Beyond the Bear (18 page)

More than one well-meaning friend tried to put a spiritual spin on my mauling, about me being some sort of chosen one, about how I now had the spirit of the bear residing within me. Right. So if you get mugged in an alley does the mugger’s spirit get to move in, too? The natural sciences, from the microbes in the soil beneath my feet to the Arctic tern’s annual migration from one hemisphere to the other—the equivalent in its potential thirty-year lifespan of one and a half roundtrip journeys to the moon—provided all the evidence I needed that there was magic in the air without resorting to making stuff up.

“Everything happens for a reason,” people would say.
Is that right
?
And the reason a bear ripped my face off is what, exactly?
What happened to me was sociobiology in its rawest form. The bear thought I was a threat to her cubs and did what any good mother would do; she put a stop to me. Nothing personal. It wasn’t fate that brought us together. It wasn’t my destiny to become Lee Hagmeier’s tribal brother. It was nothing more cosmic than at that particular moment having shit for luck.

Coming so close to dying has a way of flipping what you thought was important on its head. Even if I hadn’t lost my sight, I had been to the blue place and had returned profoundly altered. So the spirituality part was not so much what drew me to Dr. Dyer’s message. It was the solution part. Dyer’s case for the power of intention resonated with me, that we have the power to control how we respond to the tragedies in our lives. He spoke of turning adversity into something meaningful, and how our traumas can become our strengths. That gave me something to focus on. It gave me hope.

As best as I can remember, Harlow Robinson, who’d been my boss at Alaska Children’s Services, was the first person to whom I expressed this. During one of his visits to me in the hospital, I wrote on my dry-erase board: “Something good will come of this.”

“It was probably the single most inspiring moment of my life,” Harlow later told an
Anchorage Daily News
reporter following up on my story. “Dan’s the kind of guy you’d name your kid after.” And he did a year later with the birth of his first son, Eli Daniel Robinson.

All through this time of healing and grieving and soul searching and dreaming, Amber and I were staying in touch by phone. Not much at first, maybe once every couple of weeks, then gradually more often. Amber was still working as a school counselor for Cook Inlet Tribal Council, so we talked about her work with kids. We talked of mutual friends and music shows we’d been to. We talked about our dogs and we talked about the weather. Our chats were friendly, but guarded. That worked for me until my brother dropped the bomb.

Brian had acquired a girlfriend during his time in Alaska, had flown up to see her, and had bumped into Amber at the Bear Tooth at a David Grisman show. She was with a guy, and it was obvious to him that they had something going. Not that anyone blamed her, least of all me. I didn’t want her waiting for me out of any sense of charity or obligation. Amber was doing what she needed to do, what I had expected her to do, what I pretty much told her to do. She was moving on.

“Huh. Okay,” I said, when Brian let me know. “I’m good with that. Amber and I are just friends. Really, we’d only been together a day—not even. I’ve put her through a lot, and she deserves to be happy.”

Ouch, that hurts
, is how I really felt about it. Surprised by how conflicted I was, I brought it up the next time she called.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about. Brian says you’re dating somebody. I just want you to know that’s totally cool with me. I want you to live your life, to move on. I would hate to think you didn’t feel you could do that. But I’ve got to say, he’s a lucky guy.”

Pause.

“I appreciate that,” Amber said. “But you don’t have to worry about him. I don’t see this going anywhere. He’s already annoyed with me because I talk about you so much.”

Pause—my turn this time.

Our phone calls became more frequent after that. She continued to be guarded, assuming I meant what I said when I left for California, that I was too messed up to be in a relationship. On my end, I got to where I couldn’t stop thinking about her. That started chipping away at the wall I’d built between how I thought I should feel and how I really did.

I had my free-flap surgery to repair my forehead in early November at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. This fifth surgery was exceptionally tough on me in terms of pain and anxiety. Nothing else had worked; what if this was a bust, too?
Once the surgeons got inside my head, they discovered that the oval of bone that had been temporarily removed during my reconstructive surgery in July not only wasn’t viable due to lack of blood supply, it was harboring MRSA. It had to be tossed, leaving my brain beneath that spot without armor. One wayward softball to the forehead and game over, is how Dr. Kallman put it. There was talk of me having to wear a helmet the rest of my life—a helmet!—to which my sentiment was, screw that.

