“Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you.”---Emerson
Vegas has it 4-5 for the bear. Make it 2-5 if the bear is a grizzly. Optimist Timothy “Grizzly Man” Treadwell, a documentary filmmaker, had a penchant for flying up to Alaska every summer to camp with the bears, play with the critters, even touch them. Treadwell was so fascinated with the creatures that he came to believe he was one of them. Alas, “Grizzly Man” did not survive the initiation. It’s one thing to tickle Casper the Friendly Bear under the chin, another to mess with Bad Bad Leroy Bear.
On fine day in the Land of the Midnight Sun, Timmy set up his cameras, turned them on and went bear hugging. Leroy didn’t like it, turned on the man and mauled him to death in front of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. “Next year I’m going to the south of France” thought Amie briefly, before the grizzly went after her. Then, adding insult to injury, Leroy ate the both of them, cameras rolling. Poor Willy Fulton, the air taxi pilot who was scheduled to fly them home, arrived to find “the meanest looking bear you ever saw” standing on top of a pile of human remains, which included Treadwell’s head, a small piece of his spine. a few fingers and an arm with the wristwatch still functioning. What a great commercial for Timex, which used to claim, “It takes a licking but keeps on ticking.”
The eventual video was critically acclaimed and scored a plucky 92% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The video, not Tim and Amie.
There Are Strange Things Done In The Midnight Sun
“Chris McCandless, Supertramp, do you think you are what they say you are?”---Tim Rice, sorta
Christopher Johnson McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, just couldn’t get a grip on life. Despite a commendable academic career and a degree from Emory University, McCandless was the guy always singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
Always eager to find greener grass, he drove himself to Fairbanks, Alaska during one summer vacation prior to graduation and the wilds of Alaska seemed to stick in his memory banks. The fact that he visited Fairbanks and actually wanted to go back is one sign of muddled thinking, but there were others. Shortly after earning his degree, he donated all his savings to a charity, cut off communication with his family and headed for Arizona, where his car was disabled by a flash flood in the vicinity of Lake Mead. Undeterred, he abandoned the vehicle and set out on foot.
McCandless traveled the western states extensively, calling himself a tramp. He rode freight trains now and then but mostly hitchhiked, stopping for a short time in South Dakota, Mexico, Arizona again and Salton Sea, California, then set out for Alaska. One of his hitchhiking benefactors told him he was far too ill-prepared for an extended sojourn in the bush, as Supertramp was carrying little more than ten pounds of rice, a collection of books, a map and a .22 rifle, insufficient firepower for big-game hunting or defense against bears. He shrugged off the doubters, stubbornly hiking westward to the Bering Sea, but wound up sheltering in an abandoned bus on a little-traveled trail. There he composed his ultimate “manifesto,” written on plywood. He proclaimed himself “an extremist, an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road” and who now faced “a climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution.” Sound familiar? Whenever you hear somebody you know has written a manifesto, head for the bomb shelters.
Nuts or not, McCandless might have survived if he’d figured out how to cross the imposing Teklanika River, but the waterway he’d forded easily two months earlier was now swollen with snowmelt and impossible to cross. Unpreparedness in Alaska is suicide and Nature is the toughest taskmaster. Forced to continue on a substandard diet, Supertramp found his Kryptonite, weakened and died, his body weighing only 67 pounds on discovery. In his final days, McCandless recorded his conviction that the seeds of the wild potato---or Eskimo potato---had disabled him. Oh, that’s right, when all else fails blame the poor potato.
The film Into The Wild later glamorized McCandless’ life, and several misguided pilgrims as unprepared as their hero set out to visit the shrine of the Supertramp. A large number of these goobers required rescue and two died, one in 2010, another in 2019. After the deaths, Alaska state authorities had the hallowed bus removed and hauled off to the Museum of the North in lovely Fairbanks, yet one more reason not to visit the place.
Outlaw Meteorologists Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread
Some people think bullfighting is fun, others like to visit bars in Bogalusa after midnight. Bungee-jumpers dive into the abyss, tourists stick their hands in the alligator’s mouth and Will Thacker likes to snuggle up to anacondas. But who is as disturbed as the intrepid Stormchaser who gallops across meadow and stream chasing down the dreaded Tornado churning up the landscape with winds of 150 miles an hour?
How and why does one get into this line of work anyway? Do you start in Thunderstorm School, graduate to Hurricane High and get a scholarship to Vortex U.? Avid stormchasers will tell you there’s little risk, they follow the storms from a distance with all manner and make of equipment to detect the future path of the animal. That’s what the Egyptians said, too, just before Moses said “bye” and closed the opening in the Red Sea.
Oklahoman Tim Samaras was among the elite of stormchasers, sought after by newsmen for his dramatic tornado videos and expertise in storm projections. Over the years, he had outrun and outsmarted many a storm and might even have become a little cocky about it. “I just love roaming the Great Plains reporting on these monsters,” he rejoiced. A sometimes rival of Tim’s named Breezy added, “It’s like in basketball or boxing---you learn the moves of your opponent….when to deke and dive. They’ll never catch Tim.”
