A Bear Tale
Page 2
Jake sniffed the deer and rabbit trails by the mailboxes where the Kitsap Sun newspaper was delivered. Diana's mother, Janie O'Neil, stood next to him and read the morning headline, Bear Attacks Woman Walking Dog, and then they both looked up the road as two huge yellow road work machines turned onto Berry Road a quarter mile away and parked.
Jake struck a magnificent pose, his chest swelled and his tail arched. Intruders!
"Things are happenin' in Berryland today!" Janie said and Jake quivered and whined to be released. But now wasn’t the time, so he trotted back across the road when Janie called him.
Diana had already left for the hospital, so she heard about the bear attack from a fellow nursing student, Bethany Rogers, who was barely five feet tall. Bethany wore the same nurse-in-training maroon scrubs that Diana wore, and had her blonde hair cut in a pageboy. Diana had carefully braided her long brown hair into pigtails, pinning them together at the nape of her neck.
"The bear was in the woodsy stuff beside the road," Bethany was saying, her eyes wide. "The lady's dog attacked it, and then the lady got between the bear and her dog." Bethany rolled her eyes then. "I know, but still. It's a busy road! The bear knocked her down, but then she stood up and yelled and it ran off."
Diana listened and considered telling her friend that her own dog Jake went berserk yesterday evening on a walk on their rural road, and now Diana wondered if it had been because of a bear.
Bethany kept going. "She got bit on the shoulder and arm, but she'll be fine. She needs surgery, and there's a big infection risk. Maybe rabies. She’s at St. Joe’s in Tacoma."
Diana realized that she hadn't actually seen anything last night. She was trained to see dangers and hazards everywhere, ones that other people don't see. The most dangerous place to be, by far, was where she was right now. Tuberculosis. MRSA. Nothing from the hospital should go in your room at home, including shoes, clothes, and scrubs. Scrubs go in a separate wash. She pulled back physically, aware that she had been hunching over tiny Bethany.
"Diana!" Bethany said loudly, unimpressed with Diana's nonreponse. "There was a bear on Rosedale. I walk down that road all the time." Bethany lived in a garage apartment in Gig Harbor with her boyfriend, a ten minute drive from Berry Road.
"Without an off-leash dog," Diana said.
Bethany stared at Diana. "True that," she conceded. Bethany wanted a dog badly. Her boyfriend was slowly coming around.
"It doesn't sound to me like that bear was vicious," Diana continued. "It was charged by the dog. It could have killed that woman and dog, easy. But it didn't.”
"The Fish and Wildlife guys have put out traps and said they'll euthanize it."
"You're kidding," Diana said.
"If it attacked once, they say it'll do it again."
"Why not just move it?"
Bethany shrugged. "They're too territorial or something."
Diana scoffed. "I don't believe it. How are they going to know they got the right bear?" She stood up even straighter and now towered above Bethany. "There are bears everywhere in the woods. It's not like this one landed here from Mars."
Bethany laughed.
"I live in a freakin' forest. We have to coexist with the bears!" Diana was a little surprised at her own adamance on this issue; she was adamant in general, but didn't know she had strong opinions on bears.
Bethany laughed again and then turned back to her computer screen.
Diana turned to look at her own patient charts. Her priority here was her patients, period. Diana's clinical instructor drilled that into her: Flip the switch. Nurse mode. It doesn't matter if it's an old lady or a hot boy, they are just someone you’re trying to help. You try to separate, but sometimes other parts don't completely click off. If the patient is a hot boy, you can think about it later. Click on. Click off.
All day at the hospital, the bear stayed in her psychic loop, though. Diana checked vitals, catheters, feeding tubes, turned patients, and recorded everything; and learned that the local school district put extra staff on the playgrounds during recess and lunch to keep students away from the wooded areas. One nurse on the floor had to arrange for her son to be picked up at the bus stop after school because of the bear alert. Children were not to be let off the bus without an adult escort. Bear attacks of any kind were very serious business.
