Beyond the Bear (5 page)

Looking after one of the state’s most heavily fished
salmon streams, while at the same time protecting bears from the artillery-packing angling public, no doubt made for some management challenges for the various state and federal agencies overseeing the river, its banks, the campground, and the wild lands beyond. But it seemed to me that if the carcass problem could have been solved, over time the bears would have returned to behaving more like wild bears, much like the garbage bears of Yellowstone National Park did when the last of the dumps was shut down in 1970. They would do as their ancestors had done; they would go out of their way to avoid humans, leaving The Sanctuary and other hot spots to the possessed fishing hordes.

Nearly every plan for managing the convergence of the fish, bears, people, river, and land came with a downside, it seemed. The cleaning stations becoming bear magnets was one of them. Bank restoration was another. The thousands of anglers descending upon these rivers between May and September each year were trampling the riverbanks to death, prompting a huge and spendy restoration project. Boardwalks were built, gravel trails established, steps constructed, and fences erected. As a result, tall, lush grasses, and other thick vegetation once again thrived. Wonderful, particularly for the fish since unfettered trampling of riverbanks impacts habitat. Only one problem. All that lushness made it harder for bears to see fishermen and fishermen to see bears, and that could lead to nothing but trouble.

The already worrisome bear situation was even more so in July, 2003. Earlier that summer, the first of two annual red salmon runs had been weak. The second run in July, the one I was going for that day, was stronger, but salmon bound for the Russian were still holed up at The Sanctuary, resting before continuing on to spawning grounds upriver.
Maybe it was just a fluke, but for whatever reason, black bears and grizzly sows with cubs were pacing up and down the riverbanks in even higher than the usual high numbers. Grizzly boars, which normally keep to the high country, were wandering down in search of food, which put sows on edge, since males will sometimes kill cubs.

In early July, a sow with cubs charged through a riverside fence trying to get at a fisherman, who shot and wounded her in self-defense. Two days later three cubs were reported up a tree at the Russian River Campground. Their mother’s carcass was found nearby. Biologists captured the fifty-pound cubs, then made the difficult decision to euthanize them when no wildlife facility or zoo could take them.

Two days before he would play a role in my rescue, fisherman Tom Swiech witnessed a terrifying encounter at The Sanctuary between a young couple and a sow with three cubs. They hadn’t seen the bears, and were crossing the river more or less between them when the sow came huffing and splashing across the river straight at them.

“Behind you, behind you! Watch out! Don’t move! Hold your ground!”

They dropped their poles, grabbed a hold of each other, and froze. Swiech held his breath. The bear charged.
I’m going to see these kids get eaten right in front of me
, he thought. The bear stopped no less than twenty feet away, slapped the water with a front paw, clacked its jaw, turned, and huffed off.

Swiech was visiting from Pennsylvania at the time, but had fished the Russian for four summers while stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Of all the previous trips he’d made to the Kenai and Russian rivers, he’d seen only one bear—a black one. This trip, fishing six days over the course of two weeks, he’d seen thirteen grizzlies, or brown bears as they’re called in these parts.

The bear situation I was heading into that day was what some might consider off the charts. According to news accounts at the time, no one in the previous twenty-five years remembered seeing so many bears at one time near the confluence.

My buddy, John, and I had heard talk of bears in the area. But when fishing the Russian, there was always talk of bears in the area. Anyone dead-set against seeing bears should fish somewhere other than the Russian, somewhere other than Alaska, for that matter.
So my bearanoia meter wasn’t set any higher than usual that day.

I’d been in California the previous week for the High Sierra Music Festival, and was telling my friend Jeremy Grinkey my Alaska fishing stories, including how it’s not uncommon during salmon runs to share the best fishing grounds with bears.

“Man, that would scare the hell out of me,” he’d said.

“That’s just part of fishing those rivers,” I’d told him. “As long as you handle yourself correctly, keep your guard up, make noise, stay alert, and be respectful, you’ll be fine. The bears pretty much mind their own business.”

I was dead wrong about that. Because what awaited me down on the Russian that day was a pressure cooker about to blow its lid.