Well, never is a long, long time. On a fearful Friday night in El Reno, Tim Samaras, his son Paul and colleague Carl Young ran into an EF3 twister with winds up to 165 miles an hour. They could hear the whirlwind’s jet engine roar and see it snapping off power poles like so many matchsticks as the storm had its way with everything in its path, which soon included them. Five others were also killed in the rampage, while the Weather Channel’s Mike Bettes had his car tossed in a ditch and the chase vehicle of the Discovery Channel’s Reed Timmer had its hood blown off. “Some days you get the bear,” said Timmer, “some days the bear gets you.”
But when he does, it isn’t pleasant. Ask misters Treadwell and Samaras. They’d probably tell you all things being equal, they’d rather be in Philadelphia.
Cavemen
There are not many hobby sites which post signs like the one at the bottom of Devil’s Den in Williston, Florida: "STOP! Prevent your death! Go no farther.” Followed by a kindly explanation that over 300 cave divers, including many skilled instructors have died in caves “just like this one.” But boys will be boys and cave divers will tut-tut over warnings and forge ahead. Diving in caves offers the chance to explore the few remaining untouched corners of the world, marvel at ancient rock formations, even discover new life forms. For some divers, the mystic allure of the cave is too strong to resist. And between 1969 and 2007, 368 of them paid the ultimate price.
Cave diving can be as hairy as life gets. The diver enters deep, dark, tight spaces with the potential for falling rocks which can either plunk him or block an exit. Water flow can be strong and changeable. The diver can become entangled in lines or lose lines entirely. He can run out of air. Due to the overhead environment, complications like broken torches can cause panic and develop into an emergency. The diver might exceed his depth limit, use an inappropriate gas mixture, fail to make decompression stops as he ascends. Or he could get lost in those caves….horribly, impossibly lost.
Skilled stunt diver Agnes Milowka, who plied her trade in the movie Sanctum, was an adventurous diver obsessed with the caves. Her abilities netted her involvement in many documentaries and diving projects, including some work at the famous Mount Gambier complex of sinkholes, caves and underground waterways in Australia. The Tank Caves there require expert navigation through tight restrictive areas with limited visibility. A lot of the cave system is very fragile with soft ceilings, and a diver has to breathe carefully since the bubbles created from exhaling too hard can displace the ceiling, which can then fall on the diver.
Milowka had dived the Tank Caves many times and knew them well, but somehow on her last dive lost contact with a dive buddy. She became confused after stirring up silt from the cave walls and floor. Unable to find her way out of the cave, she eventually ran out of air and perished. Next day her body was discovered about 500 meters from the cave entrance. The caving community was stunned, perceiving Agnes as a sort of superbeing who could never fall prey to the usual suspects. “I’m hanging it up,” declared a close friend named Linda. “If the caves can get Agnes, they can get anybody, certainly me. It’s the suddenness of the realization that you’ve gone too far, dared Nature one time too many that probably terrifies you in the last few seconds of your life. I think I’ll take up something nice and safe like bobsledding.” About that, Linda….
The Further Adventures Of Florida Man
Eric Merda knew better. The 43-year-old Sarasota resident knew there was likely an alligator in any Florida pond bigger than a breadbox, and certainly in the environs of the Lake Manatee Fish Camp in Myakka City. Nonetheless, he decided to take a swim in the lake one very hot day in July. “Turned out not to be the best decision a Florida boy could make,” Eric told a Tampa news station the next day. As he was swimming merrily along, a gator took umbrage, grabbing his right forearm in its jaw.
Not one to panic, Eric reached over and tried to grab his adversary. “I thought I was one mean country boy, but that gator, he just laughed at me,” smiled Merda. The animal dragged Eric underwater three times before the alligator “finally did her death roll and took off with my arm.” The Florida man managed to swim one-armed back to shore and walked off in search of help, proving he actually was one mean country boy. Describing the grisly state of his arm, he told the newsmen he could see exposed bones and muscles “sticking out everywhere.”
Eric Merda spent three days trying to find his way out of the swamp, mostly walking in circles. He decided to follow the sun and some power lines, finally encountering a man on the other side of a fence who asked him where he thought he was going. “I said ‘a gator got my arm’. He falls back and yells ‘HOLY SMOKES, MAN!’”
In an interview with Fox13 Tampa Bay, the man who found Merda said, “I didn’t know if he was dead or alive when I walked up on him. There’s nothing, no words to describe it, you know? He was in a lot of pain, like ‘help, help, help!’ and talking to us and everything. He was one tough sumbitch. We cut the fence and helped him up and he walked himself to the ambulance. They later on amputated most of what was left of his arm. I told him he looked terrible, but he just said ‘You should see the alligator.’ No, thanks, buddy, I’ve seen enough.”
Don’t screw around with Nature. If the right one don’t getcha then the left one will.
That’s all, folks….
