Hugs for Everyone! (A rant on growing up wild)

As a child in Alaska, I roamed the beaches, byways, and forests of my island home. It's what we did. There were only 3 channels on tv, and they all sucked, so other than Saturday cartoons, we didn't watch it much. There was no internet, no cell phones, and few rules outside of school (which was so stuffed with them, I blocked most memories of it out as a defense mechanism). We lived life on the edge of wild, and some of us were more wild than others.

Something that has struck me about my childhood that is different from what is 'normal', is that I experienced civilization as a tiny enclave in the midst of wilderness. Most of you grew up in cities, and if you want to experience a bit of nature, you go to a park. For me, a park is part of the enclave. The ordering of the environment is, of course, varied in parks. Some of them are no more than lawns with picnic tables, while others appear more natural, like Yellowstone.

We tended to have lawns as parks, because natural spaces weren't scarce, but you couldn't play frisbee in them. While Yellowstone has a more natural environment for the wildlife, the institution of the park radically differentiates it from nature for visitors. People are restrained from treating Bison as huggable photo ops in Yellowstone. There were no such restraints in the wilderness, and you could just hug away to your heart's content.

I learned this as a child that did try to hug wildlife. At the age of five I snuck up on a doe intending to ride it like a horse. I was within a couple feet of her, gathering my pounce up onto her back, when Dad charged up, hollering 'No!', and distracted me long enough for the doe to escape her fate as a carnival ride.

I remember being disappointed that she got away. It was not until much later that I realized how badly she would have hurt me had I jumped on her. If you're curious how a deer without fangs, horns, or claws can put a hurt on you, there are probably a lot of videos of guys with guns getting their asses handed to them by deer on Youtube. 5 year old children aren't much of a challenge.

A few years later (I was 8), I crept up behind a seal sun bathing on the rocks in front of our home. My plan was to grab it by the hind flippers (so it couldn't bite me) and drag it up further on the beach where I could get a good look at it (the only part of seals I ordinarily saw was the head, poking up out of the water). The beach in front of our house was just a bunch of boulders, somewhat smoothed by the waves, and I got to where only one boulder the size of an EZ chair was between me and my research project.

As I turned to lunge up over the boulder and grasp it's flippers, I discovered that at just that moment the seal had noticed me, and had bent round to have a look. I realized a couple of important things right then. It's head was well past it's hind flippers, so my plan to be safe from biting was not gonna work. Also of note, it's canine teeth were longer than my fingers, and that biting was going to hurt. A lot.

The last thing I realized was that I wasn't gonna win a fight, if there was one, and I couldn't get away (our faces were less than a foot apart. Side note: seals have really bad breath.) I instinctively adopted the foetal position, which essentially covers vital organs with less vital bits that might be survivable were they removed.

I don't know how long I waited for those fangs to begin ripping my limbs off, but it was probably no more than eternity, or 30 seconds, whichever comes first. When I peeked through my fingers, the seal had silently slipped into the water, and was gone. It must have been more alarmed than curious, because it swam far enough away that I never saw it's head poke up out of the water.

Over the next few years I joined in the local pastime of drinking and other vices. Alaskans tend to start all the vices young. Once you discover you can't just go out and hug deer and seals, about all you can do is drink heavily to console yourself, and Alaskans do this in droves, pretty much inconsolable, and hugless.

I made a break for civilization from my island home, ending up in Anchorage at 19 or so. I had a car, a job, and a roommate in a little trailer near Turnagain Arm, where the '64 quake had left strange scars on the neighborhood, amongst which the trailer was perched on the verge of a precipice. One day when I returned from work, my parking spot was occupied by a moose calf.

Still suffering from the strange desire people seem to evidence to hug wildlife, I hopped out of the '72 Vega and jogged over to the calf with no better plan than to pet it. When I was less than 20 feet away, a fire breathing locomotive at least 10 feet tall, with hooves the size of basketballs (all four of which were aimed at my head) erupted from the ravine, and turned out to be the calf's mother.

Things were suddenly, urgently, starkly clear. Plan A was a Bad Plan, and Plan B was now in effect. I did a 180 in midair, and was back in the Vega before the smoke and flames proceeding from the cow's nostrils had even dissipated.

For these reasons, I had never expected to have a 21st birthday. I expected Darwinian evolution to suppress the stupid gene that I clearly possessed in double dose. Fortunately, my understanding of genetics proved inaccurate, and I have continued to surpass milestones I was certain I would never see, such as 30, 35, and now 55.

Confronted with my inconceivable survival, I guess just wringing the juice out of the few days I have left has proved to be a poor retirement plan. Since I am just now beginning to consider planning for my future, and presently reside in Oregon, a veritable hotbed of civilization compared to the wilderness of my youth, orca and grizzlies are in short supply.

Perhaps I can apply what I learned from the seas and forests of my childhood abode to my extant habitat, full of hyper-estrogenated wannabe hitleresses exuding hostility and condescension, and overmilitarized cops with access to my every thought, a full history of my movements, and empowered by the Patriot Act and FBI Fusion Centers. How should I deal with these new and fascinating creatures?

I need a hug.