by Brenda Wilbee, in Alaskan Life

I BOARDED THE FAST FERRY out of Skagway, AK, to see about a new job in Haines, driving tourists into grizzly country. I’d been coming north for several years as a tour bus driver. The Call of the North had tapped my shoulder.

Normally I drove tourists up White Pass out of Skagway, AK, a small town caught in a crevice between two ridiculously high mountain ranges, and then wound them down into the Canadian tundra, landscapes unrolling into boreal forests and glacial lakes. But the summer of 2014 I’d taken a job with the new company in town but with expectations that didn’t suit. A job posted on our grocery store bulletin caught my eye. Wild Adventures in Haines. Taking tourists out to a grizzly reserve. Why not?

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THE FAST FERRY'S ENGINE hummed underfoot, and with fifty or sixty fellow passengers I chugged south on the world’s deepest fjord to Skagway’s neighbor forty-five minutes away. Mountains in surround pushed up 6,000 feet. Walruses lunged up onto barnacle-clad rocks and slapped the stone and settled into naps and sores. A whale nearby surfaced and breached. I jumped backward and laughed with strangers over getting splattered.

Then the walk off the long pier to town, onto Main Street, turn left on Third.

“Hey, I’m here!” I announced, finding Wild Adventure’s office and letting myself in.

“Hey, hi!” A blonde, twenty-something woman looked up from a cluttered desk. “You must be Brenda, I’m Traci. Welcome.”

A bit of chitchat, then down to business.

“I’ll have you go out with Kits today. She’s a seasoned driver, she knows all the tricks. But her tour isn’t for an hour, let me show you around.”

The usual dog-eared employing housing. Ah! A dining room. Meal tickets. So far, so good.

“I’ll take you out to the barn,” said Traci, her yellow ponytail bobbing as she tripped through a graveled yard of buttercups and weeds and stepped into a large rusty corrugated tin shed. Five buses inside. Not the sleek motor coaches of HollandAmerica-Princess I was used to. Nor the cute little twenty-four people-seaters of smaller companies I'd gotten used to. These were retired school buses someone had bought off a sales rack. Driving them would be an adventure of its own.

We found Kits doing a precheck on a bus she called Sorenson. “I’m sore when I’m in it,” she explained.

“Haha.”

She was a middle-aged retired park ranger who’d worked in national parks all over the States. Yosemite, Yellowstone. “But nothing comes close to Alaska,” she said, thick braid falling off her shoulder. “So I keep coming up here. Summers are my fix.”

“Same here.” My own addiction in the open.

Traci left Kits to take over. “It helps to be alpha for this tour,” she warned. “Peoples’ lives may depend on their respect for you. Not to worry, just watch and learn. Wanna help me check that left taillight?”

We rattled down to the pier, every joint of Sorenson squealing in arthritic pain. We got out. Held up our tour signs so people could find us. About twenty gathered.

Arms crossed, Kits stood at the bus door, and without a whole lot of chitchat and “where are you from?”, she jumped in. “Brenda and I are taking you up to Chilkoot Lake where grizzlies roam. Can’t guarantee you’ll see one, they don’t keep a schedule. But nine days out of ten, they’re around. Do what I say, we might have a shot of surviving a close encounter."

They all laughed nervously. Me too. Boom, just like that she'd put herself in charge.

“Seriously,” she said. “Do what I say, when I say, and we’re golden. Got that?”

They nodded.

“Jump.”

No one jumped.

“Geez, you’re all dead meat. Let’s try this again. Simon says tap your head and stomp your feet.”

This time they tapped their heads and stomped their feet.

“Alight-alright-alrighty then!” she rolled out like Matthew McConaughey. And while singing “The Bear Went Over Mountain” we boarded.

She wound us north, away from Lynn Canal and into the Tongass National Rainforest, tossing off her shoulder the usual tourist stuff—on the right you’ll see, on the left there are—interjecting the do’s and don’ts of running into bears.

“If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back. If it's white, goodnight.” She had them repeat.

“The reserve,” she went on, “is their foraging route. These grizzlies, technically called brown bears, circle daily, sometimes twice. We know who they are, but we steer clear. Observe from afar. This is their turf we’re visiting and, so far, knock on wood—” she knocked her head “—we’ve had no fatalities.”