CHAPTER 3

Last Light

The last morning I would ever see, after Amber’s truck
disappeared around the corner, I went back inside to round up my gear while John organized the back of his car. I grabbed my
tackle box,
daypack,
polarized shades,
and trademark hat, a kiwi-green ball cap with “Bonfire” emblazoned across the front, a freebie
I’d scored working as a ski tech at Dodge Ridge ski area in the Sierras.
Although it made me a walking billboard for a snowboard apparel company, I’d latched onto it because I was drawn to bonfires like a skydiver to gravity. Bonfires drew people together. I’d made friends, swapped stories, played tunes, and conjured up some of my most epic adventures, plus a misadventure or two, around these tribal gatherings. Plans to show Amber around Bear Valley were made around a bonfire. I was so attached to that hat it had practically become part of my anatomy, enough that some started calling me “Bonfire Dan.”

After slapping it on my head, I poured Maya a bowl of Eukanuba
for
breakfast, then rummaged through the cupboards for snacks to toss into my pack. I paused a moment and leaned against the kitchen counter as my night with Amber replayed in my head. It was out of character for me to look forward to a day of fishing being over before it had begun, but I couldn’t wait to see her again.

“Hey, Dan, you about ready?” John shouted from below.

I washed down the thought with my last gulp of coffee, threw on my pack, and clomped down the steps in cargo pants,
a T-shirt
,
and the Chaco sandals I wore everywhere, preferring them to boots on backpacking trips until moving to Alaska, where sandal-friendly terrain is in short supply. At the bottom of the stairs, I grabbed my chest waders and rod, which I kept hanging from hooks beneath the deck so they’d be ready to go at a moment’s notice. I tossed it all into the back of John’s Subaru next to the cooler and gave the hatch a slam. Swinging open the back passenger door, I called for Maya.

“Come on girl, let’s load up.”

A Lab mixed with whatever ran through the breeder’s barnyard that day, Maya and I had hiked hundreds of miles together on countless trips, from the saguaros, jumping chollas, and prickly pears of the Sonoran Desert to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains in terrain more suitable for goats. Although she’d tangled with a rattlesnake, a javelina, and several moose, Maya was a good listener and I could always call her off
.
Almost always, anyway. As my most loyal fishing partner, she had her etiquette down. She was content to sit back and watch, letting her tail express approval as a fish flopped on a riverbank, but staying out of the way until it had been whacked, and then just a quick inspection with her nose. Maya knew exactly what a car loaded with fishing paraphernalia meant. She got her wound-up hindquarters under control and jumped into the backseat. The front passenger door handle only worked from the inside, so John leaned over and opened it for me. I slid in, John cranked the engine, and off we went southbound on the Seward Highway with John Brown’s Body reggae tunes booming from the speakers.

I had just twelve hours left, twelve hours before being plunged into darkness, twelve hours before the life I loved and assumed was mine for keeps would no longer exist.

Until then, the day couldn’t have fit my mood better. Warm, cloudless, and ridiculously blue, that day in July was one of those classic Alaska summer days that induce winter amnesia, deleting from memory all those long dark months of icy roads, dead car batteries, and bitter winds that seep through windowsills and send backyard greenhouses flying like box kites. As we passed the turnoff to Portage Glacier, I glanced up the valley, a foyer of mountains with hanging glaciers all shimmery and mouthwash blue, and reminded myself yet again how blessed I was to have landed in such a place. Soon after, the highway bore right toward the Kenai Peninsula at the far end of Turnagain Arm—so named after a scouting crew in 1778 that included William Bligh of
Mutiny on the Bounty
fame
,
serving as sailing master on Captain James Cook’s quest for the Northwest Passage, was forced to turn around again. I leaned forward in my seat and soaked up the glacier-sculpted landscape, with Chugach Mountain peaks dolloped with remnants of winter off in the distance, multiple variations on the theme of green sloshing up their mountainsides. To my left, trumpeter swans bobbed in a marsh. Up ahead, a lone raven surfed thermal waves high above the trees.

As the highway parted company with the Arm and started climbing toward Turnagain Pass, my mind wandered back to Amber. I debated whether to bring her up, but couldn’t stop myself. I knew John had to be wondering.

“So, you know, Amber and I really hit it off last night. It’s kind of crazy, but I think we’re going to go for it.”

