Tamed By a Bear. Priscilla Stuckey

      1

      Sparkling waves rolled up the gentle slope and melted away beneath an undulating line of bubbly sand. One wave. Then another. Two more. Another.

      I tried to enjoy their steady calm. It was eighty degrees in Santa Monica on a cloudless day in February. The breeze was slight, just right. In the distance surfers raced to catch each fresh inviting swell. Two dolphins pursued a small motorboat, leaping in unison, gliding below, then leaping again. I sat in the sand with my jeans and sleeves rolled up to bare sun-starved winter skin to this deliciously warm air. Swimsuits of every shape and size paraded past, legs and arms and bellies swaying between me and the blue waves.

      I should have been happy. I was living the last, and most elusive, of my big dreams. Five months earlier my first book had been published—a memoir showing my deepening connection with nature—and I was having the time of my life doing readings in cities across the country and crashing for the night in the homes of friends. Here in Los Angeles, a last-minute scramble for a place to stay had landed me in a stately Mediterranean house of cool wooden floors and smooth white archways, its windows thrown open to mourning doves cooing at dawn among the eaves and palm trees waving high over birds-of-paradise in the garden below. And now—a perfect day with a perfectly hot sun, made for lolling on the beach.

      The trouble was, I couldn’t enjoy it. Even worse, I didn’t exactly know why. It wasn’t the readings. Last night’s bookstore event had gone well as usual, a magic taking hold as people listened. Tomorrow I would read at a hip new literary series in a Hollywood bar, a once-a-month soiree where emerging writers tried out edgy or heartwarming lines in front of an enthusiastic crowd. No, the readings felt wonderful. Then what was it?

      There was, of course, the realization I’d had that morning. Lying in bed, with doves murmuring inches from the window, I’d felt a weight descend: trips like this just weren’t worth it—certainly not in terms of book sales, and maybe not by any kind of reckoning. I was late to this truth; others had been saying it for years.

      But did that really explain it—this feeling of something nibbling away at my middle, and going on nibbling, oblivious to my squirming? It was a gnawing that left me restless, edgy, irritable—what writers of an earlier age called the fantods, though I didn’t know this word at the time. I just knew something was out of place, not quite adding up. I felt awful. And I hated it.

      From my spot on the sun-drenched sand, I called a friend who used to live in LA. We’d walked this beach together many times, and I wanted her to know I was thinking of her, and of all those blustery days we’d watched the sea roll gray and green under a dense and foggy sky.

      “You wouldn’t believe how gorgeous it is today!” I said. “Wish you were here.” Then I told her about the edgy feeling eating away at my middle, the sense that all was not well.

      “It sounds like at this point you were expecting something more,” she said quietly.

      I hung up the phone feeling even more discontent.

      2

      Back home in Boulder, I repacked myself into layers of long johns and turtlenecks and braced for March snows. Nestled against the eastern face of the Rockies, Boulder gets its biggest dumps of snow in March and April, which lends some credence to the saying that snow in Boulder never lasts. If a blizzard arrives in December—but it usually doesn’t—the snow will indeed stick to sidewalks and driveways, slicking them with black ice for the rest of the winter. I’ve taken more than one tumble on that invisible glaze. But if snow arrives in March and April—and it often does, a foot-deep layer of wet heavy white accumulating in an afternoon or a night—the warming sun of spring will melt it to nothing in a day or so. Native plants along the Front Range have evolved great tricks for outwitting the spring blizzards. My favorite, the pasqueflower, grows a layer of furry hairs on the outside of its stem and three huge lavender petals to keep the snow a millimeter or two away from delicate flesh.

      But after six years in Boulder, I wasn’t yet native, and I dreaded the spring snows.

      Plus there were those sliding book stats. Say what people would about book tours, they did keep the Amazon numbers in a more rarefied range. Every book trip, every public talk bumped the sales number up, where it would hover for a few days as if trying to make up its mind. Such a fragile thing, that graph of rising numbers, shooting upward like a fledging bird on delicate wings, suddenly freed to the sky, fluttering, joyous! My heart would stop. Maybe this time momentum would catch the bird and hold it aloft. But so far it hadn’t happened. The line would turn downward again, and with it my heart.

      I knew full well that watching numbers was futile. Knowing it only made the gnawing inside grow sharper, more determined.

      And what about the next stage of my life? I’d had the feeling that this book would lead somewhere new—exactly where, I had no idea, but it would likely be a place to settle in and make a contribution. My friend had been right; I was expecting something more to open up. And I was eager for that next assignment. In each new city I checked out nature centers and environmental departments in universities and amount of winter sunshine. Tim was self-employed too, so we could move wherever we wanted. We could turn on a dime.

      But the days, and then weeks and months, were creeping by with no appealing prospects on the horizon. One tenure-track position in religious studies opened up in a city known for its sunshine. The job description sounded as if it had been written for me, which is saying something, considering my specialty in the field is rather new and vanishingly small. I thought about it; I gave a lecture at that university. But did I really want academic work anyway—another decade or two of begging students to focus their research questions and reformat their reference lists? In the end I didn’t even apply.

      I kept thinking about the book readings—how an audience might begin as disparate, mildly curious individuals but almost always ended as something else, something more like a community. How, as listeners opened to a story, their eyes wide as children’s, a silence would steal