Teddy Bear

Universe:  Ben, why did you spend so much time prowling around the wilderness last summer when you could have been making love to gorgeous women and hanging out with humans?

I:  Well, as to the former, there is always time for that, and it need not necessarily be plural.  As for the latter, I actually met more humans that way.

Universe:  Explain.

I:  That’s going to take a story.  You see, when I was a young boy—

Universe:  Seriously?  All your stories start out, “When I was a young boy….”

I:  I know, you’re right, but it’s true.  Everyone’s story starts when they’re young.  Right?

Universe:  Fair enough.  But get to the point.

I:  Okay.  Here we go:

                When I was a young boy on Long Island we visited a huge mansion in Oyster Bay.  I was very excited.  I had a big imagination and a lot of energy, and I loved stories in books and on TV.  I admit I was nerdy, but that was more out of a craving to explore than an inability to be rough and tough.  Ask anyone who knew me back then.  I ate rocks and ran everywhere I went, even if I split open my head.  When I heard my friends and academic rivals in second grade were memorizing the presidents together, I became determined to do it by myself, and faster.  And I did.  I memorized all 42 presidents’ names in order, from George Washington to Bill Clinton.  I didn’t stop there though.  My parents had these encyclopedias, and one of them was a special one on the presidents, with a four page biographical summary of each one.  I read all of them and wrote a mostly plagiarized one-page story about each one of them.  Yeah, I know, I sure knew how to have fun.

                Who was my favorite?  That’s easy.  I’d seen him on TV.  In the Chronicles of Young Indiana Jones.  Somewhere in there he finds him on an African safari, and he meets the most manly and well-rounded president of all time.

                When we finally visited Teddy Roosevelt’s mansion in Oyster Bay, I was beyond amazed.  HE actually lived there!  This great man, after whom they named the “Teddy Bear.”  I made sure my parents bought one for me from the gift shop.  I chose the pirate one, and slept with the bear by my side to fight off monsters for a very long time.  Just last week, in fact.  Okay, maybe not.  I’m not even sure what happened to it.  But I was a scared kid for a long time, and I liked having that Teddy Bear there to protect me from monsters at night.  Even though Teddy was born in Manhattan, he made his home on Long Island.  It made me proud to be from the island, a place that has some amazing natural outlets, such as the ocean, some marshes and the Great South Bay, but for the most part it’s now McDonald’s and strip malls.  My grandfather Ted grew up there when it had much more wilderness, and later told me tales of hunting and trapping and camping and hitchhiking when he was only a boy.  My dad had similar memories, but by the time I came around, Nintendo and our 1/3 of an acre backyard were the only outlets for my intense imagination bent on recreation.

                During my final semester of college I was supposed to be in the second half of an advanced writing seminar I had taken in the fall.  Unfortunately they had triple-overbooked it with students, so the professor had to cut 2/3 of the enrolled students.  He mostly kept students he had already had before, including a few hacks I’d read in previous classes.  I was annoyed by that, and it hurt my pride, but what’s more, I was short on credits for the semester.  I only needed 5 to graduate, but 12 to be full time and receive my financial aid, so I needed to add one more class.  It turned out that the professor I had just had for advanced prose was teaching the second half of “introduction to creative writing.”  I had taken the first half my sophomore year with Dan McCall, who would become my first motivator and later somewhat of a mentor after he retired.  But I never took the second half, so I was technically still eligible, even though it was a lower level.  I thought it was ridiculous to be in there with sophomores, but I had no idea then just how fateful and important this class would be for my destiny.  You see, during this time I would find a deep spiritual and pleasurable connection to poetry, a subject I had never studied at the college level.  Specifically, the poetry of Walt Whitman, who Dan McCall said was the greatest American male poet.  I only read a few of his poems in that class, but when I moved to New York I finally bought Leaves of Grass and fell in love with "Song of Myself" and "Song of the Open Road".  I know the former sounds very egotistical, but the idea is that the universe is one and in everyone, so by celebrating the divinity within you, you are united to the beauty all around you, and see the beauty in everyone and celebrate that as well.  “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”  Anyway, Walt Whitman was from Long Island.  They named a mall after him.

                The long and short of it is that I had many adventures around the world thanks to the inspiration, guidance and reassurance I found in "Song of the Open Road", excerpts of which I carried with me wherever I went.  Eventually those adventures took me to Japan, where I found myself preparing for yet another epic cross-country journey across my homeland.  Having done the south, I was now planning to traverse the north, and finally see Mt. Rushmore.  This meant I would have to read up on each president.  I read Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, and then finally Teddy Roosevelt.  It was then that I realized how little I actually knew about the man beyond a few exciting anecdotes from that original encyclopedia biography.  I knew he was the main reason the national park system had grown and survived and saved most of the natural beauty of America, but I didn’t know that he was the one who had saved the Grand Canyon from ugly development and mining.  My dad was always going on about what a great conservationist Teddy had been, and his mustache and spectacles kind of reminded me of my dad.  Not to mention his sharing his first name with my mustached outdoorsy marine police officer grandfather.

