Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (9 page)

Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish
is an equally syrupy and meandering tale about a polar bear cub who feels very insecure about her crooked feet. Her birthday wish is “to be normal.” Carroll told me that Portia’s experience is supposed to show kids that they shouldn’t obsess about their tiniest imperfections; it’s okay to be unique. It’s a parable, trying to universalize the woes of one particular animal, she explained. In that way, I realized, it wasn’t so different from the story that Polar Bears International is telling to adults. I bought a copy for Isla and asked Carroll to sign it.

Reading it at bedtime one night, I found myself thinking back on the incident at Mile 5, how gripping it felt in retrospect: how the actual polar bear rose up to threaten the author of
Portias Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish
, punishing the hood of her car. It was as though the bewildering distance between something imaginary and something real had finally collapsed, if only for a second.

—

M
Y WIFE AND DAUGHTER
arrived in Churchill early on a Wednesday morning. The one-room airport terminal was thick with bear tourists who’d streamed off the same flight. Among them was a stylish Canadian late-night host named George Stroumboulopoulos. Strombo, as he’s known, was coming to Churchill with two Canadian rock stars to film a polar bear special with Polar Bears International after Martha Stewart’s crew was done. My wife, Wandee, had noticed Strombo posing for photographs with all the stewardesses and airport gate attendants in Winnipeg and assumed he was merely an uncommonly enthusiastic tourist, documenting every leg of his trip.

Isla was a little over two years old. It had been ten days since I last saw her. I’d left before dawn on the morning after Halloween, having taken her around the neighborhood the night before. I wore the Winnie-the-Pooh costume she’d decided at the last minute not to wear, stretching its hood around my face so that the yellow bear-body swung in front of my chest like a fleecy beard. Isla went as an eggplant with wings. Seeing me at the airport now, she tucked her head into her shoulder and cemented her face into an unimpressed glare—my punishment, it seemed, for being gone. But then something occurred to her and she flung out one leg, showing me the pair of blue long johns under her pajamas. (She’d never worn long underwear before.) I yanked up the leg of my jeans and made a big show of revealing that I, too, was wearing long underwear, and her face broke wide open into a grin. With that, we seemed to have worked through any hard feelings.

My trip to Churchill became a working vacation now. I was free to be the same sort of sentimental polar bear tourist that so many of the folks I’d been meeting in town felt ambivalent about. The truth is, I’d arrived to see polar bears with the same jumbled baggage as did other classic tourists—emotions I couldn’t quite sort out and, frankly, wasn’t comfortable delving into. The fact that something as large and autonomous-seeming as a polar bear might stop existing, and the even more tremendous fact of climate change, made me viscerally uneasy whenever I allowed myself to truly think about them. So I usually didn’t. And it was this very detachment that troubled me most—how easy it was to watch the future of the planet, Isla’s future, spool ahead like a negligible fiction. I couldn’t do much to stop the disappearance of polar bears. But I figured that the least I could do was force myself to pay it some very serious and deliberate attention—to put myself, and my daughter, near some sign of the upheaval under way.

I worried that Isla wouldn’t do well trapped on a Tundra Buggy for an all-day tour, so I’d finagled the three of us spots on a half-day supply run out to Frontiers North’s Tundra Buggy Lodge, a chain of stationary buggies in the center of the viewing area that the company has remade into an inn, with bunks and a galley. (A five-night package at the lodge can cost close to nine thousand dollars; the chance to see polar bears wander by the window over one’s morning coffee, before the other buggies arrive, commands a premium.) But at some point on our school bus ride from the hotel to the buggy launch site, those plans suddenly fell through. Before I knew what was happening, we were bounced onto a buggy with the staff of Polar Bears International and the winners of its annual Project Polar Bear competition. Climbing aboard, we found a hive of amped-up young people and a very drowsy-looking Robert Buchanan crumpling himself into one of the backseats. “These are our carbon footprint–reducing whiz kids,” he said.

PBI has run the Project Polar Bear competition since 2008. It sets teams of teenagers around the world to the task of identifying and implementing ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their communities. The team that corks up the most carbon wins a trip to Churchill. That year, there were two winning teams. The “Canuck Nanooks” were a family affair: the four polite and baby-faced Vickery sisters, who ranged in age from fourteen to twenty, and hailed from a rural hamlet outside Winnipeg. The other team, from Louisville, Kentucky, called itself “There for Tomorrow.”

