Beyond the Bear (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

Until That Day

That half-dead man on the operating table was me, Dan Bigley.
For a day that started with such promise to end this way was beyond comprehension.

The person I had been for the first twenty-five years of my life had died close to midnight. Slammed to the ground, clawed and chewed, I’d tried to play dead, fingers clamped around the back of my neck, elbows tucked in tight, shrieking through gritted teeth. The mauling had come in wave after wave. Between explosions of pain, the bear had stood over me panting. I could feel the power of its breath on the back of my neck. Just when I thought the bear was done, it started dragging me like a rag doll, facedown over ground as jagged as broken glass. It then flipped me over, cocked its head sideways, and bit me across the face.

A loud, hideous pop. Then quiet. Suspended in luminescent blue. No up, no down, my long-dead grandfather nodding at me in the distance.

One of the first rescuers to get to me that night was a former US Army Ranger, a combat veteran who’d served three tours in Vietnam. What he saw lying in the grass took him straight back to the jungle. It looked as if a grenade had gone off in my face. Colonel Frank Valentine knew a dead man when he saw one.
This kid doesn’t have a chance,
he remembers thinking. A chance was all I did have, and I fought for it with every ounce of strength that hadn’t yet drained out of my body.

That morning, before heading out for a day of fishing, I’d said goodbye to my new girlfriend, holding both of her hands in mine, interlacing our fingers.

“I’ll give you a call when I get back from fishing to see what you’re up to,” I’d told her.

The way Amber looked at me with that sleepy smile of hers made me wonder what the hell was I thinking. Just this once I should pass on fishing and haul this woman back to bed. But for me, fishing was just shy of an obsession. I’d go fishing in cat-and-dog weather. I’d go fishing when the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were thick as smoke. That day it was pouring neither rain nor bugs, but was shaping up to be one of the bluest days of the summer, one for the tourist brochures. Plus my buddy, John, was waiting—waders, pole, and cooler already loaded into the back of his Subaru. So I hugged her, fingertips brushing the back of her neck. Then a quick kiss goodbye before I could change my mind.

I walked her to the door and watched from the deck as she ambled down the steps and over the footbridge that crossed the creek separating my place from the gravel road out front. She rounded up her dog, Hobbit, an imposing brute resembling a cross between a husky and a riding mower. The door of her old truck groaned as she swung it open. Hobbit hopped in, and she climbed in after him. She started the engine, glanced up, gave a quick wave, and drove off.

It would be the last time I’d see her face.

The morning after, as I lay within a huddle of blue scrubs, stainless steel instruments, and probing Latex fingers, she lay sleeping beneath a patchwork quilt. She’d later rise to public radio and shuffle into the kitchen. She’d pour water into her coffeemaker, add freshly ground French roast to the filter, and push the “brew now” button. She’d make herself Cream of Wheat. She’d go about the rest of her day afloat in thoughts of our night together, but wondering, too, why I never called after fishing like I said I would.

The timing was exceptionally cruel. Over the previous six months, one thing after another had fallen into place in my life, beginning when I landed the most challenging and rewarding job I’d ever had—working with severely emotionally disturbed kids.
Then just the week before, I’d become the new owner of a cabin in Bear Valley, high above Anchorage in the Chugach Mountains with a view that went on forever. After signing closing papers and shaking hands with the seller, I’d celebrated back at my rental place by pouring a Crown Royal on the rocks, sitting alone on my deck in the evening light, feet propped up on the railing, thinking about how phenomenal it was going to be living up there. The universe, it seemed, was looking after me.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, after a year of being attracted to one Amber Takavitz, the planets had finally aligned, and we woke up that morning tangled in each other’s arms. Had that bear not come barreling down the trail, its eyes locked on mine, July 14, 2003, would have been a day I looked back upon as one of the best I’d ever known.

Until that day, I lived in the small, bohemian ski town of Girdwood, a huddle of condos, log chateaus, hippie hovels, and crash pads with names like the Mushroom House, the Hobbit Hole, and Animal House, about forty miles southeast of Anchorage. Wedged between the Chugach Mountains and the silty, swirling waters of Turnagain Arm, the town was founded at the turn of the century as a gold mining supply camp, originally called Glacier City for the seven glaciers clinging to the mountains above. Girdwood was my kind of town, a place of artists and woods people and free-range dogs, worldly enough to have
Bon Appétit
noticing its restaurants, wild enough to have bears leaving nose prints on cabin windows.

