A self-taught bear expert was one of two people fatally mauled by bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve. The bodies of the expert, Timothy Treadwell, and Amie Huguenard, both of Malibu, Calif., were found on Monday at their campsite. . . . Troopers said they found a tape at the scene that contained the sound of the attack, in which Miss Huguenard told Mr. Treadwell to play dead, then to fight back.
Alaska. It called to you. Naturally.
Open heart, open ears, world’s your oyster. The Times called. Doug, your editor, called.
Onward, to Alaska.
Kodiak Island, Alaska. Sits at the heart of a 177-mile-long archipelago off the state’s southwestern coast. Looks like the love child of Ireland and Hawaii. Feels like a dream.
The island’s hub is the town of Kodiak, a windswept, lovably humble seaside community (population: 6,000) of fishermen, hunters, and the people who sell them stuff. Locals—as opposed to the Fucking Tourists, with their Cabela’s boots and Patagonia-ness—embrace certain archetypes. They wear galoshes to formal occasions. They shoot reindeer and skin moose and hang heads on mantels. They smell of cigarettes and brine.
The hallmark of Alaskan oysters is sweetness.
Among the town’s most well-known locals was Willy Fulton, 42, a ruddy ex-cowboy with a thick gray mustache, Marlboro Man brio, and a taste for 70s-era conceptual rock. Willy was the most seasoned bush pilot in town, with 6,000 flights under his belt. His fearlessness was legendary. He was one of the few pilots who willingly assayed one of the island’s most dangerous areas, Kaflia Bay, a mountainous jungle land accessible only by bush plane. That’s where the two campers had met their ends.
Timothy Treadwell. Amie Huguenard.
Bears.
Ew.
Basically the extent of your knowledge, at this point. Things moved fast, post-headline. Alaska wanted you there yesterday and went the extra mile to make things happen, to wit: the moment doubt entered the picture. This was two days into the story, after you’d promised Doug and Graydon an epic tale of beauty and death—“The Penguin Man meets Jaws.” You were at the gym with a friend, jogging and whining. Not a single source had called you back. The nerve of Those Fucking Eskimos—
“Tim Treadwell?”
A woman on the next treadmill. An actress. Giggly.
“So weird,” she said. “My sister lives in Kodiak. She dates this guy. His name’s Willy.”
The mother lode. The guy hadn’t returned anyone’s call. Now he was your regent and guide. And he didn’t give a shit about certain namby-pamby regulations set forth by the desk jockeys in Anchorage nor certain logistic snafus he’d encountered during his last trip to Kaflia.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said.
Willy’s plane was a classic four-seater, a 1958 de Havilland Beaver, painted orange and yellow. The wee plane resembled, to those on the ground, a flying jack-o’-lantern—hence its nickname, “the Pumpkin.” The plane evoked, to those inside it, a flying lawn mower. The wind force made it bump and career, sometimes sickeningly. This, combined with the roaring engine, mocked the ears. Conversation required headsets. “Smooth so far,” Willy said, as the island disappeared from view. “Wait till we get some weather.”
The cloudy skies were clearing, allowing increasingly unfettered views of the water below and beyond. This was the Shelikof Strait, a 150-mile-long stretch of emerald gloriousness running along the island’s southeastern coast. Kaflia Bay was 75 miles down the coast from Kodiak, in a kind of cul-de-sac inaccessible from the north. Willy would first have to swing well eastward, over the straight, before knifing due west toward Kaflia Bay. This would increase the flying time, to about an hour. Thank God. In heaven, nobody asks, “When do we land?” The only bad thing about screaming over emerald waters and through electric-blue sky, in an orange pumpkin, was the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever.
Sunlight hit the water just so, turning the atmosphere orange, then orange-purple, then into a Pink Floyd show. Possibly that last part was goosed a little by Willy, after he popped Animals into the stereo and cranked it.
Not another plane in sight, even as the plane approached land, and even though the land was part of Katmai National Park, a tourist mecca. This particular stretch, which included Katmai Bay, was temporarily closed to outsiders, by order of the National Park Service. Willy mentioned this, in passing, while bombing low toward the bay.