Because of the MRSA, I had to ramp up the antibiotics, back to the heavy-duty IV kind, so heavy they turned my sweat orange. Twice a day,
no matter whether I was on the couch or out in public, Brian, Jay, or Jeremy would hook me up through a PICC line on the inside of my upper right arm, first flushing the port with a syringe of saline, then attaching a bag of antibiotics that took a half hour to drain, followed by another flushing of the port. This, I was told, drew some dirty looks and turned heads at festivals and music shows. At one, some space princess was convinced I was mainlining heroin and kept hinting that I should share.

After the free-flap, I had a lot of healing to do, and I had every intention of doing it well enough to celebrate the end of that year and beginning of a new one in spectacular fashion. Steve Kimock was playing three shows in Colorado around then, including one on New Year’s Eve. That was my carrot. Recovering enough to make those shows felt hugely symbolic since his music had been the soundtrack of my bedside vigil. A mutual friend of his, one of my former housemates from Prescott, told him about me and was keeping him posted on my progress. I threw it out there to Amber the next time she called.

“So, I have this plan that I’ve been kind of dreaming up. I’ve set a goal for myself to work on healing and get back on my feet in time to make it to the Kimock New Year’s shows in Colorado. Being well enough to go would be a milestone for me, making it past all the surgeries. So I’m asking some of my closest friends to meet me out there. I’m wondering if you would be interested in joining us. Jeremy and his girlfriend, Paige, are coming. Brian’s on for sure, and there are several other definite maybes. If you could make it, I would love it if you’d let me buy your plane ticket.”

“Wow, that’s really tempting. School doesn’t start again until
the fifth
so that part works. I don’t have anything else planned so, yeah, I’d be up for that. But you don’t have to buy my ticket.”

“I insist.”

“If you’re going to put it that way, I guess I could let you. It really would help. I’ve been a little strapped. I should probably get right on making a reservation.”

That we’d be sharing a hotel room was a given. At the end of December, Amber and I met up in Colorado, and I had every intention of picking things up where we’d left off in Girdwood. The first night, at the
Fox Theater in Boulder, at the front of the stage with Amber beside me and my buddies all around, I couldn’t have felt more grateful, or more deeply moved by what we die-hard Kimock fans call the K-waves. The notes he doesn’t play are just as important as the ones he does, and the ones he does play, he dances circles around. I was already flying when he gave me a shout-out.

“I don’t usually do this sort of thing but this song goes out to Big Dan Bigley, who came a long way to be here today.”

I was floored. Amber put her arm around my waist and gave me a squeeze.
Kimock then launched into one of my favorites, “Tongue n’ Groove.” I grinned so hard my jaw hurt.

It was an epic night on many levels, a high-spirited celebration of better times to come. The free-flap surgery had worked; my forehead was finally fixed. I was back in my natural habitat. I was back with Amber. Only, for some reason, I felt more skittish than romantic.

When the show ended, she and I made our way back to the hotel. She disappeared into the bathroom. I sat on the couch with a thorn in my stomach and a bad case of sewing-machine leg. She came out in a silk nightie with a fresh dab of Egyptian Goddess on her wrists and neck, although that detail was lost on me since I had no sense of smell. She pulled back the covers and slid into bed. My hands out in front of me sleepwalker style, I groped my way to the bathroom, bounced slightly off the doorframe, rebounded, went inside, and closed the door. I dropped my clothes on the floor and climbed into my pajama bottoms. I came out and shuffled toward the bed, finding it first with my left shin. I climbed between the cool, cotton sheets still wearing my sunglasses. Once I heard Amber reach over and switch off the reading lamp, it felt safe to take them off and set them on the beside table close enough to grab in a hurry. Amber snuggled up next to me. I turned toward her, wrapped my arms around her, and drew her close. She rested her head against my shoulder, her body pressing against me, a leg draped over mine, a hand on my chest. And then . . . nothing. I could not move. I could barely breathe.
What is WRONG with me?

We lay there wide awake, each wondering what the hell was going on. We lay like that, not talking, not moving, until finally drifting off to sleep.

