on the spot.
The little girl looked like a cross between my sister and me. I promptly identified with her to the full of my preschool heart. There she was on the enormous screen, playing with the wildlife, running joyfully through wildflower-strewn fields in her Seventies bellbottoms, wearing the exact same ribbed tank top I owned, her long blonde hair waving behind her.
Then, all at once, there she was, being chased by a huge, roaring grizzly. In one of the most traumatic instances of my entire life, I watched as the little blonde girl splashed through the creek and desperately hid in a shallow cave. The bear was on her in an instant, clawing at the roots and reaching for her as she screamed for her mother…
Mom says that my sister and I had cowered in her arms and refused to look at the screen until the bear was chased away by the faithful family hound, Crust, the only real hero of the series.
This was my introduction to bears. A few years later my family moved from the Lower 48 to Alaska, to a location eerily reminiscent of the one in The Wilderness Family. We reached it by floatplane. Everyone used a radio to communicate, like they do in the movie. My parents were talking about going farther out to homestead the wilderness.
And there were bears. Everywhere.
Not that I saw one immediately, but they were one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst the adults. I overheard blood-chilling, hair-raising tales that brought back that terrifying image of the little blonde girl racing for her life as the monstrous beast loped after her.
I suffered nightmares about bears every night of my wilderness life, when I wasn’t hyperventilating over the possibility of spontaneously combusting. Sometimes I dreamed of both. It did cross my mind to think that it would serve right whatever bear crashed through the window and into our bedroom to snatch me out of my bunk if I spontaneously combusted in its belly like a bomb.
I’m sure Mom had her own nightmares. After all, during the weekdays while Dad was away logging, she was responsible for five kids who weren’t known for their adherence to all the rules she dreamed up to keep us safe.
The cannery site was a veritable bear magnet with its large salmon-spawning creek. And, since the site was part of the mainland, we got both black and brown bears. (In the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska, bears practice island segregation—all the brown bears on one island, all the black bears on another. The mainland was a desegregated zone, and we were right in the middle of it.)
Mom had heard all the bear horror stories too, but her fear of them warred with her more visceral terror of guns that amounted to an uncontrollable phobia. To get around this problem, she had Dad string open jugs of ammonia around the outside of the house and where we kids played.
And she taught us the conventional bear-country safety rules: make lots of noise, don’t run from a bear (a bear can run faster than you), don’t try to jump in the bay to escape it (a bear can swim faster than you), play dead if it attacks you, back slowly away and get home immediately if you smell a horrible stench, wear your bear bells, blow your bear whistle, climb thick trees with lots of limbs to impede a bear’s tree-hugging climbing abilities or its ability to push a smaller tree over…
She made bears sound like supervillains who we had no hope of escaping, with diabolical superpowers no mere human child could hope to defeat. This did not, by the way, improve the quality of my sleep.
Not content with the conventional, she got inventive. And, wisely or not, turned the stuff of our nightmares into playtime.
The bear drill, as she called it, appealed to our athleticism and our competitive instincts. That was how she framed it: “Let’s see how fast you can do the drill, from the moment I call ‘Bear!’ to the moment you’re all in the attic.”
Her plan was to get us all tucked into the cramped, dark attic of the one story floathouse if a bear ever roamed too close to the house or tried to break and enter. Though a brown bear, if it was determined enough and sniffed us out, could have torn the ceiling apart to get at us. I’m sure she thought that at least it would keep us kids from being underfoot and running loose in the event of a bear assault.
We never knew when Mom would instigate the drill. We’d be going about our business of building forts, attacking each other with bristly yellow skunk cabbage cones, swimming, rowing in the blue plastic rowboat that looked like one of the boys’ Fisher-Price toys, climbing trees, and generally living about as free and close to nature as kids could get without turning entirely feral.
When we heard, at any time of the day, “Bear!” we had to drop whatever we were doing, grab the hand of the nearest “baby,” and force ourselves to walk sedately to the floathouse before galloping up the ramp with its raised wooden stops and along the railed, narrow front deck to the front door.
On one typical bear drill we burst through the white-painted front door and Jamie jumped on the table and shoved the loosely fitted attic door (a square of plywood) to one side.
Megan grabbed Chris and tossed him to me and I handed him up to Jamie, who snatched him and threw him into the dark hole above his head. Robin came next, and he, too, was flung into the darkness. I pushed Megan onto the table and Jamie heaved her into the hole. Then he grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the table and shoved me in amongst my sweaty, giggling brothers and sister. Jamie athletically pulled himself into the attic and immediately slammed the door into place.
The five of us huddled together, panting in the hot and dusty darkness. We were supposed to wait as silently as possible, without moving, until Mom gave the all clear.
There was no light up there, and other than our breathing and the rustle of our attempts to get comfortable on the bare ceiling joists, it was quiet. It smelled dusty and mildewed with boxes full of magazines, paperback romances, eight-track cassettes, clothes from the Seventies, and other things that we couldn’t see but knew were there.
I imagined a camera with an outside view of the shining aluminum roof of the floathouse and the camera ascending, taking in the rectangular floathouse’s lengthwise perch on a small mud flat at the edge of the forest with a stream flowing out from under the house’s float logs down a gravel beach, past the old pilings down to the broad bay.
The view expanded to show the endless forest climbing ridges and mountains as far as the eye could see toward Canada. On the other side of the peninsula where the floathouse was, the remains of the cannery sprawled black and rusty in the tumbling, golden creek and on the rocky beach. Rising higher the camera took in the breadth of the bay that merged with Clarence Strait, an integral part of Alaska’s Inside Passage.
In all that space, there were no other humans. Just us.
But there were a lot of bears, some of them fishing in the salmon creek amidst the twisted cannery debris, on the other side of the peninsula from the floathouse. There were more bears than humans in this land.
Then I pictured the camera cutting back to the hot and dark attic.
“I think that was our fastest yet,” Jamie whispered.
I nodded, pushing at the hair stuck to my overheated cheeks and forehead. “I don’t think we can get any faster.”
“I wonder if Mommy was surprised?” Megan said.
“I wonder if she’ll give us a treat?” Robin speculated.
Chris responded, “I’m hungry,” and our bellies grumbled. We were always hungry.
The bears were hungry too, of course, but I never felt any sympathy for them. Not when my brothers and sister and I were potentially on their menu.
• • •
There were other things besides bears and spontaneous combustion to fear in our wilderness home.
We quickly found that the first storm we’d encountered at the cannery on our reconnaissance visit was not an uncommon event. Even inside our more protected harbor the wind could find us. And in the winter when the tides were high, blown up higher by a terrifying, roaring wind, a monster storm surge wreaked havoc on everything that floated.