Monte Montepare - Nowhere to Run

 

 

So, I'm in my truck driving through the dark across Alaska. If you haven't been to Alaska, it's big. I'm heading toward McCarthy. McCarthy is a redneck hippie town at the end of a 60-mile dirt road in the middle of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, your country's largest national park. Don't feel bad. Nobody's heard of the place. [audience laughter] And the population of McCarthy is 200 people and at least 100 dogs. It's at the toe of a gigantic glacier, the confluence of two rivers, the base of some of the most spectacular mountains you will ever see. It might be the most beautiful place on the planet, and I did not want to go back there. 

 

The night before, I was on a couch in Anchorage, I was excited. I was there to celebrate my second wedding anniversary with my wife. We'd been living apart that summer. I was living in McCarthy, taking people on adventures. I was a wilderness guide for the last decade. She was living in Anchorage, pursuing her own professional goals. She was living with friends. We were sitting on their couch. It smelled like two kids and one dog. That's where she turned to me and said, “I cheated on you two years ago, right before our wedding in McCarthy.” 

 

It was not what I was expecting to get for my second wedding anniversary. [audience laughter] I hear cotton is traditional. [audience laughter] And the more that I found out, the less that I felt like I could deal with it. When I found out that it wasn't once, it was an affair that went on that summer, I gave her a hug and I left. I didn't know where to go. I called my parents in Colorado. I thought about going all the way home. And in all the years of exploratory river trips, 21-day mountaineering expeditions, calling them with frostbite from some glacier that they can't even pronounced the name of, I had never heard my parents so concerned for my wellbeing. I was devastated. But I had to go back to McCarthy, because that's where my dogs were. [audience laughter] 

 

I remember the first day that I got to McCarthy. I moved to Alaska when I was 20 years old in my truck and I rolled into this town and it's all dirt roads and you have to walk across a bridge across the river to get there. It felt like I found Colorado in 1970, as my parents had always described it. And I fell in love immediately. I tell people for the next 10 years that I came for the mountains, but I stayed for the town. And I did. I got addicted to that community. It was so small and tight knit. I worked hard. I treated people with respect. I shared the place with the woman that I loved and I felt protected there. Like, as long as I was respected in McCarthy and my wife loved me, nothing else mattered. 

 

As I rolled back into town, I did not feel either of those things. I felt like I knew that people had known the whole time. I felt like everybody knew. I felt like I was the last one to find out my own secret. I felt like I needed to hide. I didn't want to face anybody. I couldn't face my cabin. So, I went and stayed with my best friend Chris and his wife. Chris and I had moved to Alaska in that truck when we were 20 years old together. We'd known each other since preschool. And now, he cared for me because I was incapable of doing so for myself. 

 

I've never felt an emotional pain that caused so much physical agony. I could barely eat, I could barely sleep, hours felt like forever. The first couple days felt like an eternity. And if this was life, I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep doing it. After a couple of days of that, I wanted to give Chris and Karen a break, because living in a one room cabin with your partner off the grid is complicated enough without having your heartbroken buddy occupying your living room/dining room/only room. [audience laughter] 

 

So, when my buddy Chester asked me if I would crash at his house for a night, I took him up on the offer. I met Chester that first day that I ever got to McCarthy 10 years before. We bonded over punk rock music. Our dogs are sisters. [audience laughter] So, I followed Chester through the woods in the dark to his cabin. Chris and Chester live in the same subdivision, but I feel like that word might be a little misleading [audience laughter] in this usage. Think less suburbia and more collection of cabins, shanties, trailers and permanently parked school buses connected by a dirt road ripped through the woods. 

 

So, I follow Chester to his house and we proceed to pull an all-night heart to heart. I tell him that this whole thing feels like the last act of some bizarre Greek tragedy that's been custom designed to wield my own inner demons as the means of my own destruction. I tell him how I've always struggled with my masculinity and how I feel completely emasculated. I tell him that I've always worried so much about what other people think about me to the point of trying to control people's perceptions. And now, the thing that I would like to be the most hidden is the most public. I tell him I am angry, but I'm afraid to let myself feel it, because it feels so intense and I don't know what to do with it. 

