Re-Writes of Passage: Chapter 13

Meeting the Bear

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

This one’s about fear. It’s a fearful time, after all. Democracy is under attack. The US Supreme Court is under fire for betraying its Constitutional duty while the mainstream media appear intent on whipping up rather than reporting how and why anti-democracy efforts are being conducted. Dire times. Fearful times.

I surprised myself by choosing to post this essay. I wrote it more than a dozen years ago. But the subject of fear—something I’m seeing and something I’m experiencing—nearly made the choice for me. I don’t offer it as a panacea. But the experience I describe here—a cold and lonely time—makes me think I need to remember how fear and its potential consequences can affect a person, and even a country.

In the place I call HospitalWorld, no one tells you what you can expect. This seems wrong at first. Who knows better what to tell a confused and wondering patient what's facing them than the people whose job it is to care for them?

But when a nurse's aide asked me early in the evening how bad the pain was, I panicked. I wasn't feeling any pain. Should I be? Was I so stuffed with cancer that I couldn't even feel pain? What's the deal here? 

When I realized my imagination had taken hold of me, I realized it was best not to know what to expect. They didn’t have to tell me every surgery was different. I knew that. But that was cold comfort. I still had cancer. I was still having surgery in the morning. I still had questions I didn’t want to ask for fear of the answers I didn’t want to know.

So I told myself to get ready for a world of pain. But how? You can't tell yourself to get ready for pain. You can only be ready for pain. And you can only be ready when the time comes. And oncoming pain was the last thing I wanted to experience..

I knew something was waiting to get me. I couldn't quite make it out, but it was lurking out there, or in there, I didn’t know which, taunting me, daring me to look it in the eye - and I just didn't want to. I was afraid to look. And I didn't want to admit that fact to myself. Or especially to Patty.

I decided I needed a distraction, something to take my mind off my mind. I looked up at the blind eye of the TV staring down at me from the opposite wall. No. No way. That wasn’t the eye I needed to stare into. The hospital didn’t even carry HBO back then.

It was nearing the end of visiting hours and I knew Patty would soon be leaving, taking with her the fragments of an illusion that said somehow, we were in this together, like so many other things we'd faced throughout our lives. But not this time. I'd be as alone tonight as I'd never been alone before. Alone with my thoughts. With my fears. Alone, and waiting.

Patty read my mind. She stood up from her bedside post and told me she was going to find something for me to read.

Read! Of course. I'd read! I'd dive into whatever words I could find, just like I always do, tie sentences into a long paper rope, fling it out the window, slide down it and make my escape. I'd fill my remaining hours with back issues of Newsweek. Old Rolling Stones. Even Martha Stewart Living. I didn't care. I'd leave this wretched room the only way I knew how. Leave it before it killed me.

Patty returned, looking discouraged. She couldn’t find any magazines. But she’d found a book. An old text book, she said, handing it to me with a sigh and an apologetic shrug.

If that book had been a person, it would have been in ICU. Its spine was cracked and its stiff brownish cover was dangling by a thread. Its pages were yellowing and covered with schoolboy scrawlings.

I recognized it immediately. It was called "Modern American Prose." It an English text from high school almost 40 years before, a carefully vetted, Vatican-approved introduction to the pleasures of the American short story.

I couldn’t believe my luck. The table of contents offered a smorgasbord of riches. Who better to spend my lonely last pre-op hours with than the ever-amusing likes of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and James Thurber? Their light, smart, breezy stories would whisk me away from my dismal room to long-gone, super-sophisticated Manhattan. Their sophisticated, brittle escapism was, I knew, just what the doctor ordered.

But the old book had other ideas. I riffled its ailing pages in search of Benchley but instead, that cracked spine delivered me to someone with whom I've had little truck over the years, someone whose writing had always mystified more than pleased me.

I don't know why I started reading William Faulkner's "The Bear." I remembered not liking it much in high school, which was the way I felt about a lot of writers whose works we were assigned to read back then. There was nothing, in my considered opinion, "great" about The Great Gatsby or the man who wrote it. Same with Hemingway. Same with Edith Wharton and every other member of a lost generation who could stay lost forever as far as I was concerned. I remembered trying to read "The Bear" and giving up on it, hoping there'd be no mention of it on the final.

