Читать книгу One With the Tiger - Steven Church - Страница 14

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

In 2007 there was a Stephen Haas who sold advertising for KYAK-FM radio in Yakima, Washington, which now appears to be a Christian radio station catering to a largely Latino population. This may or may not have been true at the time that Stephen Haas was attacked by a bear. This may or may not have even been the same Stephen Haas. In fact, the deeper I got into my preparation to play Stephen Haas, the less real he became.

I read again the AP news story that the teacher had given me, but I could find no record of a similar attack in any newspapers or other sources. Craighead’s death was not listed on a fairly comprehensive list of fatal bear attacks in North America. In fact, in the course of my search, I could find no record for anyone named Janey Craighead at all. Moses Lake, where she was supposedly a captain for the fire department, is a small town in Central Washington, 377 miles from Glacier National Park, but only about 100 miles from Yakima, where Stephen Haas may or may not have lived.

There did seem to be a Rick Acosta who worked for the National Park Service but it wasn’t clear if he ever served in Glacier National Park; and though initially I (perhaps foolishly) assumed the story to be true, I slowly came to realize that the whole thing was most likely fabricated or cobbled together from other stories for the purposes of the class. It was a fiction. A fake. A lie of sorts.

For some reason this disappointed me, and not because the teacher used fiction to teach students how to report facts in a journalism class. It disappointed me to know that I’d put all that work into pretending to be a fake person, a character in a fabricated attack story. I believed that I was pretending to be a real person. I wanted to be part of a “based on a true story” story because I like the way the truth bends to the details in those stories, and because these have always been my favorite kinds of stories; and I guess I wanted to feel that all of my research and writing was an effort at intimacy and empathy with a real person who’d suffered real loss.

I eventually realized that it was just my own subjectivity, my own imagination at work. Stephen Haas could only be as real as I made him. He was just a vessel. It was a lot of pressure caring for such a container. Suddenly I felt responsible for making my performance convincing, for creating a whole person out of the ether, a character with a parents and a hometown, a backstory that informs his present existence. I was the only one responsible for telling the story of Haas and Craighead and for keeping them alive.

This only partly explains why I was reading a lot of bear attack stories and eventually found myself thinking about the “Drama in Real Life” sections of Reader’s Digest that I used to consume as a child during visits to my grandparents’ house, many of them recounting dramatic and harrowing tales of animal attacks and narrow escapes. I loved these stories. You can still find them online and in the magazine. They pretty much always end the same way, with hope and survival against great odds. The stories are inevitably a kind of celebration of the indomitability of the human spirit, combined with a graphic portrayal of the savagery of a morally indifferent natural world. And bears. Lots of bears. I figured these “Drama in Real Life” stories were exactly the sort of story I needed to tell if I was going to be convincing as Stephen Haas. It seemed I should be able to answer my own questions, however uncomfortable. The problem, however, became knowing where to begin and where to end.

Q: Mr. Haas, what do you think you learned from your encounter with the bear?

Learned? About what?

Perhaps about yourself or about bears, or maybe about the safety of backpacking and camping in Glacier National Park?

The bear was just being a bear. We were in his territory. We’ d leaped into his cage. And the point of such leaps, I suppose, is fundamentally selfish. I mean, it’s about you, ultimately. It’s about testing oneself. It’s about being humbled.

What do you mean by cage?

Look, think about it this way. How do you define a cage? The only differences between a zoo and a national park are the size of the cage and the consequences of leaping into that cage. In a zoo, the probability of attack is increased exponentially, but the difference between a zoo cage and Glacier National Park is mostly a matter of percentages. You know what I mean?

I’m not sure I do. Are you suggesting that our national parks are essentially very large zoos where we are allowed to climb into the cage with the animals?

Yes. Yes I am.