Nonfiction

I circled the Vuarnet store in SoHo twice before entering, self-conscious for a variety of reasons: on one level, for instance, I knew I was too old to be shopping there. It wasn’t a holdover of the brand since its general disappearance after its peak in the nineties, as I had imagined it—a lone flag of consumerism planted for thirty fractious years among the boutiques and bistros of Spring Street. It was new since last summer, July 2018.

My obsession with my father is so pronounced that when I sit down to write about the women I’ve loved, I begin with a line about him. My memory of others is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of him. This is an old thought, the way a dream is an old thought, born in the mind and prone to illusions. Although his skeleton is underground, our relationship is ongoing.

This past summer, I didn’t run the Upper Green, the Chattooga, or any of my favorite whitewater rivers, because my kayak skirt no longer fits around my pregnant belly. That’s what I say to my boating friends when they invite me on trips. But the truth is I haven’t been on rivers since before my body showed its tenant. I’ve been scared.

Reports of a large, gray grizzly gathered thick as mist in the North Cascades of Washington State in the 1940s. A hunter after deer near White Chuck Cinder Cone glimpsed a silvery mother and cub. Near Fire Mountain, not far from the town of Darrington, a grizzly with long gray fur and two cubs ran at a man on the trail. She chased him up a tree, raking through his boot to his foot with roughly three-inch claws. After an hour and a half in the branches, he was rescued, carried out on a horse. Roughly a year later, the bear—or a similar one with gray fur that fluttered “like a flying squirrel,” an observer reported—charged at a family of six who were admiring the view from Fire Mountain. The husband shot the bear, who stopped, veered off toward Fire Creek, and then disappeared.

At the time, grizzlies like these were common enough that no one was surprised, but rare enough to make the newspapers. Their longtime presence in this sodden landscape along the Canadian border—characterized by sharp peaks, silver fir forests, and riotous rivers draining them—was memorialized in hunting accounts of the Salish peoples and, later, fur trading records of the Hudson Bay Company. Accounts of bears from white settlers moving in and claiming land during the late nineteenth century carried a whiff of the fable and violence of Davy Crockett tall tales. In 1888, one grizzly was shot with seven bullets, finally dying just a few moments before reaching the hunter. In 1924, an animal referred to as “a monster grizzly bear, whose footprints are as large as an ordinary hat” plundered campsites for bacon. They ravaged sheep, killed cows, and, wounded, left long, bloody trails into the bushes.