Midsummer Blues (and Greens)

Hearing news that stops you in your tracks

One of my daughters decided to take a long walk - 770 miles long - this summer. She’d start in Slovenia and end in Albania walking and camping along the Via Dinarica that followed a mountain chain. C. trained for months, wearing her pack and walking up and down hills and gorges until she was in peak condition. She headed out, walking over 100 miles in six days, and then, last week, I got a FaceTime call at 7:00 a.m.

“Umm, is Dad with you?”she asked. When I said he was downstairs C. asked me to get him.

When we both got on the call she said, “First of all, I’m okay . . .” Words that are always frightening when said aloud. Then she told a story that I’m still having a hard time comprehending.

She was walking along a gravel road through forests that covered the side of a mountain listening to music, turned up loud, because she knew there were animals in the forest she did not want to run into. She had already hiked 15 miles that day. C. turned a corner and saw a bear cub and right behind it was the mother bear. C. was in Croatia and knew there was a population of Eurasian brown bears in this area. These brown bears are the larger first cousins of our grizzlies.

The mother bear turned her head and she and my daughter locked eyes. My girl started walking backwards and as the bear charged she fell back. “It was like that scene in The Revenant,” she said, a movie I didn’t see because I didn’t want to see that scene. The bear reached her, grabbed her foot and began to drag her along the road. The cub made a sound and the mother bear dropped my daughter’s foot and moved back toward her cub.

My girl ran RAN five kilometers to a village she had seen on a map. She came upon a train stop and saw she had a bit of a wait for the next train that would take her on a 40-minute ride to a larger town with a hospital. She didn’t want to sit at the train stop because it was surrounded by woods, which, understandably freaked her out. So she walked into the village and bought mineral water, Fanta, and ice cream at the market - all things one buys when in shock after being attacked by a bear.

She didn’t feel any pain but knew she had to look at her foot so she took off her boot and the examined the wound on the bottom of her foot where the bear managed to bite through the thick sole of her second-hand REI boots - boots that saved her from more serious injuries. At that point she put a bandaid on her foot and switched out her boots for the crocs in her pack.

The chance of getting attacked by a bear in Croatia according to ChatGPT is 0.0005%

The first hospital said they’d never treated a bear bite and sent her to the big hospital where a doctor treated and cleaned the wound, gave her a tetanus shot, and a round of heavy-duty antibiotics. Meanwhile, every doctor in the hospital stopped by to see the bear bite because they’d never seen one before.

In the past twenty years Croatia has recorded 33 attacks by wild animals and 3 people have lived.

I almost fainted when I read that statistic.

She’s okay. The wound is healing. The foot, which became very swollen, is a bit better. She’s never felt pain in her foot, which makes her think she likely has nerve damage. While holed up in this little seaside city she’s reading Demon Copperhead and doing a jigsaw puzzle of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. She can hobble to the bakery across the street for supplies. And now she’s thinking about where to go after her wound heals over.

All I’ve been able to do since that initial FaceTime with C. is watch ridiculous television shows - last night it was episodes of Sister Wives - while my mind spins out scenarios.