GREYBEAR

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING-2025

September 4th, 2024. Thursday. Evening lecture, Asian History, credits needed and thought Asian History was the least boring of the choices. Wrong. Phone under the desk sending Grey something stupid. We'd done this for years, getting split up across the room in middle school for laughing too hard at whatever wild ass thing one of us said, and somehow by senior year nothing had changed except the shoes sizes.

No response that night. I didn't think anything of it. Went to sleep.

Friday morning. A text from a friend. Something something Grey committed. I misread it. Genuinely misread it while groggily pouring myself into my truck to head to campus. Replied damn I'm sorry like it was a fender bender, like it was nothing, and went about my day like an idiot. Then the calls started. And I sat there in student parking understanding two things at the same time. What had actually happened, and why the night before had just been silence.

I still think about that reply. Damn I'm sorry. Like I had any idea.

We met in sixth grade. Spent middle school and high school in the woods around our neighborhood in Utah building forts, getting in trouble, doing the things you do when the concept of consequences held no water. He was a bigger guy, even back then. I remember him on a dirt bike that was too small for him, knees out, completely unbothered, struggling to get up a trail. He didn't notice. Gave hugs the way professionals give handshakes, completely, without thinking about it, every time. He couldn't lie to save his life. He'd start telling you something and a smile would just slowly spread across his face, unconscious, immediate, and that was the whole tell, every time, for nineteen years. At our eighth grade choir concert his mom stood up in the audience and screamed "That's my Grey Bear!" when it ended and that was just who he was to everyone from the time he gave his first hug.

The last time I saw him alive we were smoking in a park ironically next to a police station, a week after graduation, and two months before all the go getters crossed state lines. It was fun. That's the whole memory. Just fun.

After he died I started going into the wilderness. Not for photography. Just to be somewhere that asked nothing of me except ice packs and mud. The camera came later.

That spring I wandered into a clearing somewhere between Lamar Valley and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. A young grizzly was standing there. Watching me. Not doing anything. He had that same chubby teenage face Grey had. Soft around the edges. But his eyes were something else entirely the eyes of something six and a half times its own age, looking at me with full knowledge of whatever I'd shouldered into that clearing.

I felt judged.

He turned and walked slowly back into the woods.

Maybe if I'd sent funnier videos I wouldn't be doing this work now.

I think he judged me favorably.

Called him Grey Bear because there was nobody else he could have been.