Beyond the Bear (9 page)

After surgery, I went straight to intensive care, where a ventilator made sure I kept breathing, and hoses, tubes, and wires poked tentacle-like from various parts of my body. To keep me from thrashing about, I was put into a drug-induced coma with Propofol, or milk of amnesia as doctors call it. There was nothing more Kallman could do for me until the swelling went down enough to go back in and start repairs. If I survived.

Kallman had his doubts about that. Any of my cluster bomb of puncture wounds could have become infected. With the floor of my skull in pieces, my brain was sagging into my nose, not the cleanest place for a brain to be. As cerebrospinal fluid drained out of my nose, Kallman’s biggest fear was that I’d contract meningitis or some other potentially lethal infection.

Thoroughly spent, he stumbled back to his office late that afternoon, unshaven and in the same jeans and sweatshirt he’d thrown on around 4:30 that morning. His colleagues and staff were waiting for him, anxious to hear all about it. He filled them in, then pulled out photographs of my face, one taken in the emergency room soon after he arrived, another after he’d cleaned me up and pieced me back together. That’s when it hit him, what such devastating injuries would mean to a twenty-five-year-old man in the prime of his life. He knew nothing about me other than my name, but he did know that if I beat the odds and survived, I would wake up from my coma blind, disfigured, and possibly brain damaged.

Kallman was too fried to fight it. A lump rose in his throat and tears welled up in his eyes.

CHAPTER 7

Circling the Wagons

While Dr. Kallman hovered over the ruins of my life, down
in
California my brother Brian was waking up to a day that would morph into the unimaginable, and nothing in our family would ever be the same.

Off from his seasonal job at a ski resort in the Sierras, he was hanging out
at the family getaway, a country home called Arboleda in the hills above San Juan Bautista, with our friend Jeremy Grinkey, who was caretaking the place. Growing up, my role in the family had been peacemaker, while Brian’s had been warrior-protector. Our division of labor had mostly to do with him being two years older than me, but also my dicey start in life as a sickly preemie with pencil-thin legs.

I worked hard to outgrow my childhood frailties, including allergies to just about everything. By the fifth grade I had immersed myself in sports, especially swimming, and was proud of how long I could hold my breath. Too proud. Showing off for a group of girls one time, I held my breath so long I managed to pass out. By the time I was in middle school and living in Malaysia, on top of playing conventional sports, I was a member of a high-octane hip-hop dance group that had me twirling girls over my head, and was a devout practitioner of Taekwondo, earning my black belt at fifteen. Not only had I long outgrown my mom’s nickname for me as a baby, “Bird Legs,” but my gym teacher started calling me “D’animal.” Still, Brian saw it as his job to shield me from harm, a duty that started on the playground and evolved as we got older into running interference when my mom got in my face or grounded me for stupid infractions, like putting my socks in the laundry hamper all wadded up after she’d repeatedly asked me not to.

The morning Dr. Kallman sewed up my face, Brian shuffled into the kitchen around ten to make coffee. He noticed the light flashing
on the answering machine, pushed the “play” button, and wandered toward the coffeepot. The urgency in the man’s voice stopped him in his tracks. An Alaska state trooper was trying to get in touch with the family of Dan Bigley. Something about a serious accident. Something about a medevac to Anchorage’s Providence hospital.

“What? Jeremy!” he hollered down the hall. “I think something’s happened to Dan! You’ve got to come hear this.”

Jeremy hurried into the kitchen. Brian hit the play button again.

“Am I hearing this right? What the hell is this guy saying?”

Time didn’t stand still, it swirled like a cyclone inside his head. He played the message one more time before, hands trembling, he dialed the number the trooper had left on the machine. The woman who answered put him on hold, then came back and said something about a bear.
A bear?
What does she mean, a bear?
There’s been a mauling, she said, and no, she
didn’t have any other details. She suggested he call Providence hospital right away. Brian jotted down the number. He shook his head, glanced up at the ceiling a moment, stared at the phone, then dialed.

He learned that I was in critical condition, that I was still in surgery, that I had severe trauma to the head, that doctors were hoping for the best. Brian understood the code: I might not make it.

“It’s important for you to get here as soon as possible,” the woman said.

Brian doubled over and dropped to his knees.
“You’ve got to take me to the airport, Jeremy. I mean right now.”

