The Fall of the Father

Simon welcomed all the seasons as friends in his life. Winter was the obnoxious man’s man that everyone both envied and hated. Spring was a sister that was more of a best friend and mother rolled into one. Summer was his doppleganger - both his drinking buddy and his outdoorsman companion. Fall. . .fall was his father, strong but soft and glowing, slowly declining into a dark winter, losing his energy, but slowly.

Simon’s own father had left when he was only 12, when he needed him the most, when he was about to cross over from child to something else, something more serious, but all too confusing. It happened literally overnight, one day he was there, at the dinner table with his mother eating meatloaf and green beans, talking about where they may go camping in a few weeks when school was over. The next day, he wasn’t. Just wasn’t.

Simon lived a simple life but had opted to detach from society in what he felt was a healthy-enough way. He took a year to build a modest cabin deep in the woods outside Port Protection, Alaska. Population 63 at the time he finally was able to move in full time from his societally-integrated apartment in Seattle.

It had been two years since Simon had seen anyone outside the 2 people who assisted in his bi-monthly pickups of necessities arranged by satellite phone. Two years since he had left the city and her inhabitants who understood each other the same way Simon understood the woods and the elements. Two years since he talked of himself. It was late August, and fall was heavy in the air even if not so on the calendar. Sitting on the roof of his cabin where he could catch the sliver of glow from the water not far off, eating a late-morning biscuit and just beginning to slip into deep existential self-dialog, he heard a large animal approaching his cabin.

Bears were as common as you’d imagine in Alaska, and Simon wasn’t surprised to see a small black bear ramble onto the clearing around his home. It was getting chillier after all, the bears were beginning to sense the changes and prepare. In a rare spell of laziness, Simon had left remnants of the last night’s one-man hootenanny at his fire pit. His stomach lurched as he realized what would soon happen once this bear found the box of comfort snacks Simon had prepared for his annual fall ceremony. Baked beans, pickles, chips, and jerky - trimmings of both a bachelor and a pregnant woman - now they would be a green light for this bear to return over and over. Simon was not a man of over-indulgence, but last night when he decided to pull out the Talking Head’s album, 77, all bets were off as he played drinking games involving the French language and homemade elderberry wine. He immediately regretted his time spent making wine in lieu of syrup.

The bear was unusual, with an odd pattern of fur around his joints, almost as if he were a stuffed bear and his mobile parts were worn off with movement. He moved quicker than most bears, and with a purpose as if he’d been living in a house his whole life and wasn’t worried about the human smells and sites and possibilities. The strangest thing of all, though, the thing that made Simon stand up because there’s no other reaction to have - was that when the bear approached the box of rations, he picked it up and walked on hind legs back into the woods.

Well, that was worth it, Simon decided. That was worth feeding this bear if he was that special, if this bear was that funny, if that bear was going to make Simon fall over with stunned comic relief on top of his own roof, then by golly Simon was going to support this bear and even entice him for more.

There in began the friendship with the bear. Simon feigned solo celebrations 2 or 3 times a week, always leaving food in a box - but not until morning so he could assure it was his bear receiving the goods. Simon began talking to the bear. The bear began walking slower into the clearing and even sitting for a few minutes as Simon regaled whatever was on his mind from the rooftop, to his friend. Simon talked of recent things first - how he had found a new type of fern last week, how he learned how to ferment fish (maybe he’d leave some for the bear?), how he had only seen the Northern Lights once, but it was enough. Then he started from the beginning and talked to the bear of his life as a child. He told the bear how his father had vanished, and how it colored his relationship with the world as a whole. How his father would take him deep into the mountains and they shared quiet days and nights just sitting with nature, and how this is the reason he lives all alone now 12 miles from another human, and confessing life-long secrets of grade school crushes and how he actually still eats his boogers. . .to a bear, from his roof.

“Bear,” said Simon one day, chewing on a black licorice whip from up 15 feet above the bear, “my dad left me, but I know he didn’t want to. I will never know why and I’m alright with that now, because he is here. He is in this cedar tree and he’s in this roof I’m standing on and he’s in that fermented salmon and he’s in the wind - all the things we shared so much of when I was little. Hell, he’s even in you!”

The bear kept staring up at Simon and then repeated what he had been repeating for going on several weeks now - he picked up his box, and slowly, as if waiting for Simon to speak some more, ambled back into the woods to what must have been a cardboard castle he had been making, Simon imagined.

It was almost 6 weeks since his first muted dialog with the bear, Simon had been leaving boxes more often - 4 of 5 times a week. The weather was showing hints of the bravado personality that Simon would have to mirror to survive another winter alone out there. He would miss his bear. It was then, that he realized he was already missing his bear - it had been hours of thermos coffee and far too much of a Wim Hof book to realize his bear wasn’t coming. But it wasn’t that cold, surely - the weather was certainly following the trajectory of a typical Alaska fall-to-winter, but what could be considered an Indian Summer stent had graced Port Protection for the last two days, and Simon boasted the short-sleeved shirt to prove it.

Checking the sun, he grabbed a small bag for himself, a rifle for less eccentric and easy-going bears, the box for his bear, and set out for where he imagined the bear may have been residing. It wasn’t far - a mile or so - his bear was lying below a small outcrop of rock, which stood about 20 feet tall. Simon had never been closer than about 30 yards to the bear, but as he approached he knew he didn’t have to carry the gun with him anymore. His bear was completely motionless. His bear was dead.

Simon stopped to gather himself. Why would he be crying right now? Why would such an emotionally stoic adult, such a steadfast man in mind and body, be weeping at this point? He released his bag from his shoulders, and placed the box down in a warm sunbeam and moss. He walked closer. The bear’s head was turned at an angle that looked like roadkill deer he recalled back when he drove highways - like an owl, turned in an impossible direction. How sad, this silly old bear fell from the rocks and broke his neck trying to watch the sky as he fell? Simon walked closer. His head wasn’t just turned, it was detached, but in a clean, bloodless seam. Closer. There was pale color underneath - far underneath - like adipose tissue but with a gap between the dermal layer and the fat. Closer. Simon shook. His crying stopped but now he shook.

Sitting down on the hard deathbed of the bear, Simon lifted up the bear’s head to see a human’s face, dried blood framing one side of his scruffy face. A face that genetically mirrored Simon’s. The skin was cool, the man must have been dead at least several hours. It took Simon some engineering and ingenuity to figure out how to remove the costume. When he had the man separated from the bear, only two things remained on him other than his thermal pants and a grungy flannel shirt: in his shirt pocket was a driver’s license issued 30 years’ prior and a little black book. In the book were the answers to Simon’s universe, which were for only him to know. The first page, however, in the book, was a sketch of the bear costume, with indications for pockets sewn into the lining. Under the sketch was a note:

For my son, my sun. I don’t have much, I cannot make up for what was lost. I hope we can meet as we once did, in the woods. Maybe we talk or listen, or both. Inside this bear, I have left you something of the other world - $20,000. I hope it will allow you to be with me longer, in the wilderness.