Looking for Alaska

  In another ten minutes or so, we were back to several streetlights; to Craig; the Burger King; Margie’s main grocery store, Thompson House Grocery. Jimmy worked at this store. She pulled in to buy some diapers. Jimmy saw her and me, and she introduced us. Jimmy managed the store and was living somewhere else right now, but took care of the girls often. Tina had mentioned he was an excellent father, a really good friend. Jimmy was small, very fit; Tina said he worked out to stay in shape. There was a pained bubble around them, filled with history and conflict. I understood and felt awkward.

  We left. The bookstore light went out as we drove by. We pulled into Tina and Jimmy’s house. Tina walked into the house, paid the baby-sitter, and stood looking out the picture window. It should have been a big, black, shiny rectangle, but it wasn’t. From every corner of it, from every part of the black ocean and the black sky, came twinkling lights, white lights mostly. Tina lingered, looking, and I walked over to her and looked too. The lights were moving, ever so slowly. At first I thought the lights were stars, but they were not. Tina, who had changed into the harried-mother mood the moment we walked inside, changed her mood again, radically. She spoke with intense excitement.

  “You see those lights, those are the seine boats. They are all coming to Craig, coming to port, coming to off-load their catches. They have had an opener [a few days of legal fishing] and now it is ending. Do you realize there are seven men on each one of those boats? You watch, soon my girlfriends will be calling me, watch. Those fishermen are from all over the Northwest—Seattle, Oregon, all over Alaska, who cares where they’re from, they’re not from this island. Many of them will soon be at the Hill Bar. Even the married couples like to go out when all these new men are in. They like the energy, everyone laughing, loving, and fighting too. It’s one time when I don’t feel like I need to get off this rock.”

  As if she’d summoned it, the phone rang once, twice. Tina asked the babysitter if she could spend the night; after all, it was summer, she could make some more money. Tina and some of her friends were going to go to the Hill Bar. One of the best-selling drinks at the Hill Bar that night was a drink in a shot glass with vodka and lemon juice, the rim dipped in sugar. It’s called the Panty Dropper. They wanted me to go with them, but I didn’t. I thanked her for her time and told her I hoped she was able to sort through all her confusion, pain, and sense of responsibility to locate the way that would be best for her and her family.

  * * *

  Sam and Bill were still up, watching ESPN on the satellite TV, when I arrived back at the lodge. I felt that I had lived a part of an entire life today. I was exhausted, though I had done nothing physically.

  “How was your trip to Hydaburg, Pete?” Bill asked. Sam looked up.

  “It was something. It will probably take some time to figure out what I saw and heard,” I answered. They didn’t ask for details, they said nothing else about it.

  I took home enough salmon and halibut to fill up a third of a chest freezer. I had not expected to take any fish home; I figured my fish would go to feed Al’s “village.” Sam, Bill, Al, and Jerry had other ideas. It seemed that I had been accepted into their world, and I was honored.

  6

  Bears on Dora Way

  Jed and Luke were home from their summer jobs; they had three attractive young women visiting. Sabri and Teresa were sisters; their mother is the outspoken Mickey. They live across the street from us. The third girl, Jessica, lived one house down from them. Her mother, Rosie, manages the Hertz rent-a-car place. They were watching Real World on MTV. This was the third or fourth time I’d seen it, as they tended to control our only TV. The Real World character they focused on always seemed to be drunk, drugged up, picking a fight in a club, wanting to leap out a window, get back with her partner, deny everything, or if all else failed, accuse everyone else for what was going wrong in her life. Tonight her house members were telling her she had to go into rehab or get kicked off the show.

  We had almost no furniture in our rented house in Seward. There was a good-size living room, which was carpeted. It had a great view to the street and to the homes where the girls lived. The picture window had no curtain. The $5 TV we had bought at the high school fund-raiser didn’t have sound after the first week, so we’d picked up a new TV at the superstore in Soldotna. There wasn’t a sofa, just some white plastic chairs we’d borrowed from Ben Ellis. Luke had already leaned back in one and shattered it. I sat on the rug, leaned against the wall, and watched these five people—my two sons and their three female friends—communicate, relate, and watch Real World. Luke just asked Jessica a question; Jed just touched Sabri’s shoulder.