These were Polar Bears International’s youngest, most heartfelt “Arctic Ambassadors.” There was a patch that said as much on the sleeves of their matching blue PBI parkas. “Ambassador” was a word that Robert took very seriously. I’d noticed during the past week that he has a catalog of little stump speeches he draws on when talking to journalists. One of the key ones describes his mission to convert “tourists” into “ambassadors.” Over breakfast one morning, Robert had laid the speech on me, then stopped to unpack the meaning of the word.

Being among wild polar bears on the tundra has the potential to truly reshape people, he told me. “I call it ‘the Connection,’” he said. “The ultimate Connection is when someone is able to look in the bear’s eyes. That bear will reach into your heart and your soul, and you are changed forever.” The Connection isn’t tree-hugging fluff, Robert went on; it’s Marketing 101. Making eye contact with a bear “screams,” as they say in the ad game. It screams the way the lavish, omni-colored box of Froot Loops screams to a kid in the grocery aisle. It grabs you and touches you on a level beyond intellect, demanding your compassion. An “ambassador,” Robert told me, is someone who makes the Connection and then goes home committed to helping that polar bear and its compatriots in the wild. A tourist is just looking to be entertained. Tourists go home and only start planning their next vacation. “But if you’re coming all the way up here just to see polar bears so you can check them off your list,” Robert said, “if you’re coming for your own self-interest, do me a favor: don’t fucking come. You can see it on the Discovery Channel.” The carbon emissions generated by flying to Churchill are astronomic, he said. You have to offset them with action.

Now, as our buggy jolted over slushy potholes, the teenagers seemed to whirr in their seats with an anticipatory high. They snapped photos of each other flashing peace signs, and then double peace signs, and invented and practiced handshakes in which peace signs turned into the wriggling antennae of a snail. Some of the younger Vickerys sang. There was now at least a thin dusting of snow on the ground, and what’s known as grease ice had finally started clumping on Hudson Bay, undulating with the tide beneath it, like the skin on a cup of cream of mushroom soup.

We found our first bear only a few minutes outside the launch site. Wandee held up Isla so she could see, and I wedged myself in behind them. The bear lay with its neck stretched forward and its eyes closed. One of its flanks was tinted red by the rising sun. The sight of the animal abruptly silenced everyone on board. As people shifted to that side of the buggy and drew down the windows, all you could hear was the quiet whizzing and clicking of digital cameras. This hush was familiar. I’d been on several buggy rides, and it happened at every first sighting, either out of reverence for the animal, or just because everyone was so instantaneously stupefied by the spectacle of an actual, wild polar bear that it didn’t occur to them to talk. But this time, the quiet of the congregation was broken by my daughter, shouting shrilly into the wind. “Wake up, polar bear!” Isla said.

—

I
SLA MADE A POINT
of talking to several polar bears that day. She was still feeling her way into language, and her crimped way of expressing herself reminded me of how, in nature documentaries, a just-born giraffe will skitter on its matchstick legs before finding its footing. She had lots of questions: whether polar bears liked jelly; why she couldn’t go out there with them. At one point, we watched a lone animal stand up and retreat. The bear wasn’t in good shape. Its ribs were visible faintly under its fur, like a name materializing in a gravestone etching.

Isla said, “Whoa.”

“‘Whoa’ is right,” said Sam Leist, an irrepressibly likable kid on the Louisville team.

Then Isla said, “Where do bears poo-poo?” and I watched Sam pull a befuddled, kindly half-smile, searching for any possible point of entry, before turning back to the window and raising his binoculars again. Frequently, my daughter just shouted, “That bear’s too big!” with a mix of disapproval and disbelief.

I’d been prepping Isla for the trip with polar bear footage on YouTube and by making a point of lingering on pictures of polar bears that popped up in our bedtime reading. I never presumed to know what she was experiencing or thinking—the emotional life of a child seems just as ungraspable as an animal’s to me—but now, out on the tundra, I swore I saw in her some elemental experience of astonishment, the recognition of a familiar fiction materializing before her eyes. That’s the experience Churchill’s tourism industry is selling, after all, though we grown-ups can be more self-conscious about giving ourselves over to it.

