Beyond the Bear (28 page)

I can laugh about the time I was getting dressed after a workout at the Alaska Club and couldn’t figure out why my boxer shorts were so tight until I realized I had opened the wrong locker and was standing there in someone else’s underwear.

It’s harder to laugh about accidently touching a coworker’s breast. Twice. Or the day I showed up to lead a group therapy session with troubled teens, clueless that I had dog crap all over my shoes and pants because I couldn’t see nor smell it.

I miss the way I used to play in the backcountry. I miss it so much it aches. But I’ve come to appreciate it in different ways. No more psychedelic sunrises or clouds of shorebirds playing crack the whip
.
But I can still soak up the sensations and soundscapes of the natural world. When I’m in a drift boat now I love hearing bald eagles crying overhead, Arctic terns squabbling over fish, and the river passing beneath the boat. When vacationing in Mexico with my family, I love going whale watching, and get as excited as everyone else on the boat, as if I’m actually seeing whales. Because I am seeing whales. I hear their exhale geysers and the whaps of their tails. I see every one of those whales. The way I choose to think of it, the bear that blinded me gave me a new way to see.

Lee Hagmeier continues to inspire me. At seventy, he still travels the world, unfortunately mostly without Christy, whose health limits what she can do. Just in the past few years, he’s rafted and hiked the Grand Canyon, and has visited Guatemala, Ecuador, the Amazon, the Galapagos, and a few places between. He’s poked around Mayan ruins, visited ornate cathedrals, and hiked thirteen miles along a volcano. He’s enjoyed the company of condors as they surfed the thermals along a ridge, and met a gargantuan tortoise named Lonesome George, whose shell came to the middle of his thigh. “Holding a tarantula was novel,” he recently wrote me. “She was very polite.” To get in shape for these trips, besides running and hiking, he tromps up and down ten flights of stairs, twenty times a shot, with a twenty-five-pound sack of flour in his backpack, his “flour child,” as he calls it.

Like Lee, I refuse to let blindness keep me from seeing the world.

I often get asked to tell my story. So I do, at assemblies, meetings, and conferences, to a variety of groups and organizations in and out of Alaska. I’ve told it to kids at McLaughlin, Anchorage’s youth detention center. I’ve told it to delegates at the USA/Canada Lions Leadership Forum. I’ve told it to peers at the Minnesota State Services for the Blind. Despite what life throws at us, I tell them, we have the power to rise above it. I heard a line one day during a training session at work,and try to pass it on as much as I can: “The bigger my life, the smaller my disability.”

Because I’ve put my story out there, and served two years as president of the Southcentral Alaska chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, I hear from people. I hear from those who are going or have gone blind. I hear from survivors of devastating illnesses and accidents. Now and then, I hear from other bear-attack survivors. One of them is Allena Hansen, a California woman who was severely mauled by a predatory black bear in July 2008 while she was working on her ranch in the Southern Sierras. In addition to other devestating injuries, the attack damaged her vision.

“We’re curiosities, you and I, having survived the unsurvivable—chosen to survive the unsurvivable—when most other unfortunates throughout history who, finding themselves in similar circumstances perhaps wisely did the rational thing and just let go,” she wrote me. “It certainly would have been a lot easier to die when we had the chance and not have to endure the torment of questioning our decision—let alone the physical aftermath every day.

“The actual attack, in retrospect, appears to have been the easy part. It’s the reconstruction and psychic aftermath that seemingly presents the bigger challenge.”

It’s true that we are and always will be curiosities. But I have never questioned my decision to live. I’ve stayed true to the promise I made to myself at the Russian River that night, to never to look back with regret.

In my Prescott days, I spent a lot of time meandering through the redwood forests of Big Sur, hiking along trails and rock-hopping up and down riverbeds. One time I came upon a six-foot remnant of a redwood tree that had clearly been burned up in a fire, broken apart, then flooded out and washed down the canyon, where it became wedged mid-river between two boulders. The floodwaters had long since receded, and so the burned up, broken apart, flooded out, trapped-between-two-boulders remnant of a redwood tree now hovered four feet above the current. From that remnant of a redwood stood a new, fifty-foot tree hovering four feet above the river. I like to think of it as a branch of that old, battered tree that refused to die, now rising toward the sky like a clenched fist.

When I think of where the bear has taken me, I think of that redwood tree hovering above the river. From the remains of my former self, I am growing. I am reaching for the sky.

