October 27, 2004

• Rough Day

  The one necessary task I had for today was baking a new batch of
  gluten-free muffins.  This was my third day in a row of vertigo
  and sensorimotor weirdness.  I’m questioning whether I’ll be
  functioning well enough tomorrow to drive the rehab van.   I got
  through a water run a couple of days ago despite the uncooperative
  body, and I got the muffins done today.  What I did not get done
  was the rest of the cleanup of this worktable at my elbow here. 
  It is almost done and maybe I’ll finish it tonight and get a reading or
  three done.  Maybe.

  As I was putting the muffins together, I bumped the honey jug over as I
  reached to put the lid back on.  Caught it with minimal
  losses.  I dropped the mixing bowl with liquid ingredients as I
  was picking it up to pour into the dry ingredients.  Caught it
  with no spill.  As I was sliding a pan of batter into the oven, I
  brushed the back of my hand against the hot rack, but jerked back fast
  enough to avoid blistering burn.  I’m glad, since I keep doing
  those clumsy things, that I’ve got quick reflexes.

  The vertigo feels as if I’m on the pitching deck of a ship in heavy
  seas.  Why don’t things fall over?  I fall over, but stuff
  stays on shelves for some reason.  I feel seasick.

  ---

  So, does anyone know what Chris McCandless, Carl McCunn, and Bart Schleyer have in common? 

  All three men left mysteries behind when they died in the Arctic wilderness.  Below are excerpts from Sunday’s Anchorage Daily News story by Craig Medred:

  No one will ever know for certain what
  happened to former Palmer resident Bart Schleyer. His last contact with
  another human was when a chartered floatplane left him at the larger of
  the Reid Lakes in Canada’s Yukon Territory on Sept. 14. When the plane
  returned two weeks later, the experienced woodsman was gone.

  It continues:

  Thirty-five-year-old Texan Carl McCunn
  flew into a remote valley in the Brooks Range in 1981 with a dream of
  camping out for the summer photographing the wilderness.

  A diary found near his frozen body in February 1982 detailed how the
  plane that was to retrieve him failed to show in August. McCunn spent
  the fall watching and enjoying the wildlife that could have provided
  food. Eventually, he began to starve. His diary detailed his
  deteriorating physical and mental condition until he finally shot
  himself in the head.

  Alaska State Troopers found his body lying on a homemade bed in a wall tent.  He was not the last to end up that way.

  Author Jon Krakauer a decade later made his name with a book about a
  lost hiker titled “Into the Wild.” It detailed the disappearance of a
  troubled young man named Chris McCandless, or Alex Supertramp as he
  liked to call himself. McCandless’ remains were found in 1992 under a
  sleeping bag in a deserted school bus along an equally deserted road
  that skirts the north edge of Denali National Park and Preserve.

  Krakauer theorized McCandless had been incapacitated by eating a
  poisonous plant. The theory was later refuted. No one knows how
  McCandless, who left a far more fractured diary than McCunn, came to
  starve to death in the bus.

  And last year there was the disappearance of author, filmmaker and
  minor-league California celebrity Timothy Treadwell, along with his
  girlfriend, Amy Huguenard. They, too, failed to meet a charter plane
  come to haul them back to civilization. In that case, however, the
  pilot soon discovered that Treadwell, who had a fixation for getting up
  close and personal with grizzly bears, had apparently been killed and
  eaten by one of those bears.

  The sounds on a pictureless videotape in a camera left running in
  Treadwell’s camp later confirmed that a bear had killed and largely
  eaten both him and Huguenard.

  I didn’t include Treadwell and Huguenard in my little
  teaser-quiz, largely because the only mystery there was why the man
  thought he could talk to bears and why the woman followed him to her
  death.

  The story continues:

  Schleyer, like Treadwell, had spent a
  lot of time around grizzly bears, but he was no self-professed “bear
  whisperer” prone to get down on all fours and sing to them.

  He was a trained scientist, who worked for the Grizzly Bear Recovery
  Project in Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s before moving north
  to Alaska.

  He supported himself here by working part-time for a Wasilla
  taxidermist, doing some big-game guiding and spending months across the
  Bering Sea in Russia working to help save endangered Siberian tigers.
  Schleyer was one of the world’s foremost experts at capturing,
  radio-collaring and tracking the big cats.

  It goes into a lot of detail about the discovery of some bloody
  clothing and bone fragments, and about what people who knew Schleyer
  had to say about him.  What interested me most in the story was
  some info about bears I’d not known before:

  Bears are indiscriminate eaters.
  National Park Rangers who went to investigate the death of Treadwell
  last year shot and killed a bear that charged them at the scene. It was
  later confirmed to be the bear that ate Treadwell when a biologist
  doing a necropsy found not only human remains but significant amounts
  of Treadwell’s clothing in the animal’s stomach.

  Johnstone found nothing in the scat at Reid Lakes to indicate the bears
  there had eaten any fabric, though most of the clothes Schleyer was
  presumed to be wearing were never found.

  “We did find a pair of camo pants in the immediate area that appeared
  to be torn up,” Johnstone said. “We didn’t find any other clothing.”

  Other things searchers didn’t find also make Johnstone question the idea that a bear killed Schleyer.

  “The (human) remains were found in a little patch of sparse spruce,” he said. They were lying on the moss.

  Bears usually bury their kills in what biologists call a cache. The
  remains of Treadwell and Huguenard were found in such a cache after
  they were killed along the Katmai coast last year.

  Not only were Schleyer’s bones not cached, Johnstone said there was no sign of a cache anywhere in the area.

  Neither was there any sign of a struggle.

  “I went through the whole area,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything.
  No broken branches. I couldn’t find an area where the moss was
  disturbed.”

  Friends of Schleyer say it is hard for them to imagine his being
  attacked by a bear and going down without a fight. Even if he started
  off playing dead, a recommended tactic for surviving a grizzly bear
  attack, they said, he would have known that if the animal pressed the
  attack the only chance for survival would be to fight back with
  anything at hand.

  “He’d worked with bears for years in Montana,” Hornocker said. “He
  understood them, and he knew them, and he was not one to press the
  envelope like that photographer (Treadwell).”

  Kate Kendall, a former co-worker of Schleyer’s on the grizzly bear
  study team and an investigator of several fatal maulings in Glacier
  National Park, said it’s also hard to imagine a way in which Schleyer
  would end up killed by a bear with no signs of a struggle.

  “I think the least likely scenario is some sort of surprise
  encounter,” she said. “(But) it’s hard for me to imagine having a bear
  sneak up and get him.”

  Almost everyone who knew Schleyer — fellow scientists, hunting
  buddies, clients he guided — believe he was simply too good a
  woodsman, too alert while in the forest, to have a bear catch him by
  surprise. And if one had, Hechtel said, it’s even harder to imagine the
  animal doing him in without leaving signs of a struggle on a site
  covered with soft, easily disturbed moss.

  “Unless they’re really lucky, bears
  don’t kill fast,” Hechtel said. “I think bears are eaters, not
  killers. They try to eat things.”
  
  
  
  The audiotape of Treadwell’s death was
  frightening evidence of that. Those who have listened to it say it goes
  on for a long time, recording the sounds of him being eaten alive.
  
  
  
  Naturalists who have witnessed bear
  kills say this is the norm whether the bears are eating salmon or
  moose. Unlike the big cats, which kill before eating, bears start
  eating until their prey dies.
  

  • 9:44 pm
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