me? What had I done to deserve a subcutaneous fat layer? Tears leaked out of my eyes as the heat built upward, right into a ball in my throat.
The silence of the house, of the wilderness outside, turned an indifferent eye toward my sufferings as the furnace inside heated to the point of inescapable ignition. I think I passed out from terror.
The next morning Jamie leaned down from the top bunk to do an inspection.
“Oh. You’re still here. I thought you might have spontaneously combusted and I wanted to make a record of it. For science.” He considered. “Oh, well, there’s always tonight.”
He smiled. That smile.
• • •
I was about four or five when my parents took us three older kids—the babies not being born yet—to the theater to watch The Wilderness Family (as it was originally titled when it was released in 1975), during the height of the Back to the Land Movement.
It’s the story of a family that leaves smoggy Los Angeles to homestead remote mountain territory beside an alpine lake, reachable by floatplane. There’s the dad, Skip, a denim-clad construction worker who can’t hammer a nail in to save his life; Pat, a long-haired, too-glamorous-for-my-gingham-skirt former beauty pageant runner-up as the mother; Jenny, the earnest, asthmatic blonde girl who needs to escape the smog to survive and should have won an Oscar for her performance; and Toby, the giggling little boy who gets into generic mischief and has to be surreptitiously elbowed to remember his lines.
The movie is low budget, with endless images of innocent wilderness play set to saccharine songs and back-to-back montages of DIY cabin building and homesteading to save on paying a scriptwriter. Half the dialogue sounds adlibbed on the spot.
The little girl looked like a cross between my sister and me. I promptly identified with her to the full of my preschool heart. There she was on the enormous screen, playing with the wildlife, running joyfully through wildflower-strewn fields in her Seventies bellbottoms, wearing the exact same ribbed tank top I owned, her long blonde hair waving behind her.
Then, all at once, there she was, being chased by a huge, roaring grizzly. In one of the most traumatic instances of my entire life, I watched as the little blonde girl splashed through the creek and desperately hid in a shallow cave. The bear was on her in an instant, clawing at the roots and reaching for her as she screamed for her mother…
Mom says that my sister and I had cowered in her arms and refused to look at the screen until the bear was chased away by the faithful family hound, Crust, the only real hero of the series.
This was my introduction to bears. A few years later my family moved from the Lower 48 to Alaska, to a location eerily reminiscent of the one in The Wilderness Family. We reached it by floatplane. Everyone used a radio to communicate, like they do in the movie. My parents were talking about going farther out to homestead the wilderness.
And there were bears. Everywhere.
Not that I saw one immediately, but they were one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst the adults. I overheard blood-chilling, hair-raising tales that brought back that terrifying image of the little blonde girl racing for her life as the monstrous beast loped after her.
I suffered nightmares about bears every night of my wilderness life, when I wasn’t hyperventilating over the possibility of spontaneously combusting. Sometimes I dreamed of both. It did cross my mind to think that it would serve right whatever bear crashed through the window and into our bedroom to snatch me out of my bunk if I spontaneously combusted in its belly like a bomb.
I’m sure Mom had her own nightmares. After all, during the weekdays while Dad was away logging, she was responsible for five kids who weren’t known for their adherence to all the rules she dreamed up to keep us safe.
The cannery site was a veritable bear magnet with its large salmon-spawning creek. And, since the site was part of the mainland, we got both black and brown bears. (In the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska, bears practice island segregation—all the brown bears on one island, all the black bears on another. The mainland was a desegregated zone, and we were right in the middle of it.)
Mom had heard all the bear horror stories too, but her fear of them warred with her more visceral terror of guns that amounted to an uncontrollable phobia. To get around this problem, she had Dad string open jugs of ammonia around the outside of the house and where we kids played.
And she taught us the conventional bear-country safety rules: make lots of noise, don’t run from a bear (a bear can run faster than you), don’t try to jump in the bay to escape it (a bear can swim faster than you), play dead if it attacks you, back slowly away and get home immediately if you smell a horrible stench, wear your bear bells, blow your bear whistle, climb thick trees with lots of limbs to impede a bear’s tree-hugging climbing abilities or its ability to push a smaller tree over…
She made bears sound like supervillains who we had no hope of escaping, with diabolical superpowers no mere human child could hope to defeat. This did not, by the way, improve the quality of my sleep.
Not content with the conventional, she got inventive. And, wisely or not, turned the stuff of our nightmares into playtime.
The bear drill, as she called it, appealed to our athleticism and our competitive instincts. That was how she framed it: “Let’s see how fast you can do the drill, from the moment I call ‘Bear!’ to the moment you’re all in the attic.”
Her plan was to get us all tucked into the cramped, dark attic of the one story floathouse if a bear ever roamed too close to the house or tried to break and enter. Though a brown bear, if it was determined enough and sniffed us out, could have torn the ceiling apart to get at us. I’m sure she thought that at least it would keep us kids from being underfoot and running loose in the event of a bear assault.
We never knew when Mom would instigate the drill. We’d be going about our business of building forts, attacking each other with bristly yellow skunk cabbage cones, swimming, rowing in the blue plastic rowboat that looked like one of the boys’ Fisher-Price toys, climbing trees, and generally living about as free and close to nature as kids could get without turning entirely feral.
When we heard, at any time of the day, “Bear!” we had to drop whatever we were doing, grab the hand of the nearest “baby,” and force ourselves to walk sedately to the floathouse before galloping up the ramp with its raised wooden stops and along the railed, narrow front deck to the front door.
On one typical bear drill we burst through the white-painted front door and Jamie jumped on the table and shoved the loosely fitted attic door (a square of plywood) to one side.
Megan grabbed Chris and tossed him to me and I handed him up to Jamie, who snatched him and threw him into the dark hole above his head. Robin came next, and he, too, was flung into the darkness. I pushed Megan onto the table and Jamie heaved her into the hole. Then he grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the table and shoved me in amongst my sweaty, giggling brothers and sister. Jamie athletically pulled himself into the attic and immediately slammed the door into place.
The five of us huddled together, panting in the hot and dusty darkness. We were supposed to wait as silently as possible, without moving, until Mom gave the all clear.
There was no light up there, and other than our breathing and the rustle of our attempts to get comfortable on the bare ceiling joists, it was quiet. It smelled dusty and mildewed with boxes full of magazines, paperback
