Beyond the Bear (13 page)

Early on, my family had posted a sign in my room asking those who entered not to speak of my blindness in front of me. Although I was comatose, they had no way of knowing how much, if anything, was getting through to me. In preparation for informing me that I’d be spending the rest of my life in darkness, after a week of recovery from my reconstructive surgery, Kallman gave orders to start weaning me off Propofol.

I was still swimming in heavy pain medication the first time I heard the word “blind.” In my morphine stupor, what I remember most about being told I’d never see again comes from my opiate dreams. In one, I tried making a break for it by rolling myself out of the hospital in a wheelchair, stealing some doctor’s BMW, and driving it across the lawn while men in white coats sprinted after me. My escape failed when I drove into a river and started to drown. The orderlies yanked me out of the water, threw me back into the wheelchair, and pushed me back inside, where I got a scolding: “You have no business driving! You’re blind!”

In another, I was sure there had been a mistake, that my doctors had the wrong guy.

This hospital looks more like a storage unit than a medical facility. A garage door clatters open. My gurney is wheeled inside. The door clatters closed behind me. Against the wall is a long line of La-Z-Boy recliners, each with a patient attached to a ventilator and an IV pole parked alongside. I’m soon propped up in a recliner of my own and handed a remote control. I raise my legs, lower them, then take my recliner for a spin around the room. But there are too many tubes and wires attached to me to try to escape. Then along comes a doctor.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but you’re blind.”

That’s ridiculous. I’ve got bandages over my eyes is all. Can’t he see that? “You’re wrong,” I tell him. “I can see perfectly fine. I can see you clear as day.” As proof, I reach out to shake the doctor’s hand. “If I’m blind, how come I can see you?”

“I’m sorry,” he tells me, “but that’s impossible.”

I have vague memories of hearing that I was blind three different times. As I became a bit more lucid, reality started sinking in. “Exhausted” doesn’t do justice to the way I felt after fighting for my life so hard and so long. I was still in a barely-living state. So I didn’t have the energy to have a big emotional reaction. That would come later.

CHAPTER 11

Tribe of Two

Before I’d even started to deal with the blindness piece of my
injuries, six hundred miles southeast as the raven flies, a stranger was about to take a detour in his life that would profoundly impact my own.

Lee Hagmeier was in the final phase of shutting down his life in Juneau and moving out of state. He and his wife were retired, Lee after a career in vocational rehabilitation, and Christy mostly in disability services. They’d bought a condo in Lacey, Washington, where the winters were kinder, and had just returned from tending to details down there. As the taxi backed out of their Juneau driveway, they walked up to the front door. Lee set down his suitcase, slipped his key into the lock, and gave it a turn. The door of their gray, two-story house with a view of Auke Bay and its harbor seals, Steller sea lions, and occasional humpback whale, opened with a click. Although the place had been home for nearly twenty years, the house felt unfamiliar, its bare walls freshly patched and painted, its rooms now furnished in echoes.

In the process of downsizing, they’d parted ways with many of their belongings. Before the first of two garage sales, they’d invited some friends who’d lost everything in a house fire
to come by and take whatever they could use. Strangers, for the most part, carted off the rest, with Christy’s leftover Avon sales inventory tossed in as a bonus. They’d already sold their twenty-foot fishing boat, their Oldsmobile sedan, and most of their furniture. Lee had said goodbye to the city he was born in by climbing some of the mountains he’d grown up with—Mt. Jumbo, Mt. McGinnis, and Thunder Mountain.

Coming home that day, with their black lab, Ina, still with the dog sitter, only their cats were there to greet them. After hauling luggage upstairs, Lee knelt down and gave Magic and Midnight each a pat, then headed for the phone to check the answering machine. Several messages were waiting for him, from people he knew and people he didn’t.

Had he heard? It had been all over the news. A young man had been attacked by a grizzly at the Russian River, and the mauling had left him blind. Lee’s body stiffened. He listened to one message after another.

More calls came the following day, including an impassioned one from my mother, who’d heard about him in a roundabout way through Providence. Was there any way, she wondered, that he’d be willing to talk to me? Lee had only a few days before he’d be leaving Alaska for good, but there was no question he would come. He got on the phone with Alaska Airlines and booked himself a flight.

My mom picked him up at the airport and drove him to the hospital. “I can’t thank you enough for this,” she told him.

While my stepdad
sat with me, the rest of the crew met with Lee in the cafeteria to give him some of my background and fill him in on my injuries and state of mind, which was anybody’s guess. Still coming off Propofol, loopy on pain meds, I was still in survival mode and looking like I’d been run through a blender—swollen, bandaged, wired, stitched, stapled, and slathered in ointment, tubes protruding from my neck, arms, and stomach. Propped partway up in bed to keep the swelling down, I could manage thumbs-up/thumbs-down communication and the slightest nod of my head, but I couldn’t lift my head off my pillow. I barely had the strength to lift my arms.