“Oh yeah? Huh. That’s cool.” By that he meant, this better not interfere with our fishing.

John had actually met Amber before any of us had moved to Alaska, as mutual friends of the Minneapolis-based jam band the Sweet Potato Project. He didn’t know much about her other than that, like me, she couldn’t say no to live music shows. In fact, our paths may never have intersected if not for the Girdwood-based band the Photonz, which lured us both to town. Amber was at the end of a festival-hopping road trip from Minnesota to Alaska when someone urged her to check out the band, which was playing that night in Girdwood. I’d befriended band members while they were on tour and I was a senior at Prescott, and they had talked up the place. Although John and I had sworn off girlfriends, we both knew it was only a matter of time before one of us caved. Falling for someone during ski season would have been bad enough, but during salmon season?

John and I had been practically inseparable since the previous summer when we worked security for the Girdwood Forest Fair, keeping an eye out for drinking outside of the beer gardens and making sure freeloaders didn’t sneak in through the back gate, even though, had the circumstances been different, we might have been the ones doing the sneaking. Over the course of the three-day festival, we discovered we shared a go-with-the-wind, howl-at-the-moon spirit, and during down times had long discussions about Aldo Leopold’s
A Sand County Almanac,
which John carried around with him like a bible. Both of us were getting over heartbreaks that neither had seen coming. Both of us were more interested in fishing, even if we ended up getting hosed, or climbing some mountain in rinse-cycle weather than pursuing new girlfriends.

I had taught John how to roll a kayak, and had turned him on to the euphoria of skiing in deep, backcountry powder. John, who’d worked at the Russian River Campground for two summers, showed me all the sweetest fishing holes. What I appreciated most about John, a quiet and thoughtful Wisconsinite with a long red ponytail and a matching red beard, were his spiritual priorities, evident in his willingness to go fishing anytime, anywhere, day or night. Working the graveyard shift at the Alyeska Prince hotel
,
John could punch out at 7:00 in the morning, and be on the road for fishing by 7:15.
I was always good to go, too, even if the urge hit at one in the morning. The way the two of us saw it, we’d catch up on our sleep come winter.

My grandfather had made a fisherman out of me. I’d become an instant convert upon catching my first fish before I’d outgrown the training wheels on my bike. During our grade-school years, my older brother, Brian, and I spent time each summer at our maternal grandparents’ remote lakeside property in southwest Ontario, accessible only by boat or floatplane, a CB radio the only means of communication with the outside world. The place included a main cabin and a small guesthouse built of hand-hewn logs, a boathouse, and a dock on Clearwater Lake with water that lived up to its name. I could lie on my belly at the end of the dock, look down through water well over my head, and see the bottom as clearly as if looking through glass.

While our grandmother grumped about the rustic accommodations, particularly after chasing bats out of the rafters with a broom, our grandfather loved the place. A retired Purdue University professor and agricultural geneticist who normally kept himself creased, starched, and splashed with aftershave, he’d trade his dress shirt, beige trousers, and buffed shoes for blue jeans, lace-up boots, a denim jacket marinated in grime, and a ratty ball cap with a corncob emblem across the front
,
a fitting off-duty uniform for a man who went by the CB handle “Rusty Rooster.” Every day that the weather was even halfway decent, he’d take us two boys fishing for walleye, lake trout, and bass. At the end of the day, he’d pull up a stool in the boathouse, fillet the fish, then hand me and Brian a bucket of heads and guts and let us take the boat over to an outcropping poking from the lake to make an offering to the gulls.

“Oh, you did good,”
our grandmother would say upon presentation of the day’s catch. “Now go wash up.”

She’d then tie on an apron, make a mountain of coleslaw or potato salad, heat up some Boston baked beans, mix up a pitcher of Tang, and set dishes atop the red-and-white checked tablecloth in front of the picture window overlooking the lake. If we brought home lake trout or bass, she would be in charge. If we brought home walleyes, my grandfather would take over, dipping the fillets in flour, then whisked eggs, then coating them in seasoned cornmeal, and sizzling them in peanut oil in a cast- iron skillet. After supper, I would join my grandfather in banishment to the screened-in porch where he’d smoke his Kools and I would listen to the loons wail and the old man’s stories, animated by the comet of his cigarette doodling in the dark.