My behavior was even more puzzling the second night. When Amber put an arm around me at the show, I’d take it for a while, then turn to the side and slide out of it. When she would sit down next to me on the couch in our room, I’d sit there a few minutes, then get up to do something bogus, grab a beer, whatever, then sit back down on the opposite side of the couch. In bed, after about fifteen awkward minutes of nothing happening, Amber rolled over and went to sleep.

By the third night, New Year’s Eve, she wasn’t even trying anymore. Even the kiss at midnight was more like how I’d kiss my aunt. In bed that night, lying side by side, I was actually feeling claustrophobic, like my skin wanted to crawl off my bones and hide under the bed. It was so awkward and upsetting to us both.

To my brother and friends, who’d had high hopes for the two of us, it was obvious I was blowing it.
What the hell is Dan’s problem?
they wondered.
Amber’s awesome. Has he lost his mind?

No one was more bewildered by my behavior than me. That fireworks show we’d had between us, where did it go? Here I was blind and disfigured, not exactly a dream catch, and here was this beautiful woman who obviously wanted me in spite of it all. The chemistry was no longer there, I assumed. Nothing else made any sense.

At the airport two days later, we stood around waiting for our planes, not talking about much. Brian, Jeremy, Paige Howarth, and I were all on the same flight. Amber’s wouldn’t leave for another couple of hours. When ours was called, she and I hugged goodbye once again. This time, it really was over between us. I just hoped I hadn’t blown it so bad we couldn’t be friends.

“It was a lot of fun,” I said, not the least bit convincing. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks for everything. Take care.”

I felt entirely empty, like a pocket turned inside out. The agent called our rows and we all headed toward the plane. Amber watched us go, then turned and walked away.

CHAPTER 16

Victory Lap

A week after returning from Colorado, Jeremy drove me down
the winding canyon road from Arboleda to San Juan Bautista, then worked his way northwest toward the seaside town of Capitola to deliver me to the one person who seemed to know me better than I knew myself at the time. My mother had lined me up with therapist Joanne Young before I’d left Alaska to help with nightmares, post-traumatic stress, and my staggering sense of loss. Jeremy and I stopped as usual to grab coffee and breakfast sandwiches along the way. With my ongoing struggle with antibiotic-inspired nausea, I needed something in my stomach before swallowing my weekly dose of reality, which at times was not unlike swallowing bleach.

“Thanks for bringing him in, Jeremy,” Joanne said as she met us in the waiting room that day. “We’ll see you in a couple of hours. Dan, you ready to head back?”

“Ohhh yeah,” I said as I rose to my feet. I took hold of her elbow, and we walked out the waiting-room door, through a commons area, and into her office, a room of bookcases, pillows, and plants, with lighting as soft as cotton and walls infused with troubles, some of which could peel paint.

Jeremy would kill the time
picking up my prescriptions at a nearby pharmacy, reading the newspaper at a bakery down the road, or sitting in my truck listening to Howard Stern on the radio. He never knew which version of me he’d be picking up at the end of these sessions—the one who’d psychobabble the whole way back, telling him more than he wanted to know, or the one who’d sit slumped in the front seat, mindlessly fiddling with his beard, thoughts lost in the exosphere, the one who’d crawl back into bed for the rest of the day as soon as we got back home. That day, after I faced up to how I’d treated Amber, he’d be getting the solemn, beard-fiddling one.

Back in Joanne’s office, I settled onto a leather couch, kicked off my flip-flops, and tucked my legs up beside me. She handed me a cup of lemon zinger tea. I heard the brush of fabric as she sank into her chair.

“So Dan, tell me, how was Colorado? How did it go with Amber?”

“Well, actually . . . I’m pretty disappointed. It was so strange and awkward, the opposite of what I expected. The chemistry, the energy, I just wasn’t feeling it. So I guess that’s pretty much the end of that.”

“Um-hmm. Is that so?” Joanne wasn’t buying it. “This is not about Amber,” she said. “I doubt what you were feeling had anything to do with a lack of chemistry. I’m wondering if it was more the opposite.”

I paused a moment. “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

Two hours later, I walked out of there painfully aware of how little progress I’d made on the emotional frontlines of my recovery. Since I’d first gathered my wits about me in the hospital, I’d focused all my strength and energy on physical healing, but was still white-knuckling the internal kind. I didn’t feel
connected to my own misshapen head, let alone this amorphous being I was inside. My own heart was a stranger to me.