What I remember about that day is lying in darkness in this alien body, hearing voices in the hallway, then several sets of shoes enter my room and shuffle up to the side of my bed. Brian was the first to speak.

“Hey, Dan. There’s someone here we’d like you to meet. This is Lee Hagmeier. He flew up from Juneau to meet you.”

As Lee reached out to shake hands, Brian took hold of mine and guided the two together.

“There’s no way we can really know what you’re going through. Lee’s probably the only person on the planet who can. Because he lost his sight exactly the way you lost yours.”

Although other bear-mauling survivors have lost an eye or partial vision, Lee had spent forty-four years as the only person in North America, in the world as far as he knew, to be completely blinded by a bear.

“I never expected to get a brother,” Lee told me. “You and I are a tribe of two.”

It happened on July 27, 1959, only a few months after the Territory of Alaska became the country’s forty-ninth state. Lee was barely seventeen and, like me, not one for sitting still. While his twin brother, John, was most at home with his head buried beneath the hood of a car, Lee’s place was in the woods or atop some mountain looking down on the Mendenhall Glacier. His mother was always saying she could never get that boy to come in out of the rain. He’d shot his first deer at twelve, and by the time he was seventeen had divvied up the venison of twenty-one others among friends and family. The previous fall, after he and his dad failed to rally one rainy weekend during hunting season, his father noted their blunder with a ribbing scribbled on the chalkboard in the kitchen: “Don’t let it happen again.”

On that day in July, Lee and his buddy, Doug Dobyns, were fishing for Dolly Varden just north of Juneau. It was gray and a little chilly, but the rain clouds managed to hold tight. The two had fished their way about a mile up McGinnis Creek, a twenty-five-foot-wide stream of silvery
water that skipped over rocks and under occasional windfalls, and disappeared around bend after bend. In some places they could walk along an old creek bed, in others, where willows, alders, and devil’s club marched up to the banks, they were forced to wade in the creek. Chums and a few pink salmon on their way to spawning grounds splashed about in the riffles and eddies. The carcasses of those that had already spawned and died gave the air a heavy reek.

Between the two of them fishing catch-and-release, they had landed forty to fifty Dollies when Lee got it into his head to go look for a bear. Slung over his shoulder was a 30.06 Husqvarna with a four-power scope that he’d fallen for at Skinner’s Gun Shop. He’d saved up for it through various part-time jobs, including a family scrap-metal recycling business, and grocery-store work that included hauling five-gallon buckets of herring up from the docks to be packaged and sold as bait. The boys had spooked a brown bear earlier that day. It had spooked them, too, as it went crashing off through the brush. Lee decided the area they were in would be a good place to cross paths with another.

“I’m going to go look around,” Lee said, nodding toward the thicket.

“No, we don’t need to go in there,” his buddy told him.

Lee would not be dissuaded. He was just five-foot-two, 115 pounds, definitely on the small side compared to most his age. But he was a seventeen-year-old boy with a powerful rifle. In other words, immortal. He propped his fishing pole against the bank and disappeared into thick brush. Doug reluctantly followed at a distance. They got through the understory to where the forest opened up to lichen-draped Sitka spruce towering over a carpet of ferns and mosses. They made it about a hundred yards in from the creek. Doug saw it first.

“Lee, brownie!” he hollered.

Lee was caught mid-step in an awkward position as he spun around to face the bear. It was coming for him, and fast. He fumbled with the safety on his rifle, managed to get it off, but there was no time to aim. He shot from the hip, sending tree bark flying. He whirled away, and as he did, the bear grabbed the rifle in its teeth, leaving deep gouges in the stock. The bear yanked the gun from Lee’s grip. The force spun him around and knocked him to the ground on his back. The bear bit into his left knee, then picked him up and shook him. It bit into his thigh, picked him up, and shook him again. Then again. At some point, Lee tried to sit up; the bear bit into his side. He then played dead, not making a sound.

For a moment everything was still as he lay there, eyes clenched shut, holding his breath. Then the bear cocked its head sideways and bit him across his face. Lee heard a sickening sound inside his head like a celery stick snapped in two.

He lay still a moment, until the sound of the bear crashing through the woods faded in the distance. Then he slowly raised a hand to his face. He felt a hot, sticky jumble of bone and flesh from the bridge of his nose to the middle of his forehead. He felt his left eye hanging down his cheek. His right eye was gone.

“Lee, are you all right!? Lee! Lee!”

Moments later he heard Doug drop to his knees in front of him.

After a futile effort to walk out, Doug went for help, blazing a trail to the creek and marking the way in by plunging his knife into a tree. Nearly three hours would pass before Lee would be loaded into an ambulance and the siren would begin its high-pitched wail.

