluffy flakes. I’ve got my studded tires on so no worries.”

My body reacted on a cellular level, the way it would have before.
Ooooh, yes! Let the ski season begin!
Fresh snow, like a fresh run of sockeyes plowing upriver, was a call to action, and I’d never failed to respond to that call. The initial excitement quickly faded as it occurred to me that had I not crossed paths with that bear, I would have been grabbing my skis, my pack, my avalanche beacon, and my dog, and we would have been heading off to the snowfields and glaciers in the backcountry. Me and Maya, we would have been out there. I turned my head away as if to look out the window. Amber pulled up to her place, shut off her engine, and turned in her seat to look at me.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded. I opened the truck door and got out. As I did, I felt crystals the size of Corn Flakes land on my face. I took a step, then stopped and listened. Snowflakes piling on top of each other was my favorite form of silence. I stood there in the newly fallen snow, arms stiff at my side, the corners of my mouth battened down tight.

Amber offered her arm, I took hold, and she guided me inside. She opened a bottle of red wine and poured us each a glass, then went into the master bathroom, a place of earth-tone tiles, mismatched towels, and a roomy Jacuzzi. She opened up the hot-water faucet, poured in a shot of bubble bath, and started filling the tub. When it was ready, she led me to it. Our clothes hit the floor, I climbed in, and she climbed in behind me. She massaged my neck, arms, and shoulders. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight against her chest. With my ducts obliterated no tears could fall, but I cried. I cried with my entire body. And I cried a long time.

Of all the letting go I had to do, the most pressing was having my tragedy be my identity. “Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you deal with it,” as the saying goes. Despite all I’d lost, I was grateful I was still able to be grateful.

I
was grateful to have experienced sight for the first twenty-five years of my life. I was grateful for the vivid memories that were mine to keep. Like diving into the Sea of Cortez in the middle of the night amid bioluminescence, and for a mind-blowing hour cavorting about in firefly soup. Like floating through a cave
in New Zealand with thousands of glowworms dripping from the ceiling like beads of luminous dew. Like watching Alaska’s summer sun slip below the horizon, electrify the clouds in pinks and blues, then rise again on nights I was so energized by the light that I’d forget to go to sleep.

I thought of a coworker from long ago who had seen so little with his own eyes. After returning from Malaysia to Cincinnati and graduating from high school there, I had taken a job as a street sweeper, picking up trash and cleaning up after problem drinkers’ overindulgence. My workmate was supporting his family that way. Kenny had been born and raised in the city, had never ventured beyond it, and was the type of man who’d be scared of a deer. I would show up for work on Monday mornings and regale him with tales of climbing and caving at the Red River Gorge. He couldn’t imagine it.

“You be hanging out there in the woods and stuff? Oh lordy, that’s some crazy shit. I’d be pissin’ my pants.”

By twenty-five, I had seen more extraordinary things than most people have the opportunity to see in a lifetime, from the Great Wall of China to
manta rays while swimming off a boat in Baja, nothing but manta rays above, below, and on both sides of me as far as I could see.

So now what? There were the Erik Weihenmayers of the world, blind people who do the seemingly undoable, in his case acrobatic skydiving, long-distance biking, and climbing Mt. Everest. Post blindness, I did a little telemark skiing and sea kayaking. I went rock climbing at Pinnacles National Monument and backpacking in the Sierras and around Big Sur. But I was no Weihenmayer. Those weren’t the kinds of goals I had in mind for myself. After so many years on the go, I figured it was time for me to learn the art of being still.

For years I had been questioning what I had to offer the world besides boosting the economy by frequenting outdoor gear-head shops. The question burned deeper by my final year at Prescott, with a cathartic moment in the Tetons during a backcountry ski course with Scott McGee of the Professional Ski Instructors of America National Nordic team.
One night
at the lodge where our group was staying, my classmates and I assembled after dinner for an evening program. We sat on sofas and stretched out on the floor in long-john tops, polar-fleece pants, and down booties, and sipped tea and hot cocoa as our guest speaker, Scott Wood of Brigham Young University-Idaho, spoke to us about the value of adventure. Woven into his talk was the story of one of his former students, Suzie Francis, from a school trip into Arches National Park years before. He told us how Suzie had made it her goal to treat the other students on that trip the way Christ would treat them, and how she’d endeared herself to everyone through her efforts. The second day in, one of the students found a small, secret cave, its entry obscured by brush, and they all went to investigate. Inside, Suzie buried herself in the sand like a kid at the beach. When it was time to go, she got up, shook herself off, and headed out.

Suzie died in a car accident that fall. Speaking at her funeral, Wood told us, was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He returned to that area the next year with a new group of students, remembered the secret cave, and almost dropped to his knees when he saw Suzie’s imprint still there, as if she’d just risen from the sand. Several of her friends were on that trip. They had a group cry and shared thoughts on how the way she’d lived her life had left a lasting imprint on theirs.

I was so moved by the story that after the session I skied off into the night, found a spot off the trail where I was sure I was alone, stabbed my poles into the snow,
leaned into them, stared up at the moonlight filtered through treetops and sobbed.
The story drove home how unpredictable life is, its potential to end without notice, and how there’s only so much time to put it to good use. I pulled out my bandana, dried my eyes, stuffed it into my back pocket, and skied a couple of miles before heading back to the lodge. I crawled into my sleeping bag that night knowing I wanted to use my time on this planet to do something meaningful and lasting, to leave my own imprint in the sand.

Then along came the bear. Surviving the unsurvivable brought clarity. The old Dan was gone. The new one was a work in progress. I’d fought for this second chance and wasn’t about to squander it.

One good thing to come of my tragedy was the bear bringing my biological father back into my life. Steve and his family lived in Salinas, a forty-minute drive from Arboleda, and we had been getting to know each other since my return to California. He had a doctorate in psychology, and had devoted much of his career to working with severely damaged kids. Maybe it was in my genes, but I was drawn to that kind of work. After a lot of soul-searching and talks with Lee Hagmeier, I decided to go back to school, to get a master’s degree in social work at the University of Alaska. I wanted to learn how to help others navigate through tragedies of their own.