Under my grandfather’s guidance, I learned how to speak in hushed tones and how to be still in a boat. I learned to catch my own bait, to tie a reverse clinch knot, to read the water, to drive a skiff. By example, I learned to love fishing as much as catching. My grandfather had high expectations for me, as a fisherman and as the man I would grow up to be. After his death in 1994, I never failed to bring him along beneath my shirt, up against my skin, whenever I was out on a river. My grandfather was always right there with me whenever some fish brought it on after taking my hook and arcing my rod, which was an extension of my arm, which was an extension of my heart, which was an extension of the old man who taught me patience and humility, as well as the fisherman’s motto: “Early to bed, early to rise, fish like hell, and make up lies.”

Since moving to Alaska, Chinooks, or “kings,” had become my favorite among the state’s five salmon species. They’re finicky, aggressive, hard to outsmart, and harder to outfight. The Kenai River holds the world record for the largest king caught by rod and reel in fresh water at ninety-seven pounds, four ounces, which is about what a sixth-grader weighs and the upper end for a baby hippo. For me, there was no bigger thrill than playing a king, kind of like bull riding. But reds were a close second, appreciated for their attitude once hooked, for their rich flavor once filleted, marinated in Balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, fresh lemon, salt, and pepper and slapped on a grill. I loved the way they had this one-second delay after a hook had been set, followed by a turn of the head. I could imagine them going, “What the . . . Holy crap!” before going absolutely berserk, darting up river and down, this way and that, like a gazelle with a cheetah on its heels. I liked that reds made me work, and that just because I’d turned one’s head didn’t mean it would be coming home with me that night. I’d had them spit out my hooks in disgust. I’d had my lines “spooled” and my lines snapped. I’d seen others lose them after they were banked to the biggest con of all—a supposedly depleted fish suddenly leaping up and punching a fisherman in the face, then flip-flopping across the shore with stooped-over fishermen, arms outstretched, in hot pursuit. I’d seen reds make it back to the river, then swish away, their tails flipping the aquatic-vertebrate equivalent of an extended middle finger.

On that day in July, a couple of hours out of Girdwood, John pulled off the Sterling Highway and onto a gravel side road near one of my favorite Kenai River fishing holes. While not exactly secret, it was definitely not on the tourist radar, and with tricky access, not a place someone would happen upon. It was one John had shown me, a cramped hole on the inside of a bend with a steep embankment on one side and room for no more than fifteen to fish. Once a fish was hooked, the biggest challenge was denying it access to the spurt of rapids immediately downriver that if allowed to be reached, would funnel it into a sayonara zone before a single profanity could be spewed. So it needed to be banked pronto, before it had the opportunity.

The spot was a microcosm of the mob scene some thirty miles back up the highway at The Sanctuary. I had no idea combat fishing existed until a friend invited me along on a trip to the Russian River a day or two after I’d moved to Girdwood. We arrived around ten that midsummer night. I was floored. Here I was in a state more than twice the size of Texas with about a third as many inhabitants as Houston, and The Sanctuary looked more like rush hour than anything remotely resembling its name. For me, fishing was about being alone with the river, about stillness and meditation interrupted only by catching, not by some dude three feet off my right elbow discussing his preference in strip clubs with some other dude three feet off my left elbow. As turned off as I was, the mind-blowing number of fish had me salivating. It was the Serengeti of the freshwater world.

After my initiation, I usually made an effort to ditch the throngs by hiking into the Russian River’s upper valley. Yet over time, as absurd as it was, I started getting a kick out of combat fishing. I grew to appreciate the social scene and sense of community, with the exception of the occasional dipshit, since cooperation was the only way chorus-line fishing could work without descending into a riverside mosh pit. I liked the etiquette of reeling in like your life depended on it and getting the hell out of the way the moment someone yelled, “Fish on!” I liked the synchronization, the casting and flipping of lines almost as a single entity:
Ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, flip, flip, flip, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, flip, flip, flip,
all down the line, the same motion, the same rhythm, like the fishermen’s version of the stadium wave.