Weak laughter.

“A few emergency airlifts, though, to Seattle and Anchorage.”

Guffaws to blow out the windows.

We came to a stop at Chilkoot Lake, pristine stillness. Not a ripple. I thought of Lake Louise in Banff National Park of Canada. This was not turquoise—but stunning.

We followed Kits past a walkway leading down to the lake and veered left instead, in under the usual suspects of a temperate rainforest: Sitka spruce, western hemlock, yellow ceder, red cedar, mountain hemlock, shore pine. The cedar towered so high and so tightly together that sunlight could only dapple. A quiet place except for the squirrels and birds, branches snapping. I thought of childhood fairytale woods. This was them. Anything could happen.

Kits pulled to stop in a hushed glen. We fell in, facing her. The dappled sunlight danced between us on a pine-needle carpet, and somewhere overhead a woodpecker rat-tatted twenty-five blows a second.

“Tongass National Rainforest,” she said, “is the largest temperate rainforest in the world, comprising 17 million acres, 89% of which—”

A ginormous brown grizzly padded out the woods and paused fifteen feet behind Kits. I froze. Two cubs tumbled out. I stopped breathing, Kits kept talking, and the giant sow pulled up on her hind feet, sniffing the air, ears alert. I could not move, I could not speak.

“B…b…bbb….” someone behind me stuttered.

“B-bb—,” someone else tried.  

I tried, but the enormity of the bear—thirty feet from where I stood—shut down all brain signals. She was too big, too close, too tall. Nine feet? Her nose quivered. I could see the grizzled fur of her chin. She held her front paws chest level, claws hidden. Oh my god, I wavered on my feet.

“B…b…bear!” the first person finally got out.

Kits turned ever so slowly. Ever so slowly she turned back, face ashen.

“I want you to slowly walk toward the bus. No running, no talking. If you do what I say, this is not a problem,” she said with a tranquility to contradict my fright. “There you go, I’m right behind you. That’s it, no running, stay quiet, you’re doing great…”  

I focused on her voice, a melodic calm to my chaotic shock and just enough to get my legs moving. But what if someone panicked? Or had a heart attack? What if someone broke into a run, all of us panicking? She kept talking, and I matched my steps to an imaginary clock ticking in my head. Tick tick, waiting for the tock to snuff the life right out of me. Where was the bear? Still on her feet? Had she dropped to all fours? Was she tracking us? I wanted to turn, check if I was safe, but I kept walking, though never sure my feet would hold. The bus hove into view. Run! No! One foot, another foot. Tick tick tick tick. Finally, we got to the old yellow school bus, and I collapsed into my seat. No tock. I was fine. I was alive.

Kits had done remarkable job. All in a day’s work, she told us, humoring us out of our scare and psyching us into going back outside. No bear this time as we walked a trail along the river while she showed us distant berry patches and river crossings these grizzlies traveled.

I didn’t take the job. Not enough alpha in me. One panicked tourist was all it would take for a grizzly to dine fine. I’d rather scoop ice cream at Skagway’s Kone Company.

I did find a job with Southeast Tours and went back to threading tourists through Skagway’s White Pass, up and over and down into the Yukon where black bears roamed. “Hey, boys and girls,” I said first day on the job. “When is a black bear not a black bear? They come in several flavors. Black, blue, brown, cinnamon, brown—white.” I dropped off the summit into the torturous valley of moonscape rubble, mountains riddled with glacier ice, and, just past Log Cabin of the old Gold Rush, marshland.

“We also have three kinds of bears up here. Black bears, brown bears, and—Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I choked, pumping hard on the brakes. Big Red, my bus, threatened to swerve out from under me. A moose had just lumbered out of the boreal forest and marsh to stand in the middle of the highway.

Enormous and balanced atop spindly legs, antlers five feet across, there she was, all but eyeball to eyeball when I finally came to a stop. Crazy, unpredictable, fast, moose could be dangerous. We’d take a heavy hit if she decided to charge. My guests went wild. They took pictures. I idled, hazards on. If not alpha, I was at least beta.

“What’s the third kind of bear?” asked the man sitting behind me.

“Gummy bears."

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BRENDA WILBEE & BIG RED
S. Klondike Hgh., Yukon, CA

 

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