One of the earliest memories I have is of my mother reading to me from a Little Golden Book designed to teach preschoolers the alphabet by way of the Noah’s Ark story. On page one Noah gathered two apes—or aardvarks maybe, something starting with the letter A. I don’t remember. On the last page two zebras climbed up the gangplank to the big boat under Noah’s benevolent, animal-loving gaze just as the rain clouds opened up for the first of 40 extremely wet days and nights. What I remember most is the letter B, spoken for by two enormous brown bears, which, according to this version, Noah acquired in a place called The Great North Woods. The Great North Woods! I was a goner. Along with Never Never Land and that island where the little boys in Pinnochio went to gamble and smoke cigars, the Great North Woods became a fantasy destination I had to see.

The artwork for that page in the book remains in my heart and mind today: Behind those two lucky bruins who got the species-saving boat ride, a forest of pointy topped conifers was rendered iconically in tall, green, Christmas tree triangles. I wanted to go to the Great North Woods. I wanted to see brown bears. But it would have to wait. I was four years old with no way to get there. Besides, I wasn’t allowed to mess around with dangerous wild animals.

At that time I lived in an old neighborhood in the city of Niagara Falls, NY. While western New York State indeed sits at a relatively northerly latitude, the few wooded vacant lots that remained in the industrial city were not great, and there were no giant bears at all by the 1950s when I was a kid. What there was however was the Great Bear Market on Pine Avenue in the middle of the ethnic Italian neighborhood. The Great Bear was a family-owned place, but it was large and rather ambitious, a precursor to the big chain supermarkets that would replace it a few decades later. It stood out as something quite modern among the more traditional mom and pop stores there. Take the Stinky Store, for example. This is the name my little sister Claudia and I had for Latina Italian Imports. Each time our mother took us in there our tiny and sensitive noses were assaulted by the stench of hard cheeses and sopressata salamis and God only knows what other odiferous Old World products they had hanging from the ceiling of the crowded little store. We preferred the clean, modern Great Bear Market filled with familiar Campbell soups and Wonder Bread and Maxwell House coffee. Mostly, I loved the sign over the door featuring a giant bear standing on its hind legs. It might have been a polar bear, now that I think of it, but who cares? I wanted to see real bears. Wild bears. Big ones. I wanted to get close to them, just like Noah who I considered a lucky bastard for having a whole boat full of wild animals of his own. It would be almost 30 years before I moved to Alaska and had my wish come true many times over. The thing about coastal Alaska brown bears is that there is no such thing as being “close” to them. There is only “far far away” from them, or “way too fucking close.” In June of 1989 I got way too close to a brown bear for the first time. I was sitting by myself, dangling my wader-clad legs in the water at the foot of a tall cutbank on the Brooks River in Katmai National Park. A few hundred yards upstream, the famous Brooks Falls—often pictured on calendars lined with enormous bears snapping at leaping sockeye salmon—rushed and rumbled in the afternoon air. I was lost in thought—or perhaps more accurately, in lack of thought—concentrating on tying a new leader on my fly line or something, when, over the rushing water, I heard a snort above and behind me. I turned and looked up the steep cutbank. An enormous male bear, whom I would later learn had been named Diver by the rangers, was standing at the top, about ten feet above me, looking down. At me.

Diver, now long deceased, was estimated to weigh 800 pounds when he emerged from hibernation each spring, and well over a thousand by autumn after eating 60 or 70 pounds of salmon each day all summer. Sitting on the ground as I was, looking up at him from that angle, he looked like a dirigible in a fur coat. He pulled his lips back and showed me his teeth, in what I hoped was a smile. I could almost hear him doing the math: one 180-pound fly fisherman equals 30 sockeye salmon averaging six pounds apiece. Hmmm.

I stood, my intestines twisting, recalling the park rangers’ rule: Do not run when confronted by a bear. Run? I was wearing chest waders, standing in fast water at the base of a dirt cliff. There was nowhere to run. I stepped aside and slogged a few yards upstream against the current, yanking out handfuls of grasses from the base of the cutbank with one hand, gripping my fly rod in the other. Diver slid down the bank in a small avalanche of pebbles, walked right over the tussock I had been sitting on a moment before and dropped into the river. I could have touched him with the tip of my rod. Another rule: Stay 50 yards away from any bear, 100 yards from a sow with cubs. My fly rod is exactly three yards long. I could see I was going to have to be a little more vigilant. I could also see that vigilance was not my strongest trait. It’s still not.

Last month, I went camping in Katmai again for the twentieth time (I missed one year in the ‘90s for some reason I now forget). It should be no surprise that I haven’t become a whole lot more vigilant in those intervening two decades. In fact, 20 years of camping alongside the Brooks River bears has only made me even more foolishly comfortable with them, and I’ll admit right now that my luck is going to run out one of these days. Unlike the late Timothy Treadwell, I do not think that the bears are my buddies or my pets, but I do love seeing them again and again—especially up way too close. They are a big reason I came to Alaska in the first place—one of the things that make the Great Land great.

