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“Learning changes the learner.”
The moment that I learned about the documentary Grizzly Man is distinct in my memory. In the wee hours of the morning on the day in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, my family and I were evacuating from our home in New Orleans. We had resolved to leave at midnight on the eve of Katrina's predicted arrival in order to avoid the inevitable traffic of hundreds of thousands of other evacuees from the city and region, to travel to Houston, where we would find refuge for a sojourn that stretched from days into weeks and trailed into months, as my community recoiled from shock and grief. At the time, however, en route to Houston via the backroads of southern Louisiana, through darkness and uncertainty, my apprehension and fear were suspended by an interview on public radio, replayed from a month earlier, with the German film director Werner Herzog, about his soon to be released documentary film on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell.
Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in the back country of the Alaskan peninsula tracking the brown bears of Katmai National Park before meeting his unhappy, if “timely”, end, was a complicated figure. An individual of impressive resilience, to whom Herzog refers somewhat provocatively as “grizzly man”, in a narrative framing that reflects the filmmaker's alternately intrigued, mocking and compassionate lens, Treadwell was possessed of an intense devotion to animals, an appetite for extremes and a paradoxical yearning for both the celebrity style fame and self-dissolution that he managed, in his death, to achieve.
My immediate absorption by the subject of a man who had risked sustained physical proximity to larger-than-life grizzly bears (specifically that massive subtype of Ursus Arctos, the Alaskan coastal brown bear [see Figure 1], which can weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds) marks a lifelong fascination with apex predators, those awe-inspiring