                When I mapped my route across America’s national parks, it was easy to choose my first one: Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Badlands of western North Dakota.  You see, Teddy grew up sickly with asthma, and grew up experiencing life as a battle to keep breathing, because adversity could strike at any moment.  He went to Harvard as the richest kid there, but then lost his father, and a few years later his mother and wife on the same day.  So he went out to North Dakota to become a cowboy, about as opposite a lifestyle as you could have.  And oh how he became a cowboy:

Reid’s world was all that the boy longed for, one of great manly quests and boundless inspiriting freedom.  In such settings, with such a life, one could be reborn, made brave, made strong.  He read “enthralled,” curled in a chair or standing on one leg, “like a pelican in the wilderness,” the other leg raised and propped, foot on thigh, to make a bookrest:

What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch fires [says one hero] I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life…. My strength increased both physically and intellectually.  I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and vigor of body I had never known before.  I felt a pleasure in action.  My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied my eyes reached to a more distant vision. (McCullough 115)

My favorite story is about how some rustlers stole his and his friends’ boat, so they caught up with them downriver, tied them up, and brought them back to justice.  While they rode in the boat, Teddy held a shotgun on them with one hand and read a Tolstoy magnum opus in the other.  He later wrote a detailed review of it to his big sister, who was always adoring and encouraging to him.  Then when they got to land, they had to transport the thieves by wagon, so he walked behind the wagon with a shotgun for dozens of miles until they reached civilization.  When he finally saw a doctor, he simply yelled, “Patch me up, Doc!  Have I got a story for you!”  They asked him why they didn’t just hang the thieves, and he said the thought had never occurred to him.  When he became president after McKinley’s assassination, he was hiking the highest peak in New York State, Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks.  He presided over America right after it became the richest country in the world, and made sure it was tough enough to withstand the inevitable egotistical nationalistic grudge matches that would later result from centuries of European competition to carve up the globe.  He was aggressive and jingoistic in his foreign policy, without a doubt, but if he hadn’t built up America’s naval power and shown the world that it was a force to be reckoned with, World Wars I and II might have had different conclusions.  Ironically, despite all his bulk and blood-thirsty bravado, he would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for settling a war between Japan and Russia. Despite being a Republican born into opulent wealth, he was the hardest president on big business yet:

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form…they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations…Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” (Morris 73)

            Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty, is not really free. (Morris 88)

He became the most popular president America had ever seen, and later became (still) the most recent face represented on Mt. Rushmore.

“Mr. Roosevelt is one of the most likable men that I am acquainted with,” Mark Twain remarked a few days later, dictating his autobiography.  The President was “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” by virtue of his “joyous ebullitions of excited sincerity.”

“He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch…each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion.” (Morris 431)

                So one year ago today, the first day of summer, I entered the national park system of America and paid $80 for an annual national parks pass, giving me free entry to any park I chose.  I had been up all night driving, and it took a while to drive the beautiful circuit of the strange rolling hills of the Badlands.

 

Eventually I got a camping permit for free and marched two miles into the badlands to set up my tent.  The only rule was I had to be out of sight from the road, so I found a ditch and tried to nap.  It was 95 degrees though, so I didn't sleep much.

  

Before sundown I decided to climb the nearest hill to get a view.  There were no paths, but it was a lot of fun to run up the side and find a space at the top to see the surrounding area.  I brought my laptop so I could write, and it was truly an indescribable feeling to be up there, watching the sun set in the west, wondering about the future that lay beyond the horizon of this personal frontier.

God was in nature—a force—and nowhere so plainly as beyond the Mississippi.

Unroll the world’s map, and look upon the great northern continent of America.  Away to the wild West—away towards the setting sun-- away beyond many a far meridian…You are looking upon a land… still bearing the marks of the Almighty mold, as upon the morning of creation.  A region, whose every object wears the impress of God’s magic.  His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers.  A region redolent of romance—rich in the reality of adventure. (McCullough 115)

After sunset I realized it was much more difficult to go down the hill than up, because my headlamp was low on battery and I could barely see in front of me, and on no sleep.  But I made it down the road without any big issues.  Then I realized that I couldn’t remember exactly where I had crossed the road.  I knew it wasn’t far from my campsite, but in the dark it was a whole different game.  So I marched up and down the road with my backpack, occasionally thinking I was there, only to find an enormous canyon waiting for me.  Not the Grand Canyon, but death nevertheless.  I was a forty-five minute drive beyond the park gates, which were now closed, so returning to civilization and hitching a ride were no longer options.  And despite the intense sun, night time on the prairie is still frighteningly cold.  But I was so mentally tired and physically wired that I just marched and marched.

But the chief lesson is that life is quite literally a battle.  And the test is how he responds, in essence whether he sees himself as a helpless victim or decides to fight back, whether he becomes, as Teedie was to say of a particular variety of desert bird, “extremely tenacious of life.”  (McCullough 107)

I finally found a safe spot to cross, and before I knew it I was back at my tent, the stars shining brighter than I’d ever seen in New York State.  I even made a few trips back and forth to my car simply for the fun of it, and finally got a good night’s sleep after two days of driving and hiking. 

When I had woken up earlier that day, I was in the driver’s seat of my car, having just slept through the worst thunderstorm in NE Minnesota history.  A lot had happened in between.  What would be next?

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road 

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path leading wherever I choose (Whitman 3)

Works Cited

McCullough, David.  Mornings on Horseback.  Simon & Schuster, New York: 1981

Morris, Edmund.  Theodore Rex.  Random House, Inc., New York: 2001.

Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass.  Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., New York: 1950.