 

I wake up in the morning with my 80-pound husky dog lying on my chest in her most demanding version yet of maybe you'd feel a little bit better if you pet a big furry dog. [audience laughter] Chester and I drink coffee, which I do, and smoke cigarettes, which I don't do. But that morning, it felt like I should. [audience laughter] And I smoked the shit out of some cigarettes. [audience laughter] And then, I went to leave. My phone died and I realized I forgot my sleeping bag. I go back in Chester's, I grab my sleeping bag, I put it over my shoulder. Chester stops me and he puts his hand on my chest and he says, “You have an unlimited well of power inside of you,” which, if you knew Chester, you'd know that's a very Chester thing to say. [audience laughter] And I leave. 

 

I walk into the woods alone, because my dogs bailed on me to go back to Chris' for breakfast. I feel lost in the world. I feel like my marriage was a lie, I feel like my life was a lie, I feel like I died on that couch. And then, I realized that I'm actually lost. I am lost in the woods. [audience laughter] I don't know. And I know, right? I'm a wilderness guy, lost in my buddy's backyard. [audience laughter] Because I'm killing it. But I'm disoriented, trying to get my bearings. I take a step forward a twig snaps under my foot. I look to the left and I'm staring at a 750-pound grizzly bear 20 yards away from me. 

 

I've had a decent amount of bear encounters in my life, some with grizzly bears. I've been mock charged by a grizzly bear, which is when they charge you. It's their form of pounding their chest trying to scare you off. I have never had any animal look at me the way that this bear looked at me, roared and immediately charged. This is worst case scenario, I just scared a bear in the bushes. This is not a mock situation. I'm under attack. I turn my head to run for one instant, which is not what you're supposed to do. But when you're presented with something that terrifying, it can be a difficult instinct to quell. [audience laughter] 

 

And in that moment that my head is turned, I know exactly where my firearm is. It's six miles away in my cabin on my bedside table. [audience laughter] I scan the area looking for maybe a tree to climb or somewhere to hide, which there isn't, because there never is in Alaska. And grizzly bears run 40 miles an hour. So, I know if I try and run for one more second, this bear is going to be on top of me. What you are supposed to do if you're attacked by a grizzly bear is play dead. You're supposed to lie on the ground on your belly to protect your organs, put your hands behind your neck. And only if the attack persists, [audience laughter] then do you fight for your life. [audience laughter] 

 

Well, what this bear didn't know, is that I'd felt half dead for the past four days. I'd felt like I'd been being attacked from all angles. It had persisted long enough. I knew this bear wasn't going to stop. Nobody was going to save me. I turned around, and I looked and I saw this bear barreling at me through the bushes. I planted my feet, and I put my teal and lime green sleeping bag over my head, and I took all of that confusion and pain and directionless anger and I unleashed it in a vein popping, eye bulging primal scream. And the bear stopped. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Right? But now, the bear was very close. [audience laughter] So close that this time when it roared, I could see spittle shoot off of its lips and feel its hot breath billow through the cold morning air. But now, I was committed. [audience laughter] I wasn't going anywhere. In fact, I just found out that I don't want to die. [audience laughter] So, I looked the bear directly in the eyes, which you are also not supposed to do. [audience laughter] 

 

I dig down deep, deep inside, past the burst bubble of McCarthy and the shards of my broken heart, down to a place that is not broken, to a place that cannot be destroyed. And from there, I roar and then I charge the bear. [audience laughter] I don't think that's what the bear was expecting to get. [audience laughter] Because it looked at me huffed and ran into the woods. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Many longtime Alaskans would tell you that the moral of this story is very simple, “Carry your bear gun, you stupid hippie.” [audience laughter] But to me, it felt much more profound. I knew that this experience was going to summon all of my own personal demons in their most violent, intense forms. And if I tried to run or hide from them, it was going to kill me. If I was going to survive, I was going to need to be brave. I was going to need to stand my ground and look them right in the eye. Thank you.