Beyond the Bear Read Free Page A

who’d ended up in group homes and treatment programs rather than regular foster care. With a degree in natural history and a minor in environmental education from Arizona’s Prescott College, I was a firm believer that the sanctity of nature could calm kids’ troubled minds. I took them skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and climbing at the local rock gym. I explained how weather shapes the land and land shapes the weather. I had them spying on birds, peeking under rocks, and looking for pictures in the clouds. I had them kicking off their shoes and running barefooted along the shores of Cook Inlet and writing messages to pilots in the mudflats with sticks.
    The job demanded creative thinking on the fly, the ability to shift into defuse mode when meltdowns were imminent, and to deal with them when they happened regardless, which was often the case. My boss at the time, Harlow Robinson, I later learned, referred to me as “the golden boy” and liked how well I connected with kids, including one of ACS’s most challenging ones, a boy who’d blow up on an almost daily basis. I’d been at the job about six months, just long enough by a little over a week for my medical insurance to kick in.
    Then there was Amber. I’d first noticed her the previous summer at my favorite hangout, Max’s Mountain Bar and Grill, where she had a side job making pizzas and a crush on the house sound guy. Petite. Strawberry blonde. Freckles skittered across the bridge of her nose. Elegant arms. Curvy where it mattered.
    As she tells it, she first noticed me, a six-foot-four, green-eyed, red-bearded, sun-streaked-blond ski bum, at the Aloha Alaska deli, which I walked or biked to nearly every morning with my dog, Maya, trotting alongside. Long before she and I knew each other’s names, even longer before her dog, Hobbit, quit treating me like a burglar in my own house, our dogs had conducted full inspections, and approved.
    They say opposites attract, and on the surface that may have seemed the case with us. I was the type who’d look at the highest peak in some mountain range and want to go there. Amber would glance up at the same peak, admire it from afar, and want to barbecue. Acquiring dreadlocks in high school and the nickname “Cedar” in college, I found even the vascular system of a blade of grass worthy of examination. Amber, a former high-school pom-pom girl and student-body president, once had to monitor a patch of land through the seasons for an ecology class, and just didn’t get the point.
    The worlds we grew up in, with courses set by our fathers, couldn’t have been more different. My stepfather, “Dad” as far as my brother and I were concerned, was a senior manager in the chemicals division of Procter & Gamble, so my family lived life in the corporate lane of cocktail parties, BMWs, and world travel. He was a dapper, easygoing man who left the dirty work of discipline to my mother, and whose favorite sport was ensconcing himself in his easy chair with the Wall Street Journal, world affairs magazines, and something like the autobiography of Lee Iacocca all going at once. Plus CNN on TV in the background.
    Amber’s dad was a union pipe fitter with callused hands and a vise-grip view of his role in the family, who was either working long hours on overtime or waiting out the latest layoff. He had no use for travel at the time, preferring instead to tinker around the house, go walleye fishing, and watch football on the tube. As the disciplinarian in the family, he didn’t just take Amber’s car keys one time when she busted curfew so bad she barely made it home in time for breakfast, he took all four wheels off her car.
    I grew up in California and Ohio, and spent my middle-school years in Malaysia, where my stepdad oversaw the building of a palm oil processing plant, and the family quarters came with a live-in housekeeper, a gardener, a driver, and barred windows to keep out monkeys. At the International School of Kuala