  I didn’t really want to be sitting here, I felt that I was intruding. But there was nowhere else to be except in our bedroom, and so far only a mattress and box spring were up there. Rita was making salmon dip; that’s probably why I was hovering near her. Eventually Jed and Luke and the girls left, headed for Sabri’s to watch a movie. Sabri had just announced that in the fall she was going to be an exchange student in South Africa, where she would live with a black African family.

  It was July and about midnight. Eight-year-old Julianne had a friend over from the neighborhood, Leah, also eight, and they were still up. At the height of summer in Alaska, it is nothing to see young kids up late, very late. The farther north they live, the later they stay awake.

  Leah walked over to the picture window. “Look, Julianne, look.” Leah was pointing down, into the front yard. She was a freckle-faced, self-amused, low-key child.

  Julianne ran over. “Dad, look, look, a bear. It’s a brown bear.”

  There, strolling slowly across our tiny, bright green front yard was a medium-size brown bear. I called Rita. Jed and Luke and the girls were across the street, hopefully inside. The bear walked onto our street, Dora Way, crossed it, and headed right for Sabri and Teresa’s house, where their mother Mickey’s 1970s, brown Ford pickup was parked in the driveway. Two metal garbage cans sat in the pickup.

  The bear stood up on its hind legs and shook the bed of the pickup until the two garbage cans slid toward it. It then grabbed on to one of the cans and tipped its contents out on the street. It snacked until the police came, when it ran into the darkly shadowed woods behind our houses. Our street was basically the only one on this mountain. Every house on our side of the road had a backyard that stretched into more than a million acres of at times almost vertical wilderness. Someone must have called 911, because I read about the bear and its activities in the next edition of “The Police Log.”

  Some government person went around the neighborhood and stapled up bright pink and green signs that said, “Caution [then a picture of a bear] bears in the area, be alert, removal of this sign may result in injury to others, USDA Forest Service.” These signs were posted on all the telephone poles, on the post of our front porch, and those of all the other houses up and down the street.

  The house we rented had a small entry on the street level. Then there was a flight of stairs down to where the kids had their rooms, three bedrooms. There was also a flight up to the living room and kitchen area, open to each other. Up another four stairs and there was Rita’s and my room. That night Julianne and her little freckle-faced friend, Leah, were worried because the windows in their bedroom were right at ground level. What if the bear just jumped through the window? That bear had just been in our yard, they said in stereo. Could it fit in the window, it was so large? They wondered, could they bring their sleeping bags up and sleep in the living room? Of course they could. They fell asleep before the bear came back. Mickey’s garbage would lie there until the safety of morning. Mickey, a former Dead Head, is now drama tech at the high school. Before the police came, she’d stepped out on her front steps and yelled at the bear to get away. It had looked up, then gone back to its easy meal.

  The next night, at about the same time, Julianne and Luke came running upstairs. They said they had just seen some long brown legs walk right by their bedroom windows.
They got upstairs to the living room window in time to see the same brown bear leaving our front yard and crossing the street. Our garage was filled with salmon and halibut, but it was in the freezer.

  A friend of mine, Albert Kookesh, from Angoon on Admiralty Island, was awakened one night by his dog barking. He went out to his storage shed to see a large mother brown bear standing in front of his chest freezer, holding the top open with one paw, humanlike. It was sorting through the shrink-wrapped salmon, venison, and halibut for its favorite food. I hadn’t told anybody that story, including Rita, nor the stories I’d heard of bears peeling away screwed-on four-by-eight-foot sheets of the strongest plywood to get into a cabin. It was clear to me that this bear, any bear, could easily pry open or tear apart the comparatively flimsy garage door on this house.

  The next “Police Log” recorded the action around the neighborhood this way: “July 21—12:49 A.M. Extra patrols on Dora Way where there are reports of a black bear and a large brown bear getting into trash; callers were informed to secure their trash.” About the only way to secure trash from a serious brown bear would be to build a large steel safe and then bolt it to a concrete slab.