Last month I got to see some big bears again up way too close. As usual, my less than careful nature played a part in it. My wife and I flew out to Katmai for our twentieth Brooks River anniversary. There we met up with old friends already settled into the campground. When we first camped in the lovely cottonwood grove there on the shore of Naknek Lake 21 years ago, the bears roamed among us at will. They appeared suddenly, showing up at the picnic tables, disrupting our dinners; they stomped past our tents in the middle of the night—sniffing and huffing and sending jolts of adrenaline shooting through us as we huddled in our sleeping bags. It was good scary fun. Now an electric fence surrounds the tent camping area, offering a feeling of security—no matter how close the bears come to the camp. We sleep much more soundly, but some of the thrill is gone too. Inside the fence we are the caged animals; the bears wander past freely. Maybe it’s better this way.

This year, on our first evening there, a young sow with a single cub visited the campground. The rangers said the big cub is two and a half years old; he is nearly as big as his mother and obviously needs to be sent out into the world, but the mom is apparently not ready to let go of her first child. (I was a first child myself—I know how charming we can be.) The sow and the huge cub stopped to roll around on the sandy beach in front of the campground. We stood inside the fence and oohed and ahhed and took pictures of them. They soon ambled off toward the river, probably checking to see if the salmon had started running yet.

The first night celebrations ran a little long and the whiskey a little low, and the next morning I awoke very late to find that my friends had already had breakfast and set off to the river to fish for trout. All the fly rods in camp and every pair of waders but mine were gone from the gear shelter. I was moving slowly, aching from the night on the ground in spite of the high tech Thermarest pads beneath my none-too-fit-body. I took my morning painkillers. (Almost everyone in camp is on the unfortunate side of 60 now; there are enough meds in our tents to start a M.A.S.H. unit.) I was putting on my waders and picking up my fishing gear when the same sow and cub walked past along the beach, once more heading toward the Brooks River, a quarter mile away. I watched them again, with that same feeling of awe and dread I get whenever the big bears are near. By the time I left the campground and walked to the river I had forgotten they were in the area. The sun was shining and I was going fishing. My friends were already out there somewhere catching trout like I mad, I believed. Who cares if some giant omnivores are roaming around in the brush? I hurried the quarter mile from the campground to the river.

From the footbridge at the mouth of the river where it flows into Naknek Lake, I could see my friend Bill and his wife Deb fishing a little ways upstream. Instead of following the gravel bars along the winding river, I decided to take a shortcut through the tall grass in a direct path to them. On the other side of the river, at the far end of the bridge, there is a bear viewing platform about ten feet high for visitors to Katmai National Park who want to look at the bears but have no desire to climb into the river and fish alongside them. In other words: the sane visitors. The platform was full of such bear viewers and photographers. There were a couple rangers.

I left the path and strode out into the tall grass on a beeline for the oxbow where my friends were fishing, but I only got about halfway to the river when Deb began shouting ”Rich! Bear! Rich! Bear!” I have to say that hearing your name urgently placed in the same sentence fragment as the word “bear” is not comforting. I hit the brakes. The sow and the big cub—which all the people on the platform had been watching me approach, but not warning me about—stood up on their hind legs in the grass a few yards in front of me. Without the electric fence between us, they looked a lot bigger and far less cuddly. The platform erupted with laughter as I backtracked and took a roundabout route to the oxbow. Forget the hundred yards from a sow and her cubs rule; I had foolishly come within a couple dozen feet of the them. Now, I don’t mind being the class clown, or the comic relief character, and I do realize that the rangers can’t prevent every careless idiot such as myself from getting chewed to shreds because of our own stupidity, but a little shout out from the platform about the bears I was heading for might have been in order in this case. Sows with cubs are nothing to mess with.

That particular sow with the oversized cub is a single mom raising what is the bruin equivalent of a teenage boy, and she looks it. She is haggard and sort of weary looking and seems like she might be ready for an argument with anyone dumb enough to start one. Put yourself in her paws. She is getting no child support from the father (doesn’t even know who the father is), and worse, in fact knows that the father—or any other large male bear for that matter—will as likely eat her teenage son as pay his way through college. She looks like she would certainly bite your head off if you rubbed her the wrong way.

And in this case, those are not metaphors. A brown bear will often grab its victim by the head during an attack. And there is no right way to rub one.

