don’t really know what’s happening. But you can smell the bear.
What did it smell like, Mr. Haas?
Like wet earth.
The earth?
I got tangled up in the tent fabric, trying to get out. I fell. I remember hearing Janey scream . . . it was horrible. I don’t know what happened after that. I tried to go after her. I’m sure I did.
Was that when you hit your head?
My what? Oh, right. My head. I guess so. Like I said, I don’t remember much after that.
Were you injured by the bear?
I don’t know. I don’t remember how I hit my head. I want to believe that I was trying to fight the bear off, trying to get it away from Janey, you know. That would make a better story for you. For her daughter. I wish I could tell Brandi more. I wish I knew more. The doctors said it looked like I’ d hit my head on a rock.
Why do you think the bear went after Janey instead of you?
It would be good if I said that I wish it had been me. But that would be a lie. I mean, how many of you would volunteer to be attacked by a bear? Who does that sort of thing? I wish Janey hadn’t been attacked, wish she hadn’t died, and I wish that bear didn’t have to die . . . but I wouldn’t trade places. And neither would you. I’m just being honest.
BEAR CONFESSION
There’s another truth in this: I’m somewhat bear-like, ursine in my personality and presence. I am an apex predator, even if I try not to act like one most of the time. I can be the roaming bear cruising the tundra, grazing and fishing, but not the tiger stalking, the cat pouncing, or the wolf circling. I do not hide well, and I’m not interested in bullish aggression for the sake of aggression. My size is my shield and my show, the protective bubble you do not want to break. Like a bear, you’d have to provoke me to fight. But I don’t really know what I might do or of what I’m capable in such situations. Sometimes this frightens me. Sometimes I’m afraid I will be tested.
At 6'4" tall and weighing in at around 260 pounds, I sport a torso like a beer keg and stout legs that are too short for my height; my ankles and wrists are surprisingly thin—probably a gift from my mother, but I wear XXL shirts and have close to an eighteen-inch neck. I can’t really grow much facial hair, but I have a scar on my right cheek and, to some people, I look big and intimidating, especially when I buzz my hair down to stubble.
In bars or at parties in high school or college, when the alcohol was flowing, I was often mistaken for the alpha male type who wanted to play-fight or wrestle like juvenile bears at a salmon stream. But I don’t like to wrestle. I don’t play-fight. I don’t want to slap or punch and pretend that violence is an appropriate substitute for affection. Hugs are okay. But I don’t even want to yell and scream when I’m drinking. I don’t want to be jostled or touched or shoved too much, especially by strangers.
When I lived in a house full of guys in college, my roommates would often wrestle and roughhouse with each other. I asked one of them why they never included me in their games and he said, “Because you’ll hurt us.”
I don’t know if this was true. It might have been. To me violence was not play. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the lessons I learned growing up big. When I did the same things other kids did, they had different consequences. When I roughhoused, I hurt people, even if I didn’t mean to do it. And often because of my size I was a target, a test for some kids to see if they were brave enough to mess with the big kid.
Once, at a cousin’s friend’s house, an older boy decided he wanted to test me. He kept teasing me and hitting me, and eventually wrestled me to the ground and pinned me down, putting all of his weight on top of me. He was laughing at me, calling me fat. And I didn’t like it. He’d gone too far. So I grabbed his legs and wrapped my arm over his neck, then I stood up, holding him up on my shoulders. And like something I learned from professional wrestling, I lifted him over my head and slammed him to the floor. After that he crawled under a bed and wouldn’t come out for a while.
Unfortunately these are lessons my daughter is learning for herself now. At seven years old and well over four and a half feet tall, pushing five feet soon, she’s taller than almost every other kid in her grade level and towers over the boys. I’ve told her what I learned growing up big, that she has to avoid physical confrontations because if she pushes a kid, even in a simple game on the playground, it can have different consequences. It can mean bruises and parents talking. She has to be like the bear, playful but solitary, self-possessed and rarely predatory.
But I’ve also told her what my father always told me:
“You don’t ever start a fight. But you finish it.”
Be the bear, not the bull.
Q: What can you tell us about the cave where you were found, Mr. Haas?
I don’t remember the cave. Just the shadows. And sounds. It felt like I’ d drank way too much whiskey. Everything was blurry and I kept blacking out. The noises were bad. How long was I in there?
All night, Mr. Haas. The rescuers found you in the morning. Some hikers had stumbled across your campsite and could tell something bad had happened. That cave, though, was pretty convenient, huh? Had you scouted it out before as a possible shelter?
Cave is a little generous, really. It was more like a hole between some bigger rocks. I might have hit my head diving into the rocks, just trying to get away. I remember waiting for the light to change. I wanted the sun. And I wanted to find Janey.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
In 2007 there was a Stephen Haas who sold advertising for KYAK-FM radio in Yakima, Washington, which now appears to be a Christian radio station catering to a largely Latino population. This may or may not have been true at the time that Stephen Haas was attacked by a bear. This may or may not have even been the same Stephen Haas. In fact, the deeper I got into my preparation to play Stephen Haas, the less real he became.
I read again the AP news story that the teacher had given me, but I could find no record of a similar attack in any newspapers or other sources. Craighead’s death was not listed on a fairly comprehensive list of fatal bear attacks in North America. In fact, in the course of my search, I could find no record for anyone named Janey Craighead at all. Moses Lake, where she was supposedly a captain for the fire department, is a small town in Central Washington, 377 miles from Glacier National Park, but only about 100 miles from Yakima, where Stephen Haas may or may not have lived.
There did seem to be a Rick Acosta who worked for the National Park Service but it wasn’t clear if he ever served in Glacier National Park; and though initially I (perhaps foolishly) assumed the story to be true, I slowly came to realize that the whole thing was most likely fabricated or cobbled together from other stories for the purposes of the class. It was a fiction. A fake. A lie of sorts.
For some reason this disappointed me, and not because the teacher used fiction to teach students how to report facts in a journalism class. It disappointed me to know that I’d put all that work into pretending to be a fake person, a character in a fabricated attack story.
