I scribbled half this essay the night the rough draft was due. Then, on Friday night, I was getting ready to go to a party when I realized I had not finished the essay and the final draft was due! Hastily, I filled in some NaNo-style details and emailed it in. I got a 93%. XD
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Picture this: It's a pitch dark night. Not even the stars illuminate your path as you make your way up several flights of wooden-railed metal stairs, climbing from the park below to the streets above. It is late, and the world is silent, without even the sound of passing traffic on the road above. You are tired, and you've climbed so many stairs that you're not really paying attention to the path in front of you. Your eyes are focused, instead, on the glow of the streetlamp just one more flight away, a cheerful yellow light that shows you've almost completed your ascent. Without warning, something dark moves across the field of your vision, and you freeze, heart thrumming in your throat. What was that? Swallowing nervously, you begin to crawl up the rest of the stairs, every sense on high alert. Just when you think it was only your imagination, you see the creature! A black bear blocks the final flight of stairs, his dark eyes glinting in the streetlamp's light as his head turns in your direction. “Oh, God,” you think. “What do I do?”
Though the odds are against an encounter such as this on any given night, chances are, if you live in southeast Alaska, you'll come face-to-face with a black bear at least once in your life, just as Lord describes in her essay, “The Beauty in the Beast.” Though the previously described encounter was that of a friend, I have had several close-quarters experiences of my own, with similar bruins. Each time, I have been granted a glimpse into the life of a powerful creature, so often the subject of myth and of legend, and each taste of the wild has brought a delicious stirring in some secret part of my soul that still connects me to the uncivilized ancestry hidden in my genes. I've lived in Juneau all of my life, and all of the stories contained herein take place in that town, the capital city of Alaska.
The first time I ever saw a bear with my own two eyes, I was young, about 12 or 13. I had gone to church with my mother and, now that the service had ended, she and I took the bright-red overpass that leads down from the end of the street on which the Cathedral stands to the top of the stairs that descend to street-level next to the State Office Building. As we made our way down the staircase, we saw two elderly tourists leaning over the rail and taking pictures of something, so we stopped to see what they found so interesting. At first, we didn't see anything, but, after a moment, we spotted the object of their attentions half-hidden in the brush, chewing on a blueberry bush. I don't know if it was a large bear, but it looked enormous to my young eyes, and I couldn't get enough of the creature. To me, it represented the world of adventure inherent in Alaskan life, as I had read of it in books such as Jack London's “The Call of the Wild” and “Baree: the Wolf-Dog” by James Oliver Curwood and Patrick Girard Lawlor. Bookworm that I was – and am still – I lost myself in the romanticism of the situation, just as Jans described in his essay, “Arctic Heroes.” Like him, I felt that I was part of a fantastic world, though I did not fancy myself a hero, as he did. I considered myself lucky just to be part of the story. Sadly, the city bus was due in only a few minutes, and I was forced to trail after my mother as she turned away, but I was thrilled to have finally had a chance to view my first bear. It was a lucky chance, too, for another six years passed before I saw another.
The next encounter I can recall was no more than a brief glimpse of a bear cub darting across the street in front of a car in which I was a passenger. I was riding with another girl and a few members of a group of college Christian men called Campus Crusade. They had come up to Alaska for the summer as a ministry, from various other States, and were more than thrilled at their chance to view Alaskan wildlife up close and personal. At first, unaccustomed as any of us were to such encounters, we collectively assumed that the large black animal must be a large dog, perhaps belonging to a visitor on the campus. We would have passed the creature by with no more than an idle comment if we hadn't startled it when we turned onto the road leading up to the college dorms. As we swung around from the main road, the “dog” turned sharply and fled; in doing so, it passed in front of us, nearly causing us to overrun the poor thing. Only a quick jerk of the wheel and a squeal of the brakes prevented a collision and possibly the death of the beast.
“Is that a bear?” one of the men whispered, awed. Someone else was quick with a digital camera and managed to capture several photographs of the creature as it darted into the woods on the other side of the road, clearly wishing to be free of us.
“It looks like a cub,” my female companion said, and I agreed:
“I hope the mother doesn't come along after it and hurt someone!”
That thought sobered the lot of us, so as the cub fled into the woods, we, too, fled, up the road and to our final destination at the dorms, laughing in relief and joking that we'd had two close calls. The first, of course, was our near collision with the poor animal, and we thanked God that we had not, in our carelessness, harmed the creature or ourselves. It would have been a miserable shame to have killed a beast that would one day become so powerful and fascinating, such a deep part of the world which the girl and I lived, and which the men felt so lucky to be able to visit. Too, we felt that we had the right to claim imminent attack from the cub's mother, though we had, in truth, been more than safe in a large vehicle that could easily have outdistanced any bear. Bloated as our egos were on our own excitement, we felt as thrilled as though our fears had been anything other than illusory. During this encounter, I was in no real danger, but that is not always the case.
The first time I was truly frightened of a bear was when I encountered one after walking home with my boyfriend, Brent. We had just turned into the driveway of the duplex he shared with his roommate and a downstairs neighbor when we were startled by a movement near the stairs leading up to the apartment. A bear! Nothing separated us from the large, dangerous beast: no fence, no cars in the driveway, nothing. My heart hammered as I froze, hoping not to startle the creature into an attack against myself or against Brent. The animal, in its turn, focused its attention on us for no more than a moment before shuffling onto the adjacent, toy-strewn lawn as though pretending it had not seen the two humans in the street. Unwilling to make the attempt to get past the creature, for fear of provoking it into more aggressive action, we waited in the street and watched as it shuffled around in the yard, knocking over children's playthings and paying us no mind. It was a lucky thing, I thought, that the children next door were still in school! There were several of them, and we often saw them running around outside. Brent and I began to relax as the creature's shambling carried it across the next-door yard and into the one beyond that. Finally feeling safe, with the bear too far away to catch us, we walked quickly down the driveway and hurried up the stairs. We tried not to make too much noise as our feet crunched on the gravel and thudded on the stairs, but the bear was clearly not concerned by our presence, and we made it into our apartment unscathed.
“Good thing that bear didn't decide to attack us when we first got here,” I exclaimed, glad that the adventure had not become a tragedy.
“Aw,” Brent replied, a cocky grin painted across his lips. “I had my knife in my pocket. I'd've held it off long enough for you to get away!”
We laughed off the experience, but in truth we were both very relieved that things had not gone badly that day. As common as bear sightings may be in this town, near to the wilderness as we are, an encounter of such proximity and perceived personal danger is always an adventure.
These are only a few examples of typical bear sightings in my hometown. It is for a good reason that my mother always used to warn me to keep my eyes and ears open for bears when walking at night!
Bibliography
Curwood, James Oliver and Patrick Girard Lawlor. Baree: the Wolf-Dog. Tantor Media, 2003.
Jans, Nick. “Arctic Heroes.” The Last Light Breaking: Living Among Alaska's Inupiat Eskimos. Graphic Arts Center Publishing Company, 2007.
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild. Prestwick House, Inc, 2005.
Lord, Nancy, “Beauty in the Beast.” Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore. Counterpoint, 2000.
