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Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Advertisement Email Story to a Friend June 2, 2006 A grizzly wanders through a marsh. Wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell became fascinated by the bears, befriending and observing them for 13 summers in Katmai National Park, Alaska. (Photos.com) 'Grizzly Man' crossed a line and paid the price Timothy Treadwell's fatal obsession shows the risk of seeing the wild as an Eden This time of year my mind is drawn to Grizzly Peak. I have hiked that mountain near Ashland many times over the years, but now every time I think of it, the name unsettles me. I recently saw "Grizzly Man," filmmaker Werner Herzog's haunting 2005 look at wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Alaska's Katmai National Park observing and befriending grizzlies until a bear killed him in 2003. His girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, who had camped with him during his last two seasons at Katmai, also died in the attack. For us in Southern Oregon, where grizzlies were eradicated a long time ago, the name no longer brings up a visceral fear. But watching Herzog's film reawakens not only that terror but also a disturbing story of how good intentions can become a fatal obsession. Treadwell was a handsome, athletic would-be actor looking for direction in his life when he latched onto the idea of living among Alaska's grizzlies. In the film, Treadwell's father recalls how his son had auditioned for the role of the bartender in "Cheers," only to come in second to Woody Harrelson, a defeat that sent him into a long tailspin of drug and alcohol abuse. Treadwell said that at his lowest ebb, after nearly dying of a drug overdose, he realized his kinship with animals was his only hope of redemption. He settled on Alaska's grizzlies as his life's work, living among them to learn their behavior and, for the last five years of his life, filming them. Advertisement Again and again on his videos Treadwell voices his love for animals, weeping when favorite cubs and foxes die, even as he seems fascinated with the idea of danger and death, saying "I can smell death on my fingers." Endearing in his openness, vulnerable in his desperate desire to connect with the bears and the natural world they represented, Treadwell "reached out, seeking a primordial encounter, but in doing so crossed an invisible borderline," Herzog says. "It was a simpler world" he was trying to enter," says ecologist Larry Van Daele in the film, "but a harsh world. There's a desire to get into that world, but you never can, because they the bears are different than we are." Often, Treadwell seems a lonely chameleon, eloquent in the bears' defense yet increasingly self-preoccupied in his seasons as self-appointed "caretaker" at Katmai. In some of his late videos he examines his failed relationships with women, his spiritual bond with nature and his sense of outrage over government regulations he felt hampered his work. But it is when he is not on film, when he focuses solely on the bears instead of being a "star of his own invention" as Herzog says, that his videos achieve a truly haunting power and grace. In one scene, two bears are seen loping across a mud flat after each other almost like galloping horses, playful in one sense and frightening in another as paragons of nature's brutal rules of survival. In a stunning scene late in the documentary, Herzog reruns a Treadwell video of a ferocious encounter between "Mickey" and "Sgt. Brown," two behemoths who lock jaws and claw at each other in a titanic struggle that ends in a wary standoff. Treadwell examines the torn ground where the fight took place afterwards and coaches "Mickey," seen lying exhausted in the distance, as if the animal had been in a boxing match instead of a savage fight for a mate. Treadwell acted as if "everything out there is good, as if there were no predators," narrates Herzog, "while I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder." Treadwell's life, so full of the desire for self-understanding and connection, ended in tragic irony. He had returned to Alaska after leaving at his usual time in September because of an argument with an airline employee during the flight home. When he came back, it was late autumn and many of the bears he knew by name had gone into hibernation. Those remaining were wilder, unfamiliar bears, including one he could not befriend. Preparing to film that bear as he was about to leave, he had the sound on his camera turned on but was never able to uncap the lens. The bear attacked so swiftly that all Treadwell could do was beg his girlfriend to flee and save herself. But instead of fleeing, the woman who had always believed in maintaining a boundary between people and bears fought to save him. In the end, one can't help wondering whether Timothy Treadwell's last thoughts were on his beloved grizzlies or on the human lover he ultimately realized his unnatural obsession had doomed. Steve Dieffenbacher is a Mail Tribune copy editor. You can reach him at 776-4498 or [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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