Brian,
tall and bearded like me, stuffed his wallet into his pants pocket and threw his address book and a change of clothes into a daypack. He and Jeremy were out the door in minutes. They jumped into Brian’s Jeep, and with Jeremy behind the wheel, drove down the winding canyon road to the highway leading to the San Jose airport, forty-five minutes away. As Jeremy concentrated on the road, Brian sat slumped in the passenger seat, his head in his hands. What if he didn’t get there in time? What if he never got the chance to say goodbye?

I had just spent a week with Brian and Jeremy when I flew down for the High Sierra Music Festival over the Fourth of July. Hanging out at Arboleda before the festival, I’d been telling Jeremy my fishing stories, and how in certain places, you almost expect to see bears. Only days before, I had assured him that as long as you followed protocol in bear country, you’d be fine. I had just assured him there was no reason to worry about me.

Jeremy dropped Brian off at departures, parked the Jeep, then made his way into the terminal to see Brian off. Struggling to keep it together, Brian headed straight for the Alaska Airlines ticket counter.

“I need the first flight you’ve got to Anchorage,” he told the agent, his voice cracking. “I don’t care how much it costs. My brother’s been mauled by a bear, and they don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

The agent’s eyes grew wide. As crazy a story as it sounded, especially in the asphalt-and-steel
landscape of Silicon Valley, the look on Brian’s face assured him that this was for real.

“Oh my god, that’s horrid. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll get you up there as soon as possible.”

His finger clacked across the keyboard as he stared at the screen. Brian held onto the counter with both hands and stared at the floor.
Clack, clack, clack.

“Okay, I’ve got you on a compassion fare on our next flight out, which boards right down that hallway past security in about twenty-five minutes.”

“Oh, man, are you kidding me? Thank you
so
much,” Brian said as he handed the agent his credit card.

“Glad I could help. Good luck. I’ll be thinking of you and your brother.”

Brian was anti–cell phone at the time and didn’t own one. While waiting to board, he found a pay phone and made some calls, pacing as best he could, a step this way, a step that way, tethered by the phone’s metal cord. First he called our stepfather, Doug Wilhelm, the pillar of our family and “Dad” to us since our biological father had slowly faded from our lives for reasons we’d been too young to understand at the time. Our parents lived in Carmel, about sixty miles south of the airport, but were away in two different states on opposite sides of the country. They’d attended a family wedding in Florida, and my stepdad had stayed on afterward to spend time with his daughter, Gretchen, and others while our mom, Ann, had gone to Atlanta to visit her sister. Brian caught Doug on his cell phone.

“Dad, where are you?”

“I’m on the highway. What do you need?”

“Dad, you need to pull over. I have something to tell you.”

“Can’t you just tell me? I’m following Gretchen, and I’ll lose her if I do.”

“I don’t care what you’re doing or where you are. You need to pull over now.”

Always even keeled no matter what kind of chaos was going on around him, Doug flipped on his blinker, braked, and pulled onto the shoulder.

“Okay, what’s going on?”

Brian took a deep breath, and then just said it. “Dad, Dan got mauled by a bear. He’s alive, but he’s in bad shape. He’s got a severe head injury, and they’re not sure he’s going to pull through. I’m at the airport now. I’m on the next flight out of here. You and Mom need to get to Alaska as soon as you can.”

He was silent a moment, absorbing the news.
Dan . . . A bear . . .
Once it registered, he was his usual composed self: “Okay, call us when you get there. I’ll let everyone know what’s going on and go straight to the airport.”

Brian still had a few minutes before boarding. He debated whether to call our biological father, Steve Bigley. We’d grown up hearing only one side of the story of our family’s demise, which had its final meltdown when I was still a toddler. There was so much we didn’t know. We’d only seen Steve a couple of times since returning from Malaysia, but despite being virtual strangers, I was still his son. Brian had been carrying his phone number on a sticky note inside his wallet for years. He dug it out and dialed Steve’s home in Salinas, California. Neither Steve nor his wife, Margaret, picked up. Brian left the news on their answering machine, then hung up, gave Jeremy a stiff hug goodbye, and headed toward security.