A little fear of bears and other large carnivores is obviously a good idea. But you can’t let it keep you home. In 1972 I went to the nearest thing to the Great North Woods I could reach at that time in my life. I was still living in Niagara Falls, married with one child, working in a paint store, painting houses on weekends for extra money. I was not going to Alaska any time soon. My young brother Marty and I did go camping in Algonquin Provincial Park on the Laurentian Plateau of central Ontario, Canada that spring. It was a place where a black bear had killed a couple young boys the year before. We were intrigued and more than a little frightened.

We canoed and portaged our way across a lake system until we were far from the one road that cuts across the southernmost corner of the big park. We fished, and we cooked trout on a wood fire, and slept in a cheap nylon tent in Army Surplus sleeping bags—no Thermarests—on the hard Precambrian bedrock. The condensation from our breath dripped on us all night long. It was May, and it got very dark in the middle of the night, and when we heard the chewing sounds start, just outside the tent, we knew that the killer black bear was working through our food supply on his way to us. We had no flashlight.

Marty was 16 years old. Being his older brother, a married man and a father, I felt responsible for him. More senseless than brave, I led the way from the tent into the absolutely opaque blackness, lighting wooden matches and cupping them one after another in front of me trying to throw a little light on the fearsome beast that had come for us. We nearly tripped over the porcupine before we saw him, hunched under the overturned canoe, nibbling on one paddle. We did not have a gun. I have no idea what we thought we were going to do or perhaps say to the animal if it had, in fact, been a bear.

In my 20 trips to the Brooks River, and in all my foolishly close encounters with those bears there, I have never had a gun on my person. That is partly because I have no training and very little experience with guns (I hunted small game when I was a younger man), but it is also because guns have been prohibited in National Parks. Only recently, as I got older and less able to convince myself that I could climb a spruce tree if I needed to, have I begun carrying bear spray. But this past winter the National Park regulations were amended to allow guns in the parks to the extent that state laws allow them wherever the park is situated. That means guns are now permitted in all Alaska national parks. You are not allowed to discharge them. But there will be extenuating circumstances, you can be sure.

For example, in May, a camper shot and killed a bear in self-defense in Denali National Park. Maybe it is a coincidence that in the first month of the first summer that guns have been allowed, a bear needed to be shot in a park that gets tens of thousands of visitors each year, and to the best of my knowledge has never had a fatal bear attack. What I do know is that someone is going to shoot a Brooks River bear, probably very soon. The inevitable way-too-close encounters are not for everyone. If I were the kind of guy who was good with a gun, I would have shot Diver coming down that cutbank toward me looking for all the world like the giant predator he was. There has never been a bear attack of any kind in Brooks Camp in spite of the thousands of visitors there too. I have a feeling there will be one as soon as there are enough people carrying guns there.

About mid-week in my recent trip to Brooks Camp, my innate obliviousness once again put me in harm’s way. Five of us set out to fish for pike in an old beaver pond maybe a hundred yards inland from the beach on Naknek Lake maybe a mile from the camp. Halfway there we spotted a huge male bear walking toward us along the big lake’s edge. We cut inland and bushwhacked through the alders and willows to the beaver pond, the big boar forgotten as soon as we started catching pike. I had drifted away from the others and was by myself, standing in hip-deep water by the huge beaver dam that had created the lake in the first place. There I cast a fly out into the deeper water where I hoped the biggest pike lurked. Casting a fly is one of the few truly pleasurable things a man my age can do repeatedly, for hours on end, without either hurting or embarrassing himself. Needless to say, I was not paying attention to anything around me.

Once again it was Deb who called out, “Rich! Bear!”

Maybe 30 feet away, a short cast with a fly rod, the enormous boar was walking over the top of the beaver dam. This was no juvenile delinquent cub, or world-weary single mom sow. This was a trophy sized male bear. Looking upward at it there on top of the beaver house, perhaps six feet above my eye level, the animal looked like a Pleistocene monster: Arctodus simus, the nearly 2,000-pound mega-carnivore of prehistory. There is a reason taxidermists mount bears on small mounds to make them look taller and scarier. It works. It was a jaw dropping moment, and I just stood there watching it walk past, until Deb barked, “Rich! Come on.” I snapped out of my reverie and waded away from the big boar and back toward the company of my fellow meat snacks—I mean humans. There is safety in numbers primarily because the odds improve that someone is paying attention. It is never I.

My wife has admitted that in the first few years of our relationship, she credulously believed that when I drove right past the Safeway Store where we shopped several times a week, I was thinking about something profound. In more recent times she has come to realize that I may or may not be thinking at all. My mother used to use the old fashioned saying that I had “my head in the clouds.” My wife would locate my head somewhere much closer the ground and decidedly less ethereal.

Either way, I’ll keep going back to Brooks Camp, unarmed and oblivious as ever, to wander among the fabulous bears—happily fishing and stumbling over their huge furry hulks until one of them knocks my head clean off.

They really are what makes the Great North Woods so very great.