I wasn’t interested in having a casual relationship with Amber. Had I been, things would have been much different in Colorado. Falling in love means making yourself vulnerable, risky under the best of circumstances. And there I was, a blind man with no blind-man skills whose curb appeal was in the tank. Why would Amber want me? Charity? Although I had a primordial fear of living alone in the dark, I preferred that to a relationship based on pity. Combine my post-bear insecurities with the standard ones that come with the territory in any new relationship, then pile on the
squirrely
highs and lows of that raging cocktail of love chemicals, and what you get doesn’t feel all that different from an anxiety attack. Joanne’s theory was that sensory overload had tripped my emergency shutdown breaker, and the more we talked, the more I could see that she was right.

I’d been mulling this over for a few days when Jeremy and Paige brought it up over dinner.

“Amber seems really cool, the kind who’s down for just about anything,” Jeremy said. “You didn’t seem all that into it. We were all wondering if you’d lost your mind. Have you even talked to her since we got back?”

“Yeah, she’s great. And no, I haven’t.”

“Seriously? What a dumbass you are.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

I got up my courage to call her later that night. I took the phone from the kitchen, felt my way down the hallway trailing my hand along the wall, went into my room, and closed the door. I sat on the edge of my bed thinking about what I was going to say to her. Before I could lose my nerve, I dialed her number. She answered on the third ring. I could sense her stiffening when she heard my voice, so I jumped right in.

“I’ve got something I need to tell you. I think you know, I’m sure you know, it was pretty weird between us in Colorado. I don’t want you to think you had anything to do with the way I acted. You didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t say the wrong thing. You were completely stunning and beautiful. I don’t know how to make sense of it. I just thought that somehow the chemistry wasn’t happening. I know now that wasn’t the case. I think my emotions just got all haywire and I pretty much wigged out.”

It was a good thing Amber was a great listener because I had a lot of explaining to do. I just hoped it wasn’t too late.

“I’m sure I hurt your feelings, and for that I am truly sorry. If there’s any way you’d be willing to give me another chance, I would really, really love that.”

Amber was silent long enough for me to wonder if I’d managed to make things worse. After all, I’d pretty much just told her I was an emotional nutcase.

“Amber? You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. It was a tough trip,” she finally said. “Thank you for the apology. I’m willing to keep talking and see what happens. No promises.”

“Amber, thank you. I feel like such a jerk. The good news is, I’m aware that I bring a lot of baggage into this. The bad news is I have a lot of baggage. But I’m going to work really hard to make sure it no longer gets between us.”

After that, I launched into full-steam-ahead, hot-pursuit mode. I started calling her most every night, and
sometimes we’d talk for well over an hour. I’d talk for well over an hour, anyway. I was eager to share with her what I was learning in my sessions with Joanne. I wanted to show her the progress I was making, and the commitment I had to making it. I would talk and talk about my fears, insecurities, and revelations, and Amber would listen without drama or judgment. Some nights, most nights, she’d listen herself right to sleep. I’d hear the shift in her voice, then in her breathing, heavy and rhythmic.

“Hey, Amber? You still with me? Amber?”

I’d smile and imagine her curled up on her futon with Hobbit, her head resting on her arm, mouth slightly open, phone lying abandoned on its back. I’d imagine myself lying next to her, brushing the hair from her face with my fingers.

All winter and spring we had our late-night talks, speaking in soft tones, getting to know each other by sharing our stories. Courtship by phone put us on equal footing. With blindness irrelevant, we were just two voices in the night. Without the distraction of trails to follow, rivers to run, and fish to catch, Amber, I came to realize, was the best thing to come my way. Ever.

I’d known all along that at some point I needed to return to Alaska to visit my former life, to wrap things up in a way I was incapable of when I left in the fall. I could still hear Jaha’s voice from the Russian River just before the ambulance doors closed between us. “We’ll be fishing again before you know it,” he’d said. It was time for me to get back on the horse, and so I booked a flight for July. After six months of working with Joanne, I felt ready to audition once again for boyfriend status with Amber. Visiting her in Alaska would be my comeback. Fishing again with John and Jaha would be my victory lap.

