Jul 13, 2005

Book Review

Bear With Me

For 13 summers, Timothy Treadwell pitched his tent in Alaska's grizzliest bear habitat. He carried no rifle or mace or electric fence. He lacked scientific credentials and his presence was very much of a puzzler to many. Until he got famous.

This he accomplished, at least in part, by breaking the widely-accepted rules of bear country. Edicts like "don't tread near mama with cubs" and "leave no candy bars in tent" were lost on this sprightly Californian. Of course, there're guidelines so obvious they shouldn't require a rule like, "don't pet bears." Just so we're clear: Timothy Treadwell petted wild grizzly bears. If that's merely stupid, there's also the inexplicable.

As Nick Jans reports in his wildly interesting book The Grizzly Maze, Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession With Alaskan Bears (Dutton, New York, 2005), Treadwell was often seen crawling around bear-style on his haunches and was even spied tromping around a field of bears in a tuxedo. For his efforts, he received more publicity than any wildlife maven in recent memory.

With the media Treadwell fashioned a "the bears have been misunderstood" tack, and if not in so many words, promoted a touchy feely notion of the creatures, upon whom he bestowed names Disney would surely reject for being too cute: "Booble," "Cupcake…" 'Nuff said.

For this he earned the lasting enmity of bear researchers the world over. Not only did they resent his media spotlight, but they detested his idea that bears are literally and metaphorically "approachable," something they saw as both dangerous and disrespectful to the animals he claimed to love.

On October 5, 2003 Timothy Treadwell got what many of them feared, and some expected, was his inevitable comeuppance. A day before he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were to be picked up by bush plane, the two were mauled and eaten. Rangers who arrived the next day filled two body bags with a mere 40 pounds of their remains.

Jans does an admirable job sifting through Treadwell's mythology, applying a healthy dose of skepticism but without bludgeoning him with judgment. Take, for instance, his preferred biography. For fans of Christian television, it's a familiar narrative. In his book Among Grizzlies, Treadwell explained how bears saved him from a life of drugs, alcohol and fighting. He returned the favor by devoting his life to them. As Jans notes, the story omits his middle class upbringing, his thwarted career as a competitive diver and his family and friends. Not to mention that what Treadwell was saving the bears from was never clear.

Treadwell insisted it was necessary to spend the better part of each season with the bears because of poachers. Without his protection, he claimed, these 800-pound beasts would be gutted for their gall bladders, which fetch a tidy sum on the Asian black market. But Jans finds no evidence that poachers have ever been a problem in Treadwell's stomping ground of Katmai National Park.

While his friends may have doubted his reasons, and many had reservations about his tactics, according to Jans, none ever questioned his devotion to the bears. This was in evidence during the off-season, AKA hibernation, when he tramped around the country sharing photos and stories with school kids, often for free.

Part of why Treadwell's story fascinates isn't just the overload of tragic irony. Much like Chris McCandless of Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild, Treadwell expatriated himself from middle class America. Among grizzlies he made an authentic life that he couldn't find in more conventional settings. To justify it, he often distorted the truth and adopted an insufferable messiah complex.

He was hardly noble, certainly misguided and in some ways even selfish. But he lived life on his own terms, without apology. And it wasn't always a picnic. Joel Bennett, a nature photographer who logged countless days with Treadwell in the bush, poses the $800,000 question: "Think of Tim out on that coast, hunkered in a leaky tent, always wet or damp, no fire to dry clothes or cook on, bug-bitten, living on peanut butter. Alone most of the time, no one to talk to - and this was a guy who loved company… Day after day, weeks at a time, season after season for 13 years… What sort of a man would do this?"

Perhaps someone hungry for something greater than that which so many of us work so hard to achieve: comfort. What Treadwell did for himself is obvious, if not sensible. What he did for grizzly bears remains unclear.
John Dicker

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