At lunchtime, we parked at a bend in the coastline, and Robert and our driver set out sandwiches and soup. Someone noticed that a bear we’d previously seen in the distance was heading straight to us, hugging the shore. Maybe it was attracted to the smell of lunch. “She’s going to come right alongside and check us out,” Robert whispered to the kids as the animal crept within a dozen yards. Soon the polar bear was underneath his window, and he leaned over the edge and exhaled rhythmically, shooting muffled, punctuated breaths to attract the bear, wanting it to rise up and paw the side of the buggy as bears often do. Nearby, Sam blew in his hands and whispered, “You’re beautiful, aren’t you?”

We hadn’t noticed somehow that this female was being followed by a smaller bear: a cub, or maybe a yearling. It was hard to tell. The adults aboard the buggy noted that the young bear looked unusually thin. It hunched by a back wheel. But when it got too close to the female, the larger bear huffed loudly and feigned a charge. The yearling turned and trotted away, spinning its head back toward the female as it ran. It stopped. Then, after a minute, it moved closer again.

This happened several times. Finally, the female flushed the younger bear for good and hauled off in the opposite direction. Suddenly, everyone on board was talking again, weaving a speculative story to explain what we’d seen. Maybe the female had weaned the yearling and was now chasing it away, as mother polar bears do. Or maybe the yearling wasn’t actually her offspring, but an orphan—maybe a climate change orphan—and was trying to make this other female its surrogate mother. What we’d seen was either a brutal part of nature or a natural part of a brutal new trend. No one could say. It remained a drama with no narrative.

After lunch, Robert stood at the front of the buggy and asked people what their favorite moments of the day were so far.

“Having a bear make a connection with me,” the youngest Vickery sister, Madison, said.

“And what is a connection?” Robert asked her.

“Having a bear look you in the eye, and you look at it,” she said. She thought for a second. “There’s no words to describe it.”

“What about feelings?” Robert said. “What did people feel?”

Sam said, “Respect.”

Robert seemed to like that. “That’s a very important one,” he told the students. He said that what he always feels is a kind of rattling insignificance: “The feeling that my problems are silly.” And before I even realized it, he’d shuffled into the most signature of his signature riffs—the canned speech that would be written on that winter’s Polar Bears International Christmas card to donors and which I’d already heard several times. It was a genuinely affecting monologue about how improbable and precious our Earth actually is—a paradise, “possibly the Garden of Eden itself”; a “little blue marble,” suspended on the tail of the Milky Way. “If someone has given us a gift as magnificent as this,” Robert would say, “I think we better take good care of it.”

Frankly, it was a little unsettling how expertly Robert drilled his ambassadors, reinforcing his own talking points. It felt just slightly too manipulative, like an indoctrination—even to me, who believed wholeheartedly in the cause Polar Bears International was indoctrinating these kids into. In town, I’d listened to guys like Dennis the Bear Man criticize PBI for brainwashing the students they bring to Churchill. (“Some of these kids are babbling idiots by the time their week’s over,” Dennis said. “They’re so neurotic and worried about saving the world. My God, I’m sure they must have nightmares.”) And suddenly I could appreciate these men’s disgust—not with Robert personally, but with the fact that it has come to this; that the experience of just being near these animals has become so loaded and solemn; that we’ve turned the polar bear into a psychic pack animal and heaped our shame, disquiet, and hope on its back.

“I love you,” Robert told the kids, rounding out his blue marble speech. “I’m proud of you. Thanks for helping straighten out what we messed up.”

—

T
HE EPISODE
WITH THE FEMALE
and the yearling was by far our buggy’s closest and most dramatic encounter of the day. Isla missed it. She’d gotten restless, no longer appeased by the chocolate chips we’d been dispensing like SeaWorld trainers reaching into their fanny packs for smelt. Then, quietly, mercifully, she had fallen asleep in Wandee’s arms, her hand shoved down the neck of Wandee’s shirt in lieu of holding a stuffed animal.