But for reasons I couldn't explain to myself, I began again. Along the way, I I finally recognized why it held such meager appeal for 17-year-old me. Here's what I saw:

“He was ten. But it had already begun, long before that day when at last he wrote that age in two figures and he saw for the first time the camp where his father and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the others spent two weeks each November and two weeks again each June. He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the tremendous bear with one trap-ruined foot which, in an area almost a hundred miles deep, had earned for itself a name, a definite designation like a living man.”

The remembered teenager in me took one look at that paragraph and rolled his eyes. A story about a kid? A 10-year-old? And some no-doubt wise old geezers who were going to teach the kid a lesson about living in the woods and dealing with a big-ass bear?

Great, said the all-knowing teenager. Wonder what’s on TV.

I read those words lying in that miserable hospital bed and the geezer I had become was captured.

There was no escaping Faulkner's unvarnished words. The story's very title gave awful shape and size to the fear that had been toying with me all day. It had snuffled and padded its way to the edge of my awareness and squatted there, watching and waiting for the light and heat of my campfire to become cold ashes, when I knew it would pounce.

Maybe, I told myself, if I kept watching Faulkner's forest and not my own, the beast would lose interest in me and slink away of its own accord.

So I kept reading. I bent my mind to what was unfolding before me. I thought I was looking for escape that night. But that wasn't what Faulkner was offering.

"The Bear" is the story of a boy—never named—who’s hellbent on becoming a man. He does this the way his father and grandfather before him have done it—by learning the hunter's ways.

He proves to be a pretty fair pupil. He shows skill but he's impatient. He kills his first buck, but that's not enough. He's after bigger, more dangerous game—Ben, the majestic, awe-inspiring beast who's eluded every hunter in the county, the bear who few can rightly claim to have even seen for certain. The bear who watches and waits for the hunter to make a mistake, who no hound can tree nor hunter kill.

The summers come and go and the boy—who's 14 now—knows something's not right and what he's got to do about it:

So I will have to see him, he thought, without dread or even hope. I will have to look at him.

Not only that, his Indian guide tells him, but the boy will have to meet the bear stripped of all protection.

"Be scared," the guide, Sam Feathers, tells him. "You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells you are afraid."

There it was—a path to the dawning day. I had to face the fear that had been hovering around me, had to locate it and look it in the eye. I could be scared. I was scared. But before that moment, I had never recognized the distinction between being scared and being fearful. Fear was something different, something dangerous. Something, Faulkner might have said, something unmanly.

         I knew that if I showed fear, my own lurking beast would take me. Take me when I least expected it to, in ways that would do me no good. And I couldn't allow that. I had to remain. Even as my campfire burned to ash, I had to stand my ground and treat what was coming my way with the respect and attention it deserved. Failing to do that, giving in to the fear, would kill me as surely as a slip of the surgeon's knife.

         Sitting there in that hospital bed, suddenly and completely disinterested in distraction, I came to an understanding. It was not a literary understanding, but something that grabbed at my heart so fiercely I almost gasped. I could be scared, and that would be all right. Completely understandable. But I couldn't be fearful, at least not for long.

         The knowledge of that distinction gave me distance. It let me see things as they were, to recognize where I was: not in a bad place, but in a place. A room. It didn't matter if I wanted to be there or not, if I liked being there or not. It was where I was. Surgery was hours away. It would come. It would go. I would return to the hospital room and I would begin my recovery.

         I would begin my escape, if you will.

         But I wasn't there yet. What was ahead lay ahead. What was behind was gone forever. I had only this moment and this one and the next one to live in, even to savor.

         That was all I needed, all I would ever have.

***

Not for the first time that night, tears came to my eyes. I felt relief. I showed Patty the passage I've just shown you. She understood. We kissed. I knew she'd be the first to arrive back in my room in the morning.

         She left and I was alone with the thrum and beep and hallway chatter that passes for silence in a hospital. I listened. And I waited. There was nothing else to do. I knew what I needed to do, how I needed to feel. I was at peace. It was as good as staring the bear in the eye. I was soon asleep, alone in the comfort of the moment I had finally come to occupy.