  “1:50 A.M. Two 911 calls of a brown bear on Dora Way; caller was advised to use the business phone line unless the bear was threatening life or property.” Sounds like this dispatcher was a bit irritable that night. When a brown bear is one foot from the stairs that go up to your deck, which opens into your bedroom or your baby’s room, or is standing two feet from your child’s bedroom window, what’s wrong with being nervous and calling 911? Does the bear have to be in your house and clicking its teeth before you call 911? In Seward it’s acceptable to be crabby every so often. Sometimes the weather gets to you.

  “2:39 A.M. Police spotted a grizzly on Dora Way [technically a brown bear] and directed it into the woods. Fish and Game will be contacted in the morning.” This means they would be calling Ted Spraker. He’d call his sidekick Larry Lewis, and they’d come to our rescue. When our Seward police directed the bear into the woods, what technique did they use? Did they get out of the patrol car and wave their arms in the air and cowboy it? Did they inch toward it in their car?

  The next night while on bear watch, Jed, Luke, their friend Warren, and their three girlfriends decided they’d sit in the middle of Dora Way, in front of our house, beginning around midnight, and dare the bear to join them. It didn’t show until fifteen minutes after they left. It must have been watching them from the dark, dangerous woods.

  After they dispersed, I was standing on the back deck, looking at the stars. I heard something walking in the damp, dark shadows under the limbs of the trees that grew everywhere in the woods behind our house.

  I called inside to Rita and Julianne; everyone else was over at Mickey’s. Julianne was wearing her white terry-cloth bathrobe and she was chilled, but not by the cool Alaskan night or the bluish white light of the moon. No, what made her shiver was the sound of something coming toward us in the three-to-four-foot-high weeds growing in the yard a few feet from us.

  “Daddy,” she whispered, grabbing ahold of my shirt and pointing in the direction of the approaching sounds. Her white-blond hair looked silver in this moonlight.

  Below us, suddenly, was the head of a brown bear, walking toward us, its body hidden by the tall weeds. In two seconds it was in our yard; in another second it was under the deck we stood on. I heard it paw at some bottles; I later found someone had had a beer or two under there.

  “I’m afraid,” Julianne whispered.

  “It’s okay, honey. I think it will go over to Mickey’s house again.”

  It walked under the deck, almost silent on the soft summer grass. I thought I heard it breathing, or was that me? It went by the stairs that would have led to us and then, as predicted, headed over to stand up and shake Mickey’s truck again. This time, though, the truck contained no trash cans.

  “The Police Log” in the Seward weekly newspaper reported, “July 22—11:19 P.M. Report of brown bear seen in the Dora Way and La Touche area.” “July 23—12:51 A.M. Report of brown bear going through garbage in 1900 block Dora Way for more than an hour in the same area.” “1:15 A.M. Coast Guard Kodiak [the largest Coast Guard base in the United States is just 185 nautical miles from here on Kodiak Island] received report of vessel capsizing in vicinity of Resurrection Bay.” A few things were happening around Seward other than the wandering, hungry bears. “1:52 A.M. Report of a black bear going through garbage at a residence at 2500 Cedar area; caller said their dog was stuck outside with the bear.”

  “2:35 A.M. Bear has returned to Dora Way area; dispatcher will make a ‘bear log,’ noting addresses and whether trash was secured for future citations.” Uh-oh, now the garbage-creating humans are in trouble with the police too. Knowing how stiff-necked and tough-minded some of these Alaskans are, if I were a Seward policeman, I would rather deal with the bears.

  At 11 P.M. during the summer, there were usually a fair number of children out playing in the front and backyards of our neighborhood. Julianne and her friend Nicole bounced on the trampoline in Rosie’s backyard. Next door to Rosie, going uphill, were Mike and Sue. They had two black-haired sons who were constantly making jumps to run over with their skateboards or trick bikes. As July wore on, the brown bear was coming out earlier and earlier, overlapping into times when the children were out playing.

  “July 23—3:18 A.M. 911 caller said brown bear at 2000 block Dora Way was tearing through trash in backyard.” “4:28 A.M. Officer sighted brown bear at 1900 block of Dora Way.”

  The bears kept on getting bolder, coming into our yards, sniffing around our garages, harassing the neighbors’ dogs. They were showing up now before it was fully dark.

