Is Grizzly Man Summer Goals?

Delicate grass. Impassable mountains. Total silence. Isn't nature great? It's a teacher, and there's no better time to learn from the great outdoors than summer.

There are few better thrills in life than getting danger close to wild animals. I was once on an outback trail when a moose crossed in front of me. Do you know how big moose are? I sure didn't, until I saw it in person. I do not remember feeling scared. I remember feeling completely in awe of nature's scale. The moose even stopped and lifted its head to the sky, leaving me with the most majestic natural memory of my life.

I love getting out in the great unknown, but I also adore my creature comforts. Couches. Computers. Area rugs. I wouldn't entirely call myself an outdoorsy person, but, in the summer, I try to spend as much time as possible outdoors. Sometimes, when I'm laid up with sunstroke, I just watch nature on TV. Pretty much the same thing, right?

When I saw Grizzly Man placed snugly at No. 98 on The New York Times' 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list, I decided I'd watch it. Maybe I'd find some inspiration to get up off my couch and explore the wilderness while the days are still long and the temperature still warm.

Some people, like me, talk about getting out in nature and only do so a couple times a month. Then there are people like Timothy Treadwell who are more comfortable in the chaos of the natural world than they are in the symmetrical structures of civilization.

Treadwell spent 13 summers living with brown bears in Alaska. If you want to talk about getting off the grid, you can't get more in the bush than where he was. Where this eccentric man discovered this passion for living with bears is a little obscure. He's a recovering drug and alcohol addict. The bears, according to him, were his saving grace. They kept him clean, kept him focused, and gave his life purpose. It also gave him a certain level of celebrity, which must have satisfied the vanity of this failed actor turned environmentalist.

I learned a lot about nature through Treadwell. In my city-rotted brain, I assume that anybody who is going to live nose to nose with brown bears will swiftly die or be viciously maimed. I've seen The Revenant.

What Treadwell did was undeniably dumb. He purposefully avoided simple tactics to keep himself alive, and he wasn't even close to the most educated guy in the field. It's like if you or I decided to take a float plane up to Alaska to live with bears. And yet, he survived 13 summers! I can't be the only one who is flabbergasted by this run.

When I go for a hike in North Vancouver, I assume that, if I see a bear, I will die. Everybody carries bear mace and everybody is terrified of the time when they might actually need to use it. We live in our world of comfort, so devoid of the natural world, that we become terrified of nature. What Treadwell made me realize is that there is actually much less to fear than I think. Just like everything, the scariest things are the scenarios I make up in my head.

Treadwell was an actor, a recovering alcoholic, and more-than-a-little weird, but he wasn't stupid. In his own, bizarre way, he really must've known how to communicate with these bears. In Grizzly Man, there are multiple scenes where he is talking to wild animals like they are people. He always tells the bears he loves them. When bears approach him, he doesn't do the typical "get big" strategy. Instead, he almost tries to negotiate with them. The very weird part is that it works. The bear comes close, Treadwell says his words, and the bear moves on, leaving him unbothered. He never throws anything at them, never hits them, never harms them. He de-escalates every situation simply with his words, tone of voice, and body language. It's bizarre, not recommended, and utterly fascinating because it works so well.

Sometimes this backfires, like when his fox friend steals his hat. Treadwell tries to convince the fox with his words to give the hat back. No surprise that there's no reasoning with a fox. In this situation, it would have worked better for him to forcefully take the hat out of the fox's mouth, but that's not him. He feels so much love for these animals and cares for them so deeply that, even if it will do him a disservice, he will leave the animals alone. In the end, he loses the hat because the fox takes it back to his den. He scolds the fox like a mother would her misbehaving son, but that doesn't result in him getting the hat back. It's gone. Nature is indifferent to this inconvenience.

The uneducated mind, or the mind of a person who hasn't seen Grizzly Man, will think that all of Treadwell's efforts were for nothing because a bear does finally kill him. What the documentary makes clear is that he knew he was in a bad situation on the day that he was killed. He had stayed too late into the season. He set up camp in space enclosed by bushes, rather than out in the open where bears can easily see his setup. He knew that nothing was ideal about his situation. If he had continued to follow his code, if he had left the area at the right time and not stayed too late into the season, there's a chance that he would have spent many more summers with the bears.

When you are doing an activity like this, one that is so life and death, and Treadwell was abundantly aware of the risks, it is important to do everything correctly. Just like a cop or an oil rigger or a scuba diver, following a plan of operations is essential to your own safety. His situation was no different. These were his occupational hazards and he screwed up. He was not killed because bears are evil. Surprisingly enough, it was his human miscalculations that led to his death.

This was one of the points that I did agree with Treadwell on. He says, early in the doc, that these bears are misunderstood. I think his efforts prove this. After watching Grizzly Man, I have a new appreciation for bears' docility. Throughout the summers, there were probably countless opportunities for one of the bears to take a swipe and end him, but they didn't. They allowed this bizarre man to live by them, observe them, talk with them, even act like them. I don't think they loved him like he maybe thought they did, but their tolerance of this strange character is admirable.

You probably wouldn't think that a documentary about a guy getting mauled by a bear would "remind me of summer," but Grizzly Man highlights the importance of exploring the world while the weather is prime. It's full of footage that Treadwell filmed himself, and it is some of the most majestic nature footage you are likely to see (even if it's a bit low quality because of the early-2000s' technology). Watching a behemoth brown bear rub its 10-foot-tall back on a tree is a superb reminder of nature's scale. It's inspiring. It made me want to lace up my hiking boots, leave my bear mace at home, and adventure through the unknown.

Treadwell's story is a testament to the power of ignorance. Just because I don't know how to do something, doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. Often, the only way to learn is to do, and, through 13 summers, he learned more about brown bears than almost anybody. He certainly had more close encounters with these animals than basically anybody in history. Because of that, he's a legend. When December rolls around and I am in desperate need of some artificial vitamin D, I'll turn on Grizzly Man and remind myself of the beauty that awaits in the heat of the summer.