In Girdwood, I found a community of kindred spirits, the kind who gathered regularly for potlucks and jam sessions, who lived to ski, kayak, hike, climb, and fish. The kind who launched paragliders off mountaintops at midnight on summer solstice, then soared, banked, and did pirouettes in the sky before landing in the backyard of my favorite watering hole in time for last call.

A college buddy and I had scored a sweet deal on a rental within walking distance of the Alyeska ski lifts. It was a funky (some would say derelict), rectangular, cedar-shake house that sagged like a hammock atop twelve-foot pilings. We joked how the floor was so bad in the kitchen, a minor earthquake, or even a passing gravel truck, might topple the refrigerator over like a drunk, sending it into a face-plant upon the patchwork
linoleum floor. The carpet was a Pepto-Bismol pink muted by a series of previous tenants who apparently had an aversion to vacuum cleaners. On the upside, the place was cheap for a ski-resort town, and had a glacier view and a wraparound deck overlooking a creek. I could lie in bed in the morning, listen to howitzers being launched at avalanche chutes, and know without looking out my window a powder day was out there waiting for me. At the end of those powder days, I could ski past the lodge, across the road, down the street, and right up to my front steps.

After a series of miscellaneous jobs, from pounding nails to driving a shuttle for a whitewater rafting company, I’d finally landed one that gave my degree and sensibilities a workout. As an activity therapist for Alaska Children’s Services, I was working with kids who’d been abused, addicted, abandoned, tossed out, and otherwise run through the wringer, kids who’d ended up in group homes and treatment programs rather than regular foster care. With a degree in natural history and a minor in environmental education from Arizona’s Prescott College, I was a firm believer that the sanctity of nature could calm kids’ troubled minds. I took them skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and climbing at the local rock gym. I explained how weather shapes the land and land shapes the weather. I had them spying on birds, peeking under rocks, and looking for pictures in the clouds. I had them kicking off their shoes and running barefooted along the shores of Cook Inlet and writing messages to pilots in the mudflats with sticks.

The job demanded creative thinking on the fly, the ability to shift into defuse mode when meltdowns were imminent, and to deal with them when they happened regardless, which was often the case. My boss at the time, Harlow Robinson, I later learned, referred to me as “the golden boy” and liked how well I connected with kids, including one of ACS’s most challenging ones, a boy who’d blow up on an almost daily basis. I’d been at the job about six months, just long enough by a little over a week for my medical insurance to kick in.

Then there was Amber. I’d first noticed her the previous summer at my favorite hangout, Max’s Mountain Bar and Grill, where she had a side job making pizzas and a crush on the house sound guy. Petite. Strawberry blonde. Freckles skittered across the bridge of her nose. Elegant arms. Curvy where it mattered.

As she tells it, she first noticed me, a six-foot-four, green-eyed, red-bearded, sun-streaked-blond ski bum, at the Aloha Alaska deli, which I walked or biked to nearly every morning with my dog, Maya, trotting alongside. Long before she and I knew each other’s names, even longer before her dog, Hobbit, quit treating me like a burglar in my own house, our dogs had conducted full inspections, and approved.

They say opposites attract, and on the surface that may have seemed the case with us. I was the type who’d look at the highest peak in some mountain range and want to go there. Amber would glance up at the same peak, admire it from afar, and want to barbecue. Acquiring dreadlocks in high school and the nickname “Cedar” in college, I found even the vascular system of a blade of grass worthy of examination. Amber, a former high-school pom-pom girl and student-body president, once had to monitor a patch of land through the seasons for an ecology class, and just didn’t get the point.

The worlds we grew up in, with courses set by our fathers, couldn’t have been more different. My stepfather, “Dad” as far as my brother and I were concerned, was a senior manager in the chemicals division of Procter & Gamble, so my family lived life in the corporate lane of cocktail parties, BMWs, and world travel. He was a dapper, easygoing man who left the dirty work of discipline to my mother, and whose favorite sport was ensconcing himself in his easy chair with the
Wall Street Journal,
world affairs magazines, and something like the autobiography of Lee Iacocca all going at once. Plus CNN on TV in the background.