Once my plane touched down in Anchorage, I had to sit tight until everyone else was off and a flight attendant came to assist me. I was halfway decent with a cane by then, but didn’t feel like pushing it. So I took her elbow and we headed up the aisle, through the jetway, and into the waiting area at the gate, where she handed me off to a passenger-assist associate with a big, beefy voice that suggested she was a woman used to getting her way.

“Hello Mr. Bigley. I’ve got a wheelchair here for you.”

“No thanks, I’m good.”

“It’s no problem, sir. It’s all ready to go. Wouldn’t you like to take a load off and go for a little ride?”

“No, not at all. I don’t need a wheelchair.
If you don’t mind, I’ll just take your arm and we can walk together.”

She sighed and cleared her throat. “You’re sure?”

“I am
so
sure.”

“Well, o-kay then.”

Once we passed the security exit and entered the main terminal, I heard Amber’s signature, “Heeey, there.”

“Thanks,” I told my escort. “I’m good here.”

I felt Amber’s arms wrap around me. I wrapped mine around her. We held onto each other almost long enough to qualify as a scene.

Amber never did buy land in Bear Valley, but she did find a cabin to rent not far from my own. We pulled up to her place around one that afternoon. I stood in her driveway a couple of minutes taking in the familiar Chugach Mountain air and calls of the ravens, then took hold of her arm and went inside.
I kicked off my sandals, slipped out of my backpack, and set it down in a corner. She took off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair.

Her cabin was nearly as Alaska-ghetto as mine, only with indoor plumbing. More than once while she was away at work, the freight-train winds of winter had blown her front door open, frozen the pipes, and deposited snowdrifts upon her bed. It wasn’t the smallest place she’d lived in but it was close, so small her twin bed, draped with her patchwork quilt, doubled as a couch. How convenient. How awkward. While she busied herself making tea, that’s where I sat, cross-legged on Amber’s bed, fiddling with my beard. There was a lot to fiddle with. A remnant of my former self, my beard was one thing I felt I had control over, and I hadn’t let anyone trim it since the hospital. Down in California, having feral facial hair that reached my chest, along with my hefty sunglasses, brought a steady stream of ZZ Top wisecracks.

As I twirled it between my fingers, familiar clouds of doubt formed inside my head. Seriously, why would Amber want me? Half the time I couldn’t even find my own shoes. A year after my accident, there was still a little too much swelling for prosthetic eyes. In the meantime, I was stuck with these green plastic placeholders. The lids of my right eye were swollen shut, and the lids on the left were stuck slightly open, exposing the space-alien green of my conformer. What a turn on. And here I was in Alaska in July. At least in Colorado it got dark at night. Amber handed me my tea, and I jumped off that train of thought.

We sipped our tea. I ripped the tab off the string and rolled it into a ball between my fingers. We sipped our tea some more. A mosquito buzzed and landed on my arm. I slapped and missed. I continued working on my tea, in no hurry to finish. When I finally did, Amber took my cup to the sink. I went back to fiddling with my beard. I could hear her own nervousness as she clanked about in the kitchen. I wasn’t about to do a repeat of Colorado. This time I wanted her so bad I could hardly stand it. But first I had a decision to make.
Sunglasses on? Sunglasses off? Sunglasses on? Sunglasses . . .
Oh, the hell with it
.

“Hey, Amber, why don’t you come over here a minute?” I said, patting the spot beside me on the bed. She abandoned the dishes with a clatter, came over, and sat down next to me to the creak of bedsprings. She was dressed in jeans and a tank top, and I could feel the warmth of her skin against mine. I leaned over and kissed her softly on the shoulder. She leaned her head my way. I turned sideways, put my right hand on the small of her back to orient myself, and kissed her temple, tasting the sweetness of her hair. She leaned back, exposing her neck.

My glasses went flying and landed on the floor with a thud.

Making love for the first time left us both glowing, all the pent-up awkwardness melted off our bones. Had I been able, I would have sprinted to the nearest mountaintop and shouted, “I love this woman!” Instead, I held onto her as if I’d never let go. We fell asleep that night crammed in her tiny bed in her tiny cabin, tangled in each other’s arms. And then, just as I had the previous summer, I woke up late the next morning and hugged and kissed her goodbye. I was going fishing with John and Jaha on the Kasilof River, and my ride had arrived.