The Sad Tale Of The Bad News Bear

"He was not hunting people, he was hunting peace. But it's a funny way to get it, whacking people".

 

Steve Herrero, bear expert, on the protagonist of “The Black Grizzly Of Whiskey Creek”

 

I dunno. Seems reasonable, sometimes.

 

A mystery co-worker, aware of my penchant for things ursine, saw fit to plonk this book on my "Staff Picks" shelf. It's a title which has evaded an interested but cash-strapped me in the past, so I thought it appropriate that I should intercept and actually read it this time around. 

 

Sid Marty, the author, is as prodigious as he is eclectic. Erstwhile poet, journalist, and -most importantly in this context- ex-park ranger and actually present during the drama, he takes on the dread but impelling task of committing to text the appalling and tragic (for human and bear alike) circumstances surrounding a spate of bear maulings in Banff, during the summer holiday of 1980.

 

Taking the subject matter into consideration, one might expect the usual lurid beatdown of man against beast; fodder for a beach chair on the porch by the lake on a weekend afternoon. I soon found, however, like the denizens of a bygone Banff, that I was up against something far more numinous and worthy of both serious consideration and respect (a 2008 GGs finalist, no less). Time and screen space preclude my musing upon the importance of Bear to the human psyche and environment alike; perhaps it is well that I direct others to Marty's masterful tale in order to conveniently, if sensationally, remind them of it. 

 

Everybody knows what eventually happened: a man was killed, and a number of others were permanently scarred, physically and otherwise, as the result of a hideous agglomeration of shames and sadnesses: human laziness, incredible bureaucratic chicanery, Nature's inopportune indifference, as well as her inevitable expression in carmine tooth and claw. The mystery and mastery of Marty's take on the horror lie in his skills as a artistic magpie. A vast, vivid melange of character sketches, natural-historical observations, and journalistic reportage, conspiring, tensing and inevitably honing themselves towards a gut-churning and awful denouement, Marty's patchwork warp and weft leave us in no doubt as to who is the villain: we have seen the enemy, and he is us. Nonetheless, a due and trembling deference is granted to the eternal, fearsome Bear as archetype, avatar, and very real predator; Marty clearly admires and respects bears, but is no teddy-hugger. If some measure of humility and sorrow were not granted to the Banff residents who witnessed the happenings in the summer of '80, perhaps the smack of it could still be had by the naïve and curious bystander through a reading of this book. It would be difficult not to be affected, even if bruin-neutral. 

 

Marty's style is as honest as it is sensitive; he careers between workaday brusqueness and profound lyricism on a dime, and herein lies the magic. His asides can become distracting at times, though he allows none of us to lose the ever-thickening spoor of a hollow and shameful conclusion. Suspense and poignance wax in grim contention. A newcomer to this country, I once anticipated the thrill which might accompany the sighting of a bear in the wild. This book is a sad reminder that the human gaze diminishes (as well as defines) wilderness, the bear's dwindling realm; it is best for a bear that I should never see him at all, and that he should never have to see me. I can visit with him vicariously from the comfort of my couch through Marty's literary offering. 

 

Particularly impressive to me, a chapter surprising in its utterly unexpected (but welcome) poetry, and juxtaposed with such hard-and-fast fact, to boot: how a single bear, deadly, mighty, and yet tragically indifferent, might -of all things- dream.