Ghost of Spirit Bear (17 page)

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!

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 shoes, 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.

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!

The problem was I always had wonderful ideas and stories bouncing around in my head. After all the other kids fell asleep, I’d lie awake in the dark, grinning at the ceiling. And so I started taking a piece of paper with me to bed at night. I hid a flashlight under my pillow, and every night after the headmaster shut the lights out, I pulled the covers over my head and knelt with the flashlight in my mouth. With paper and pencil in front of me, I continued writing. It was there, filling those blank pages under the covers, afraid of a strapping by the headmaster, that I really began to discover the magic that would someday make me a published author.

For me, becoming a bully was my way of surviving.

When I was at college, I helped work on bear studies in northern Minnesota. After moving to Montana, I received a phone call asking if I would be willing to raise a little cub that had been used in a research facility. If I couldn’t take him, they would have to kill him. I agreed to take care of him and began raising my bear, Buffy. I didn’t have any special expertise. Even the books I read on bears didn’t prepare me for raising one.

I do need to say this—people should never raise wild animals. They belong in the wild. But Buffy was a special circumstance. I’ve raised him for more than twenty-five years now, and he is the most extraordinary creature I have ever met. He weighed barely twenty pounds when he first came to my home. Now he weighs nearly seven hundred fifty pounds. We are very close, and he trusts me so much that he will hold out his paw and allow me to cut open an abscessed toe with a razor blade, all while growling and biting on his other paw. That is a lot of trust. I’m not sure my sisters trust me that much.

One important thing: I have noticed that when I visit Buffy each day, he mimics my mood. If I’m playful, he’s playful. If I’m sad, he puts his big old nose on my shoulder. If I’m angry, he’s dangerous. I want my books to reveal that how we treat the world is most often how the world treats us.

I’ve spent a lifetime catching up on my education. I’ve also spent a lifetime dealing with the emotions and anger brought on by my early years. I always tell students that I made up the story
Touching Spirit Bear,
but the book was my own emotional autobiography. At one point in my life I was Peter Driscal, at another point, Cole Matthews. When I discovered life can be wonderful if you treat it wonderfully, I became like Edwin and Garvey.

I must also add this. When I heard about Columbine—where two boys in Colorado who were bullied in school killed many of their classmates—I knew I needed to write
Touching Spirit Bear.

I knew when I finished
Touching Spirit Bear,
the story wasn’t finished. I always imagined what Cole and Peter might do when they returned to the big city. The real test of survival in my mind would take place once they came back to reality. They might have changed on the island, but now they were coming back to a big inner-city high school where things hadn’t changed. There were still bullies, gangs, and drugs. Now came the real test of whether Cole and Peter had changed in their hearts.

And they had.

I also knew from the beginning that they would learn new lessons to build on their earlier ones. That is how life is. We are always learning.

Each year I speak to students in different settings all across the country. Some of the best writers are in juvenile detention centers, where the kids truly have stories to tell. Their technical skills are poor, but their stories are powerful and filled with feelings. This is something that students should always remember. Write stories that have feelings. If you don’t make the reader care, it doesn’t matter if the words are spelled correctly.

I am simply grateful that life has given me the written word. I can’t sing a note without scaring the dog. I can’t paint a picture of a cow pie, much less a sunset. But I did discover the power of words. I discovered that words allowed me to make magic. I could make people laugh and cry. I could make people think. For that gift, I will always be thankful.

That is what is so wonderful about reading and writing. We can discover our own potential. By doing what I wanted in life—following dreams and learning to believe in myself—each day has become truly remarkable. Students can discover the same lessons that I learned: Your life is the greatest story you will ever tell. We are all the authors of our lives.

Also By Ben Mikaelsen

Red Midnight

Touching Spirit Bear

Tree Girl