The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

The student-run community news site of Vermont State University - Johnson

Basement Medicine

Dan and Clint: a friendship begining

I was going to tell you about my sex life, but that’s not much of a story anymore.

Then I got 1,800 words into an essay about crippling depression, but we’ll save that for later; that’s not first date material.

Yesterday I whittled away a 600-word nugget about a backpacking trip to the northeast edge of the Kenai Peninsula — lots of blood, some sex and out-of-sight eight-foot-tall man eaters — but, again, it just felt wrong.

Probably I have scrapped about 5,000 words (that’s about 17 double-spaced pages to you college students) trying to decide how to begin. My MacBook’s desktop is littered with abandoned word documents.

You see, readers, a lot has happened since I left Johnson, and it has only been roughly a year.

I have driven more than 11,000 miles, lived in five states, almost died once, pondered my mortality following the event, wept for our country’s geographic beauty, and — now I realize — seen things that have permanently rearranged the furniture in my head.

I want to show you it all, but we must not rush. If we’re patient, we can have something special.

So take a seat. If you’re around talking people, tell them to shut the hell up, and let me tell you about a man I met driving to Alaska for a newspaper gig.

His name is Clint Treadwell, and he travels North America on a grizzly bear’s back.

This is how we met:

My blue Subaru was resting in a backwoods campground somewhere north of Whitehorse, and downhill of it, in a boulder-strewn riverbed, I was reading Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” with my feet in a river. I was at the part where Tom Wolfe was visiting Ken Kesey in jail, when a silence swept over me.

I set my book down in my lap and my beer between two round boulders in the water and looked up.

The tops of the black furs across the river began nodding, but there was no wind. Then, as if something were cutting a survey line through the trees, they began shaking, and tweeting birds flashed into the sky and rabbits and a coyote snapped out onto the riverbank and dashed away.

I no longer heard the water rolling by.
I forgot about the sun.

Then I heard branches snapping and trees falling and a growling that clenched my bones. It got louder … and louder … and louder — then a tire-sized paw swatted a tree into the river and it stepped onto the bank.

He was on the back of a grizzly bear more muscular than a Clydesdale and more towering than an mammoth. He pulled on reigns made of moose backstrap attached to a beluga whale rib that ran through the bear’s frothing mouth like a bit. Behind the bear’s ears was hung a necklace of rabbit skulls, and to that hung a tattered American flag the man sat on like a saddle cloth.

The bear stopped, its claws settling into the stony riverbank.

The man kicked his heals into the ribs of the gigantic bear and it grunted and lowered its head to the bank. He swung his legs together and placed two pointy-toed and sharp-healed black leather boots on the bear’s back; from its flank he slipped a shotgun out of a sheath fitted with a howling wolf skull; and he walked down the bear’s shoulders and head, stood in the stones and, from under a caribou-hide cowboy hat, stared a thousand yards through me.

Yelling so I could hear him over the river, he said to me:

“Prometheus and the Western Hero. Both suffering for the same foolishness. We will share a gravestone one day that tells about our folly.” He spit. “But fuck them. They can go to hell. I chose solitude a long time ago.

“How’s your liver?” he asked, cackling, swinging the shotgun onto his right shoulder and scratching his calf with the toe of his boot. He was wearing grey jeans and a deerskin vest stitched at the throat with baby seal tendons.

Behind him the bear farted and six trees fell over.

“Goddamnit, Rawhide! Can’t you keep that to yourself,” he said. “I am so disgusted every time you go about fartin’ in front of guests.”

The bear looked embarrassed.

“Hold on there, kid. I’ll be right over.”

He walked up behind the bear and spanked the back of its knee because he couldn’t reach its ass, and said, “Git going.”

The bear lumbered off down the bank, and the man rolled up his jeans, waded through the river in his cowboy boots, holding his shotgun overhead in both hands, and, when he got to me, stuck out a dirty hand and said: “Clint Treadwell.”

At this point in the story you’re probably thinking: “Shit, Dan, you expect me to believe this. There’s no way a grizzly bear would tolerate all of that. And sure they’re muscular creatures, but they do not grow as large as a wooly mammoth. Come on.”

Yes, attentive readers, I know. But I’m telling you now that this story is as real as a summer day in Alaska is long. Maybe I exaggerated a bit about Rawhide’s size, but Clint is no fabrication. We speak often since the day we formally met.

Anyway, as I was saying:

Clint sat down on a dry boulder and set his 12-guage on his lap facing away from me. For a dirty man that just crashed out of the woods on the back of a grizzly bear, he was quite the philosopher.

He looked at me, tilting his head back so that his hat’s shadow lifted from his blue-grey eyes, and asked, “Does hard going make you stronger or does hard going unhinge you?”

“Well,” I answered, “if you’re strong it’ll make you stronger, I guess. But if you’re tired, then, well, I’m afraid you’ll unhinge, if it’s unabating.”

He nodded, and asked, “Is it better to be alone or with others?”

“Um, I guess I feel this way about it: If you have questions to be answered, it’s better to be alone.”
“I’m glad you said that,” he said. “But if you’re alone and you can’t find the answers and you’re unhinging, what happens?”

“I suppose one alternative is you get strange,” I said.

He slapped me on the back and smiled. His teeth flashed in the sun. “I think you’ll like it at this latitude,” he said, but in his eyes, in a distant place, as his smile dropped to a dull grin, was a sadness.

We sat there as the sun lowered, and I gave him the rest of my beer.

I asked him why he had asked about my liver, but he just looked at me like I was an idiot.

I told him I was moving to the Kenai Peninsula for a job as a reporter on a daily paper. He told me that sounded awful.

After a while we stopped talking, and I opened my book and he sipped my beer.

It was the end of a long day driving north, and I was a little emotional with all the new country I had seen. Eventually I could not read my book in the darkness, so I closed it and picked up my cold feet from the river and placed them on a dry rock.

I looked at Clint, and he gave me the empty can then shouldered his shotgun.

We both stood from our boulders and faced each other. His cowboy boots had been in the river for several hours; I told him I didn’t know what he was thinking. He shrugged.

Squeezing his lips and nodding his head, he said, “I’ll see you around.”

He chucked his shotgun in the river, looked hard at me for a moment in the darkness, and jumped in.

 

More to Discover