“Youth Attacked, Critically Injured by Raging Brown Bear,” screamed the headline in the
Juneau Empire
. “Lee Hagmeier, 17, Loses Sight as Bear Gashes Face.”

Now here he was, standing beside my hospital bed forty-four years practically to the day since his attack. My tribal brother.

“I have something for you,” he said as he reached into his pocket. “This is a talking watch. That was a big issue for me after my accident, waking up disoriented, not knowing whether it was day or night. Is it okay if I put it on you?”

I gave a thumbs-up. Lee reached for my hand, slipped the watch over my wrist, and pushed the button: “The time is 2:52 p.m.” I managed a smile.

“When something this traumatic happens, you can feel awfully alone,” he told me. “I want you to know you are not alone. I also want you to know there’s still a lot of life worth living. It may not seem like it right now, but you have a great deal to look forward to.”

Lee was the only person on Earth who could have told me that, and I believed him. I pointed to my chest, pointed toward him, fumbled for his hand and gave it a squeeze. Then, for the first time, I lost it. With my tear ducts obliterated, I couldn’t cry tears, but my chest heaved until I thought my ribs would break.

My father Steve first heard of Lee while staying at the Hickel House, low-cost housing for Providence outpatients and hospitalized patients’ out-of-town families. The volunteer at the front desk recognized the name Bigley from the news.

“Are you the father of the young man who was mauled?” she asked.

Steve nodded.

“I know someone who might be able to help your son.”

She knew Lee’s story well. She told Steve she’d gone to high school with him in Juneau before his accident, and was in touch with his twin brother, John Hagmeier, an award-winning Anchorage homebuilder. She offered to track down Lee’s number.

As excited as everyone was about his visit, all were a little nervous. None of them had ever met a blind person, and had no idea what to expect. Jay in particular envisioned some grizzled, hard-boiled character, not a five-foot-eight, soft-spoken, sixty-one-year-old grandfatherly type who collected bear T-shirts, especially ones with
Far Side
–type humor, like a picture of bears throwing people at each other with the caption, “Food Fight.” He had a patch over his left eye and a prosthetic in his right that looked so real they wondered if he was really completely blind, especially after seeing the ease with which he moved through a room and the way he spun around to face whomever was speaking. His face didn’t look “partially torn away,” as reported in the
Juneau Empire
at the time of his attack. He looked good and completely at home in the world. They hoped they were seeing me in the future.

Lee stayed the weekend in Anchorage, and over the course of several
visits told my family and I a little of what became of that seventeen-year-old boy he was before his bear. I’ve learned a lot more in our many conversations since.

If ever there was a guy who beat the odds, he’s the one. Limited by the medical advances of the day, in a town of ten thousand accessible only by boat or plane, his chance of survival was one in fifty, he would later hear. The doctor who saved him, Dr. C. C. Carter, was the same doctor who had delivered him and his twin brother in 1942.

The people of Juneau also helped save him. The town’s
Territorial Sportsmen group launched a fund-raising campaign for his medical and educational expenses that went the day’s version of viral, with donations coming from in and out of state. For one event, residents gathered around their radios and television sets for a three-hour, phone-in auction with such donated items as 150 yards of gravel, a full-day’s labor with a chain saw, a banty rooster and three hens, and frozen herring that Lee had hauled up from the docks and packaged himself. One bidder even paid twenty-five dollars for the shirt off the auctioneer’s back.

After seven weeks in the hospital, Lee and his mother boarded a plane for the East Coast, where he got his first round
of plastic surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He went from there to Helen Keller’s alma mater, the Perkins School for the Blind. Until then, as he puts it, he was the first blind person he’d ever met. He went from sharing a room with his twin brother to living in a cottage-style dorm with twenty blind strangers, and everything familiar as far away as it gets without leaving the country. At Perkins, he had to learn from square one how to live in the dark. This during an era in which appearing blind, even using a cane, was discouraged at the school.

At first his fingertips could barely feel Braille, let alone decipher it. Eight years later
,
he graduated summa cum laude from Chico College with a degree in psychology. He then earned his master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation, followed by a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Washington. In those days, recording lectures meant reel to reel, and writing papers meant using a Braille-writing machine, then having the document translated and retyped by a sighted assistant. He managed all this nearly two decades before the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Lee never gave up being an outdoorsman. He took up running at Perkins, teaming up with a legally blind student with just enough travel vision to make it work. The two of them set the East Coast record among blind and visually impaired athletes for the two-mile run at eleven minutes, twenty-seven seconds that the last time he checked, some forty years later, still held. He runs to this day, sometimes by teaming up with a sighted partner, sometimes with just his guide dog leading the way on trails he knows by heart.