He spent the flight immersed in tunnel vision, hunched forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, head in hands, ball cap pulled down low, trying to think while at the same time trying not to. A car wreck he could imagine. A climbing accident. But a bear? What were the odds? As the first family member to arrive, he’d be the one asking all the questions and making all the decisions. But what questions and what decisions? There were so many unknowns.

The last time Brian was en route to Anchorage, he’d been so stoked he could hardly sit still. That was the previous summer when he and his dog, Ram, short for the Hindu classic,
Ramayana,
came to visit
me and Maya and see Alaska for the first time. He had so many great memories from that trip. Looking left for Dall sheep and right for beluga whales on the drive down Turnagain Arm. The all-night music bash with the Photonz in Talkeetna. Our two dogs romping like long-lost cousins along the banks of a glacial-fed creek. He’d been so impressed with all he saw he took long stretches of video as we drove down the Seward Highway with his recorder out the window.

The highlight, though, was our epic fly-in fishing trip to Lake Creek south of Denali. We were after silver salmon, but all we were catching were spawned-out kings that were
so past their prime, we could hardly stand handling them long enough to retrieve our hooks. After fishing a couple days without much luck, we followed a tip from another angler we’d happened upon that entailed a hairy river crossing in hip-deep current that was so pushy, the rocks we dislodged as we shuffled along in our waders glanced off our ankles and went
bowling off downriver. Bracing each other, we barely made it across, and once we did
we just hoped we could make it back. But we found the mother lode, what seemed like thousands of silver salmon holed up in the calm waters of a channel not much wider than my Girdwood living room. We had never seen anything like it, not even on some fantasy fishing show. Not only were the waters choked with silvers, those silvers were chromers, so fresh from the ocean their scales were as shiny as polished steel. Three days later, Brian and I flew out with a humongous cooler stuffed with our daily limits.

This time, landing in Anchorage filled Brian with unprecedented dread. My roommate, Jamie, picked him up at the airport and drove him to the hospital in relative silence. Brian found his way to intensive care, and at the security doors picked up a phone that connected directly to the nurses’ station. He told the answering nurse who he was and why he was there. She said she’d be right down.

While waiting, Brian walked in circles, stroking his beard, a nervous habit the two of us shared. After several minutes, the doors clicked open and the nurse introduced herself and let him inside. The doors locked behind them. Before escorting him down the hallway and into the unit, she tried to prepare him. I was out of surgery, she told him, but not out of the woods.

“He’s heavily sedated, so he won’t be able to respond. You’re going to see a lot of equipment and a lot of tubes. He’s had a tracheotomy so he’s on a ventilator. He has a feeding tube and a catheter. There are puncture wounds on his back, shoulders, arms, wrists, and left thigh. His eyes were severely damaged so his eyelids have been sewn shut.”

“His eyes?”

“His surgeon can tell you more. Do you think you’re ready?”

Brian shook his head no but answered “Yes.”

He caught his first glimpse of me through plate glass. From the bottom of my nose to the top of my head, nothing was familiar. My head—black and blue and snaked with stitches and staples—was elongated and swollen like a giant lightbulb. My stitched-up eyelids were bulging, and the eyes beneath them didn’t seem to be in quite the right place. The walls and floor started swaying. Brian’s knees began to buckle. The nurse helped him to a chair and brought him a glass of water. My room was directly across from the nurses’ station, its front wall entirely glass, so he sat there a while staring at me, trying to register what he was seeing, the nurse’s hand upon his shoulder. After several minutes and several deep breaths, he rose to his feet and walked into my room. He stood in silence, holding on to the side of my bed with both hands.

“Is it okay if I touch him?”

The nurse nodded. He took my hand in his.

“Dan, can you hear me? It’s Brian. I’m here now. Mom and Dad should be here tomorrow. We’re here for you, so keep fighting, man. Keep fighting.”

No one thought to call Amber. She and I were such a new item that she was the last person on anyone’s mind. Except for one. The previous night, Amber had wandered over to Max’s, where she ran into her friend Julia Dykstra, a Girdwood musician. Julia knew me through the bonfire crowd and the music scene—the open mikes at Max’s and jams around town. About the time John and I were making our first casts at The Sanctuary, Amber, still on a high from our night together, was updating Julia on our status.

“Dan and I have decided to give this thing a try,” Amber told her. “I’m pretty psyched about it.”

“You should be. He’s a great guy. I really hope it goes well for you two.”