Acknowledgments

DAN BIGLEY

There are far too many people I’d like to acknowledge and thank for their roles and contributions in my life’s story to list them all here. I would not be here, alive and well, if not for the many people who were involved in my heroic rescue, my surgeries, my care in recovery, my rehabilitation, my training as a blind man, and the care of my psyche, those who helped to heal my soul and kept me from sliding into bitterness. My life itself would not be possible if it were not for your acts of courage, your commitment of service to humanity, and your compassionate giving and kindness toward others. Your roles in my life’s story have galvanized my faith in the human spirit, and there are no words sufficient for me to express my gratitude and appreciation.

I’d like to thank the wonderful people of Alaska and beyond for your prayers, your thoughts, the letters of support, and more. I’d like to thank the man who offered one of his own eyes in hopes that I may see again. Then, to my family and friends who left their own lives behind to be at my side when it wasn’t clear if I would live, and to those who stayed at my side until I had grown wings and had a whole heart once again.

Thanks to my friend and coauthor Deb McKinney for her dedication to this project and for helping me tell my life story. To my parents and brother, thank you for your twenty-four-hour vigilance at my side. The love you brought and surrounded me with was perhaps the greatest variable in the outcome of my healing journey. To my beautiful wife, Amber, and my children, Alden and Acacia, you are the life in my heart and the joy in my soul, and together the life we share as family is my greatest dream come true.

DEBRA MCKINNEY

I am deeply grateful to Jim Welch, who unknowingly set this book project in motion. Without him, I would not have met Dan Bigley. I owe a world of gratitude to Dan for the trust he placed in me to help him tell his story. I am grateful to the entire Bigley family, and to Dan and Amber’s couch, where I woke up many mornings after work sessions that went late into the night.

It would be a daunting task to try to list all the teachers, coaches, writers, editors, whip-crackers, and verbosity death squads who’ve inspired and mentored me, but I take a deep bow to the late John Forssen, my journalism teacher at Hellgate High in Missoula, Montana, who began the process of making a writer out of me. Another shout-out to the heavens goes to Foster Davis, my writing coach at Poynter Institute who became a dear friend. Endless thanks to Kathleen McCoy and others at the
Anchorage Daily News
for helping me grow.

Thanks to my Fairbanks family, Kathy Lenniger, Pam Weaver, Mike Bowman, Barb Sivin, and Ron Harper, for their wisdom, feedback, and endless enthusiasm for this project. Same to my daughter, Genia Cliffton, to Richard Murphy, Dori McDannold, Jill Crosby, Gina Hollomon, Fran Durner, Douglass Bourne, Geoff Penrose, Lara Stone Penrose, and so many others. Even more of the same to my judicious advisors and readers: Tom Kizzia, Craig Medred, Peter Hoople, Barbara Hunt, Linda Billington, Jamie Berggren, Lynn Hallquist, Chris Volk, and Shelia Toomey, despite her proclivity for slashing out entire pages. And to Jeff Fair, not only for his critiques, but for supplying “Mother Yukon’s Glossary of Editing Terms” and other laughs when I needed them most.

I am grateful to many for sharing their areas of expertise, including Dr. James Kallman, Dr. Carl Rosen, Stephen Herrero, Joel Reynolds, Carol Ann Woody, and Evelyn Hemmingsen. A toast to Kirsten Schultz Brogan and Crystal Bailey at Providence for their help chasing down details. And another to Martha McCord and Carl Battreall.

I am grateful to Lee Hagmeier for sharing his own remarkable story. And to my father and stepmother, Walter and Carol McKinney, for their tireless encouragement, and for providing me a writer’s retreat on their lanai overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Same goes for Michael Miller, my friend and Mac guru, who’d take my panicked calls day and night, and to Web-master extraordinaire, Alan ElSheshai.

Our literary agent, Elizabeth Evans, awed us with her sage advice, generous investment of time, and unfaltering belief in us. And big thanks to all those behind the scenes at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. Warm thanks, too, to Holly Rubino for finding us a home at Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, and to Janice Goldklang, David Legere, Sheryl Kober, Justin Marciano, and the rest of the
Beyond the Bear
team.

I’m only mentioning him last because it makes me all weepy. My husband, Paul Morley, deserves an armload of merit badges for his unwavering support throughout this project, from serving me dinner at my computer to dragging me outside to watch the sun set. His love, patience, and belief in me are a gift I will never take for granted.