Amber’s dad was a union pipe fitter with callused hands and a vise-grip view of his role in the family, who was either working long hours on overtime or waiting out the latest layoff. He had no use for travel at the time, preferring instead to tinker around the house, go walleye fishing, and watch football on the tube. As the disciplinarian in the family, he didn’t just take Amber’s car keys one time when she busted curfew so bad she barely made it home in time for breakfast, he took all four wheels off her car.

I grew up in California and Ohio, and spent my middle-school years in Malaysia, where my stepdad oversaw the building of a palm oil processing plant, and the family quarters came with a live-in housekeeper, a gardener, a driver, and barred windows to keep out monkeys. At the International School of Kuala Lumpur, class outings required leech-proof socks, and included kayaking down the Perak River and jungle trekking in the company of flying snakes, monitor lizards, and other fanged hazards.

Amber, whose family hadn’t strayed far from the Boundary Waters area for three generations, grew up in the small town of Eveleth, Minnesota, home of the world’s largest free-standing hockey stick, where blasts at the local open-pit mines sometimes rattled her school. Good times in Amber’s childhood included cookouts, jet skiing, and attending an annual basketball match that pitted local firemen against the cops while riding on the backs of donkeys.

Besides that, I played guitar.

Amber played tuba.

For different reasons, we both rebelled against our upbringings, answered the call of the road, and found what we were looking for not far from where that road dead-ends at the northernmost edge of the continent.
It wasn’t long after I landed in Girdwood that Amber caught my attention. Once she did, I started keeping an eye out for her whenever I was out and about on the town. I took note of her on the sly, leaning behind a friend’s back as she tossed horseshoes in the backyard at Max’s. I checked her out from afar as she gyroscoped inside a purple hula-hoop to Grateful Dead tunes at the Jerry Garcia Pig Roast in Fairbanks. At that same festival, with me in a camp chair and her in a halter top and long, flowy skirt, I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she cleaned and organized her Volkswagen van. She was a free spirit for sure, but not one of those cosmo-la-la types who think that if we all just embrace the magical power of crystals everything will work out fine. She struck me as the kind who could bake bread
and
change her own timing belt.

Amber may not have been up for skiing down chutes or hiking to the top of Max’s Mountain at midnight, but as I’d later learn, she was actually ballsier than me. While pursuing a major in anthropology at the University of Minnesota, she’d boarded a plane to Kenya not long after a series of bombs at American Embassy buildings killed hundreds and wounded thousands. There, she lived with the Maasai, a semi-nomadic herding tribe that practiced polygamy and female circumcision, and traditionally offered its dead to the hyenas. While living in Malaysia in a gated house I’d felt brave eating shark-fin soup. While living in Kenya in a cow-dung hut, Amber ate what the Maasai ate and drank what the Maasai drank, which upon occasion meant taking a polite sip of blood from the throat of a slaughtered goat.

Once I learned through mutual friends that Amber had lived in one of the storied, off-the-grid cabins way up Girdwood’s Crow Creek Road—in winter—she couldn’t have been more appealing had she shown up on my doorstep in a nightie. The access alone, a gravel road winding its way up the valley along steep mountain slopes and across several avalanche paths, was enough of a moat to weed out most. Amber, her best friend, Rebecca “Bekkie” Volino, and their two dogs had moved into a tiny cabin up there in February, 2002. Although workers living at the gold mine above kept the road reasonably plowed, Amber was driving a low-rider Oldsmobile with summer tires that would sometimes lose traction and start sliding backward like a spooked horse. She’d have to back down, get a running start, and gun it. She’d then pull over at a spot a person might pick who wanted to wander off and never be found. She’d hoist her pack onto her back, walk into the woods, and head down a trail to a bluff so steep there were fixed ropes for lowering herself down.

The cabin, hunkered at the bottom next to Crow Creek, was about as spacious as a lunchbox, with as many amenities. No electricity. No phone. Not even cell phone coverage. Amber and Bekkie had to share the only sleeping space, a double mattress atop a sheet of plywood propped up off the floor on five-gallon buckets. They used a Coleman lantern for light and a woodstove for heat and cooking, hauling firewood down via zip line.