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MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

I realized at some point during preparation for my role as Steven Haas that Janey Craighead, my camping partner and the sole fatal victim of the bear attack, also happened to share a name with Jean Craighead George, the author of the 1959 young adult novel, My Side of the Mountain, a book largely responsible—in a somewhat indirect way—for my own trip to Glacier National Park and Denali National Park in Alaska in 1995 and for my preoccupation with a life of solitude in the wilderness.

At the age of eleven or seventeen, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve probably answered, “River raft guide or maybe a hermit in the woods.”

It was Craighead’s story of Sam Gribley, who chooses to leave his large family and society in search of a solitary life in the woods that probably ignited much of my fascination with a solitary life in the woods. Sam carves a home in a hollowed-out tree and keeps a peregrine falcon named “Frightful,” and this seemed like a pretty good plan to me.

Hovel in the woods? Check.

Animal for a best friend? Check.

I believe it may be books like Craighead’s or Walt Morey’s books, and later work from Edward Abbey and Jon Krakauer that inspire people like Christopher McCandless to actualize the fantasy, to break the chains of family, society, and home, and to leap into the wild; and I can’t deny that I always found these stories undeniably compelling.

I don’t mean to blame these books or authors, but rather to suggest that what makes them powerful and enduring works of art is that they tap into a deep and elemental desire of many people, especially it seems of young men in their twenties and thirties—that prototypical western drive to test oneself against nature, as if there is something hormonal or physiological about this drive, as if it’s in our marrow and coursing through our DNA. Hell, I had plans. And I shared these plans with anyone who would listen, including my girlfriend.

Craighead’s book (and Morey’s Gentle Ben) certainly planted the seed for me, and Jon Krakauer probably nurtured it. My writing mentor in graduate school told me that nearly every semester he teaches Krakauer’s Into the Wild, the perhaps largely imagined and embellished story of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, one or more young men in the class experience a kind of breakdown, sometimes even disappearing from class and school altogether, stepping away from life much as McCandless did and run for the hills. He tells me he has to be careful with that book.

He tells me that it is a dangerous book.

I love this idea. Because I think I’ve felt that urge, too. And that book is dangerous—a hypnotic essaying of this urge that so many young men seem to feel, a book that is both warning and siren call to chase the wild.

I’d already read Krakauer’s 1993 piece on McCandless from Outside magazine, “Death of an Innocent,” when, in 1995, after my graduation from college with a degree in philosophy, my girlfriend and I drove from Kansas to Denali National Park in Alaska. I knew we were going where the bears are as big as Volkswagen Beetles. I knew McCandless had died not far from Denali, but I didn’t really know where. I knew also that part of Krakauer’s mission in the article, and later in the book, was to normalize this urge to disappear into the wilderness and to rescue McCandless from a simplistic understanding of his death.

That first night, after we set up camp in a stiff wind, I pulled out my map and studied it for a while in the tent. It took me a while to see the full picture, but I eventually realized that we were camped on a ridge above the valley where McCandless lived and died in an abandoned bus. I hadn’t planned this. Or had I? When we picked up our backcountry permit, we’d taken one of the only quadrants left available that had any elevation. We’d just climbed to the top of the ridge and picked a spot to pitch our tent.

The next day we hiked up and peered down into a vast stretch of trees and green bogs, and I saw the river that, swollen with runoff, had supposedly prevented McCandless from making it out when he’d finally realized he needed help. On the map I saw the hand-crank ferry that could have saved him if he’d only known about it, if only he’d walked a few hundred yards farther upstream. At some point between the looking glass and the map, I realized I was staring into a future book, a kind of alternate reality, and perhaps into my own possible future.

Between Krakauer and Craighead, I found literary inspiration for my own engagement with the wild, my own desire to lose myself in bear country. What I didn’t realize some twelve years later as I was preparing to pretend to be a bear-attack survivor was that Jean Craighead was the younger sister of pioneering grizzly bear researchers, conservationists, and twin brothers, Frank and John Craighead.

Like Sam Gribley and his falcon, her brothers had caught and trained a Cooper’s hawk. Their work with the bird eventually led to them developing a relationship with National Geographic and a series of TV specials that introduced America to the outdoors-loving, naturalist-nurturing Craighead family. The brothers pioneered the use of radio collars and tranquilizer darts to track, capture, and study grizzly bear populations in Yellowstone National Park. One of their great successes and unique talents was combining conservation with entertainment, particularly with documentary film. They were something like the Jane Goodall of grizzly bears, exposing whole generations of Americans to one of the last great predators of North America, and perhaps staving off all-out extermination of them in the lower forty-eight states.

Q: Mr. Haas, were you aware that there were grizzlies in the area? Did you feel that you had ample warning and were adequately prepared for encountering bears?

Look, we went there to encounter bears. You don’t go to Glacier if you don’t think that might be a possibility. We wanted to see bears.

Did you and Ms. Craighead see warnings from the national park about bear activity?

Warnings? Like signs or something? The whole place is a warning. The trees whisper of it. You can’t be there without feeling the presence of bears. You can’t stand on a lightning rod and feel surprised when you get struck.

Why would anyone stand on a lightning rod?

Humility. How many times in your life have you sought out an experience that humbles you? You know what I mean? How many times have you, sir, ever been in a place where you are not the top of the food chain? Do you know what it’s like to be prey? It’s strange, really. And pretty cool. Kind of hard to explain. I guess it’s a unique intimate experience, a chance to know yourself better.