  “The Police Log” for the week of July 23, 1999, printed in the Seward Phoenix Log, was filled with bear calls along with some of the usual “Police Log” fare: “1:05 P.M. 911 call received of a woman stuck in trunk of vehicle. Out of vehicle 1:22 P.M.” Did she call from inside the trunk? “4:40 P.M. Caller advised he gave ride on his bicycle to a subject who appeared to be intoxicated and thought it strange the subject has many T-shirts with tags still on them.” I think it’s a bit strange the guy on the bicycle picked up a hitchhiking drunk. Riding two on a bicycle requires real balance. “8:38 P.M. Manager at Burger King [the only fast food in town, unless you count Subway] advised that occupant of an older white vehicle blew marijuana smoke into drive-thru window and was drinking alcohol. Contact made. Driver passed field sobriety test.”

  And of course there was still report after report of the bear invasion of our street, which was now spreading to other parts of town. “July 23—6:31 P.M. Officer went door-to-door in Dora Way to advise of brown bear sighting.” “July 24—2:17 P.M. Bear reported on patio of home on Wolfe Circle. Trooper scared bear off for now.” “5:00 P.M. Bear trap will not be set tonight at Dora Way and La Touche due to the state not approving overtime for Fish and Game to do it. Trap will be set tomorrow.” Budget cuts equal longer freedom for brown bears in human habitats.

  The state surely hoped no one would be mauled or injured by the bear that night. One entry that week was appropriate, especially if this bear was not caught soon. “8:10 P.M. Adult male handing out pamphlets at the Kenai Fjords Tours parking lot, referring to the ‘wrath of GOD.’” If something tragic happened, after all those calls, forget about the wrath of God for now; the wrath of the folks on Dora Way and throughout Seward would be more than enough for any mere mortal.

  “July 25—12:15 A.M. Brown bear eating garbage at 1920 Dora Way.” “12:50 A.M. Brown bear eating garbage at 1910 Dora Way.” “4:15 P.M. Bear trap set near water tower.” “7:57 P.M. Security check of bear trap.” “10:27 P.M. Bear sighted at 1721 Phoenix.” This last sighting was a few blocks down the hill from our house, below the old, deserted orphanage. This was either a new bear or “our” bear was broadening his range. “11:05 P.M. Security check on bear trap.” Notice how often the trap was being checked.
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  “July 26—11:16 P.M. Brown bear sighted at 1905 Dora Way.” This is next door to us; we saw it a few minutes before they did. This was the earliest anyone had seen it, so far. The bear was rapidly becoming habituated. “11:30 P.M. Very large brown bear sighted east of Gary’s Gas.” Gary’s, where they also sell snow machines, was about six miles from our house. This was a new bear. A person could begin to feel surrounded.

  “July 27—2:59 A.M. Brown bear reported at Second Avenue.” Now they were getting close to downtown, close to Providence Hospital. One especially outspoken female neighbor said that at least if someone was mauled in that part of town, they’d be close enough to the hospital to crawl there. “6:26 A.M. Small black bear in the trap.” No one had ever seen this bear. “8:38 P.M. Bear trap moved to 2025 Dora Way.” The trap was moved to the yard of the wildlife officer who’d given me the ticket for having the wrong fishing license.

  “July 28—3:12 A.M. Security check of bear trap.” “5:29 P.M. Caller from Dora Way concerned for children playing in area due to the brown bear sightings. Requested a poster be put on his door.”

  “July 29—4:36 A.M. Advised of brown bear eating trash in the 300 block of First Avenue. Caller did not have their trash secured.” Here we go again. “2:55 P.M. Report of a brown bear chasing kids at Creekside Trailer Park. Trooper responded.” Uh-oh. A brown bear in middaylight chasing children. The tension around town was growing. The fuse was not only lit, it was nearing an explosion if something wasn’t trapped soon. Even after this entire series of events, not one person had fired a shot. “5:54 P.M. Caller advised she could hear a child screaming from the Bayview Apartments, yelling, ‘No, no.’ Officer patrolled area and no screaming was heard.” Surely no bear had broken into the child’s apartment. “11:23 P.M. Security check on bear trap.”