The Skin of a Bear

Where the Overdose Crisis and Grizzly Bears Meet

The Skin of a Bear

I left work early today. My response was automatic. I was on the western edge of my outreach territory when I got the news.

Usually this is my favourite area to work in. I feel at home in it. Ecologically speaking, it is the margin where the semi-arid sage and ponderosa pine landscape merges with the cedar and fir covered mountains of the inland temperate rainforest.

The people I serve in this area are generally older - many in their 60s, shooting dope for forty five years or more, and quite a few of them are housed. Some of this housing is admittedly precarious-especially in cases where abuse is taking place, while a few others hold title to places that were handed down by their relatives who were among the region’s early homesteaders.

This distinction around housing is important. In the simplest terms, housed people have more stable ground to make changes from whereas, on the street, life is parred down to survival, living day by day, or “minute by minute” as a sixteen year old homeless boy once described his experience to me.

Throughout the area I work, I visit with a wide age range of people. Some as young as 13 (already injecting drugs), all the way up to elders in their 70s. I don’t worry about the older ones as much. They are more experienced, they have street smarts, and generally speaking have a better grip on the raw skills of survival.

That’s why the news of a long standing older client who suddenly passed away staggered me. They were really careful about their use. I wasn’t expecting them to OD.

For the purposes of confidentiality I will call this client Genie. I had worked with her for four years. The previous outreach person had worked with her for many years before that. Back when I first started this job, Genie invited me into her home-an old farm house that she inherited from her family. It was in a sunny spot up above the river. Beautiful view. She made me a coffee, showed me heirlooms, old photographs and precious items that had been passed down from the olden days. She took pride in the fact that she was maintaining her family’s legacy.

“As long as I have this house,” she said, “I’m doin’ okay.”

Genie had taken some big punches in her 50+ years of living. She didn’t give me permission to tell the intricate details of her story, so out of respect I won’t share them here. Suffice to say she had gone through all sorts of pain starting at a young age and, like all of the people I work with, found a means to attenuate it with opioids. Her face told two stories: one of kindness and generosity, the other was tight with squinted down eyes as if they were constantly on the lookout for an incoming threat. Regardless her vigilance, Genie helped people. I saw transient hitch hikers crash at her place as they travelled west from the coast, and she also supported others in the area who used intervenes drugs - providing harm reduction gear and vitamin supplements. Genie cared about these people and got upset by the way some in the wider community stigmatized homeless folks in town who struggled with addiction. I looked forward to our twice monthly visits. She reminded me of my older sister who, herself, had been swept up by heroin back in Detroit (where my family is from) in the 1970s.

It hurt to hear of Genie’s passing. I felt a void in my chest driving by her house - the first time in four years of working in this region that I wouldn’t be stopping in to see her. I intended to visit another client a few kilometres a way - tried to fulfill my responsibilities to the others, but when I came to the intersection where I would usually turn right by the lumber yard I just kept driving straight.

I was counting…

Seventeen fatal overdoses in my client base over the last year. Eight of them were people with whom I worked very close - people I sat with, people who shared pieces of their lives with me, and who in turn knew some of my story as well. All of them were people who mattered to me.

This many fatalities in this span of time is unprecedented for our region.

And it’s not only death by overdose, but also by suicide. Three that I knew of personally in a year. Also more psychosis, more freak outs, more mental health calls. These last two years - pandemic time - have hit the community I work with exceptionally hard - not with Covid (to my knowledge not a single client of mine has died from the virus), but by impacts of lockdown, isolation, and the restrictions which caused services to become limited or completely unavailable.

I think about this as I drive, passing the grove of old and wisened ponderosa pine on the river, driving beneath the outcrops where big horn sheep graze in Spring. I’m going over all of the hardship I’ve seen in the last two years. The sadness. The violence. The clients who have simply disappeared.

Eventually I find myself in the next town over. I’m on autopilot and steer the car into the municipal visitor centre. I don’t know what I am doing there, but I find myself going inside. I pass by the wall of tourist brochures and see a sign for the bathrooms on my right. I just keep walking down the corridor and discover at the end of it a little natural history museum that I have never been to before. I make a left at the end of the hallway and then I see it:

A grizzly bear hide.

I approach the table where it lays on display. A sign says not to touch it. I reach out anyway - my fingers running down its length, from the head all the way down its back. For 28 years now, they have been there as my guides. At one time I studied them as a research biologist, now I simply follow them to receive the medicine they offer. The dichotomous grizzly - fur that is both supple and wiry.

With my hand resting upon the spot where its shoulder hump would have protruded I close my eyes and imagine the forested slopes where the bear made countless day beds when it was alive. Before my eyes are the high alpine meadows where its mother taught it how to dig for osha root, the avalanche chutes where it nibbled glacier Lillies. I could see the long silver guard hairs of its coat blowing in the wind like the tall grasses of the Yukon Territory in early Autumn, its wonderful nose reading the code of individual scent molecules as they drifted up from the valley bottom; its life shaped by the various energies of the mountain.

For a few seconds I am completely there - a place without fentanyl, where there is no methamphetamine, no fatal overdoses, no people living in poverty in the alleyways getting frostbite on their feet, no destitute families packed into welfare motels. All of it is suddenly gone and it’s just me on the mountain, looking out at what is left of the wild world from inside the skin of the bear.