Diana's shift ended at three along with several hundred workers from nearby Puget Sound Naval Base, including two nuclear submarine mechanics, a shop supervisor, a welder, and a former sailor who was nearing retirement as a wonk with the Department of Defense. These, including Diana in her red Subaru, were all Berry Road residents who were now stopped behind a school bus on the main Valley Road, less than a minute from Berry. The wind gusted and it started to rain. Diana looked out into the darkening afternoon.
Dense forest filled both sides of Valley Road. Most of the homes were hidden down long gravel driveways. At the very bottom of the hill was the Purdy Creek bed which ran clear back to Highway 16 and was solid berries. Bears foraged the area most of the summer, trampling the berries but causing no trouble. Most everyone knew to either stay out of there completely or at least make noise and the bears stayed away. Now the bears watched from the trees, smelling the coming storm, and thinking about their own dens.
The weather seemed to be more of a threat than the bears, Diana thought, as a small branch crashed down across the road.
Cars lined both sides of the two lane road, which had a narrow gravel shoulder. A posse of parents greeted each child as he popped out of the bus, whose lights continued to blink warning. This process took several minutes. There were lots of kids out here. Diana turned off her engine.
She checked her phone. No text from Jared, the boy she was sort-of dating back in Spokane where Washington State University's Nursing School was located. It was nothing serious, but she counted more and more on his texts to give her days umphf. The last one was two days ago. She sat back, adjusted the car's seat, and decided to fantasize about her future. The nursing job market was bleak and she knew just one nurse from the last class who was hired in the Seattle area. There was need but no money. Everyone she knew around her age was miserable and without clear direction. The only time she didn't feel the angst lately was with Jake.
Finally the bus driver pulled in the stop sign, turned off the blinkers, and things began to move. Diana turned her lights on and poked along behind the bus.
Eventually the bear-alert traffic sorted itself out and Diana turned right onto the freshly graded and graveled Berry Road. Two other cars were ahead of her, unheard of traffic density, and everyone slowed down. Even in the gloom and rain, it was a happy, cared for road.
Berry Road was a young road. The first quarter mile was cut straight north/south through the forest in 1990 when the hermit Tom Coolidge built the pole house that the O'Neils now lived in. Tom had bought the five acres from a development company, and there was no road maintenance in the deal. Over the next fifteen years, twenty-four others bought acreage, each parcel between two and ten acres, and extended the dead end road to three-quarters of a mile. Unfortunately, only half of the owners had any sort of road maintenance even mentioned in their deeds, so responsibility for upkeep was a mess from the get-go. As the road was used by more and more families, the potholes became such a problem that the Post Office threatened to stop mail delivery. Several members of the official Road Maintenance Group who were for paving sent out a letter casually discussing the topic of maybe filing liens against neighbors who refused to cooperate. It was sent to a couple of neighbors who weren’t even a part of that whole thing. They hired a lawyer. Letters went out to county officials. Tense meetings were held. Hostile e-mails were exchanged. Feelings were hurt and grudges were formed. It was a sad road that Diana's parents moved to in 2007. In the end, after a year of lawyers and neighbors not waving to each other, an
d of Alan and Janie voluntarily filling the potholes every month (they were new to the road and not seen as partisan), the Pavers conceded defeat in a letter written by the Group's road manager. Paving was history, he wrote. County rules had changed, and the cost of asphalt had sky-rocketed. Annual dues or voluntary contributions paid for one grading and minimal graveling per year. The Pothole Group (Alan and Janie) was separate.
A boy hoisting an enormous skateboard on his shoulder stood by the O'Neil's mailbox, having just come down the hill on the newly graded road. Diana could see him stopping and talking to Alan and her boy radar fired. And there was Jake on the side of the road.
The car in front of her stopped to talk with Alan, too, and to get the mail. It was the little 4-year-old who still wore her Cinderella Halloween costume even though it was mid-November hanging out the backseat window, and her 6-year-old brother in the passenger seat. They lived behind the O'Neil’s.
Diana drove ahead and parked in the O'Neil driveway entrance. A couple more cars went by and honked and waved. It was a circus! Grand Central Station out in the middle of the boonies! Jake let out a howl of greeting beside the car door and Diana's heart leapt for joy.
Chapter 3