It was their job to ask the right kinds of questions, to steer my comments into something they could use. He told me that in a previous year the man who’d played my role had gone to the lengths of wrapping his head in gauze and bandaging an arm in order to look the part. This guy was the Leo DiCaprio of class visits.
I made no real effort at looking the part. I wore a baseball cap pulled down low over my eyes, and I carried a cup of coffee. Though I’d never really had an intimate or violent encounter with a bear, a costume seemed less important than being able to capture the emotional and intellectual reality of what it’s like to survive a bear attack. I thought I should first call upon some of the things I knew about grizzly bears and Glacier National Park.
I also wrote out an entire life story for Stephen Haas . . . because that seemed necessary. And because I tend to over-prepare for anything like this, or because I’m more “method actor” than I care to admit. It’s true that I felt as if I needed to get close to the subjectivity of Stephen Haas’s experience, even if only through my imagination. I needed to become Stephen Haas.
I figured that it would help my story that—in real life—I had actually stopped in Glacier for a couple of nights on my way to Alaska in 1995 with my girlfriend (the girlfriend who would later become my wife and the mother of my children, and the woman I would eventually have to divorce after almost two decades of marriage and partnership). I thought my knowledge of the place would add some authenticity to my performance.
At Glacier National Park we’d stayed in a campground that had recently been invaded by a large grizzly. Signs had warned us to be vigilant about keeping food, or anything with an odor, outside our tent. It rained on us for two days and we day-hiked in a downpour, scared the whole time we might run into a wet and grumpy bear. We slept in the truck because it was easier than trying to set up a tent in the rain. We never saw any bears or signs of bears, but the traces of their presence seemed to float around everywhere like mist, like something you take into your lungs and it fills you up. And I figured I could use this kind of feeling in my performance. I could talk about the fear and the exhilaration tingling in my extremities, the way every sound seemed amplified.
FOR MY ROLE, I tried to imagine what Stephen Haas must have felt and thought at the time, tried to create him as a character in my mind. I wanted to tap into the subjectivity of the experience, which meant that I spent a lot of time reading reports of bear attacks, the wash of them sweeping over me until I could spit out facts and figures like Rain Man.
I also had my own questions for Stephen. I wondered how he’d managed to escape the tent when Janey didn’t, and how he found the cave nearby. I wondered about the nature of their relationship. Janey was older and had a grown daughter. How did they know each other? Had they been camping together before? What made them want to be in grizzly country together? Did they discuss the danger? Was this trip a kind of test of their relationship?
Q: Mr. Haas, do you have any previous experience hiking or backpacking in bear country?
She trusted me, you know. I mean, I promised her that nothing would happen. I’ve been around bears before and they just . . . well, they don’t normally care about humans. Or they don’t so much in Alaska. I know it’s different here, different in Glacier. I know the history of this place.
What history is that, Mr. Haas?
Attacks, man. Grizzly attacks. Night of the Grizzly. All that. I mean you can probably look them up. People don’t get killed by grizzlies in Alaska. You know that, right? I mean you know that more people are killed by moose every year? That’s because the bears and humans have adapted to cohabitate, to survive and thrive together. I mean, there are attacks. Sure. But not like in Glacier.
What is it about Glacier that makes it different?
It’s a darkness. Something in the history of this place. Like in the DNA. There’s been a tension between bears and humans here for a long time. Maybe always, certainly ever since that night those two women were killed. You know about that, right?
1. The above scenario is the initial one provided to the students. In advance of the interview they were also given the following additional details:
From St. Patrick Hospital:
• Craighead died of a ruptured aorta.
• Craighead was the divorced mother of one daughter, Brandi Craighead, 25, of Spokane, Wash.
• Craighead was a captain in the Moses Lake Fire Department.
• Haas is single. He sells radio advertising for KYAK-FM radio in Yakima, Wash.
• Haas may be released from the hospital in two or three days.
From Glacier National Park spokesman Rick Acosta:
• A backpacker on Sunday morning notified Rangers of a possible bear attack. A search party found a torn nylon tent in a clearing around 3 PM Sunday. Inside was the body of Craighead.
• Shortly after, searchers heard a faint cry coming from a small cave nearby. There they found Haas, bleeding but conscious. An evacuation helicopter transported Haas to St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula.
• “It’s just pure luck that he was found,” one searcher said.
• This is the first fatal grizzly attack in Glacier National Park since 1972. It is the second reported attack of 2005.
• Searchers have not located the grizzly.
NIGHT OF THE GRIZZLY
Maybe part of the story of Stephen Haas and Janey Craighead, or at least my reading of it, began on a summer night, August 13, 1967, in Glacier National Park, Montana, four years before I was born.
On that night, two nineteen-year-old campers, Julie Helgeson and Michelle Koons, sleeping ten miles apart from each other, were each attacked and killed by two different grizzly bears; and their stories would forever change the way many people thought about one of America’s last great predators.
MY FATHER USED to tell me quaint anecdotes about visiting Yellowstone Park and of feeding curious bears from the car or watching the beasts rummage through a garbage dump. Bears were treated as docile mascots and encounters with humans were not only allowed but even encouraged. Bears were harmless, slow-footed cartoon characters, fun to watch as they pawed through the Yellowstone garbage dumps or ripped into your neighbor’s cooler; they were the Park’s resident entertainment, Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo, postcard characters of an endangered species. They even fought forest fires.
Yellowstone and Glacier parks are two of the only protected areas in the lower forty-eight states where grizzly bears still exist, but there are no more garbage dump feeding-times to watch, no drive-up encounters with bears, and visitors are regularly reminded that bears are dangerous and unpredictable and that, because they’ve chosen to drive, park, hike, or camp in the bear’s home territory, they are assuming a certain amount of mortal risk.
That night in 1967 in the backcountry of Glacier, a grizzly stalked Julie Helgeson and her friends throughout the dark hours of the night, circling the camp, hunting them. They could hear it pacing, huffing and sniffing, and watching. They’d tried to keep it at bay with fire and a makeshift fort of logs, but the bear wouldn’t leave. They heard it stomping around the perimeter of their camp, waiting for an opportunity. All night long, they kept their vigil, hoping the bear would lose
