Test Ballad

Scene 1: Meet Colin and Mount Doogie Dowler My name is Colin. I’m a hunter and a fisherman, and I love the outdoors. Quadra Island, where I grew up, at the time had a little over 1000 people. It did have paved roads, but they’re pretty crude paved roads where most of the population is. The north end of the island was quite wild. To give an idea, my youth in the 80s was on Quadra and there was one three year period that there was 18 cougars removed from the island by parks. So the Cougars were just kind of around, but there was always a neat cougar story. Nobody ever got attacked. We had some TV. The old two and a half channels. CBC and then I think three and 11 that were often the same thing and you went to the one that was less fuzzy. Until our antenna and would blow off the house and then there was no fixing that in the winter. So long and short of it, not much of a reader, I spent a lot of time messing around outdoors. A lot of that time was spent at Mount Doogie Dowler. This is a mountain named after my grandfather. He had moved there in around 1956. Local postmaster and grocery store owner and just did really well by the community and set a good community standard. He ran the local grocery store, him and my grandma, which had the post office and obviously groceries. They had gumboots and things that kind of people would need, fishermen that worked there and that kind of thing. And he kind of set up a fire department there. Volunteer fire department. He played in a local band and he was a really cool, cool guy. The store the Doogie Dowler ran was incredibly important for the community. It was like a little community center.

Viewing it from Quadra Island, which is an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia, Mount Doogie Dowler looms large. It’s a tall mountain. It’s an Alpine Mountain. Twin peaks. Beautiful and covered in snow right now. It's approximately six thousand seven hundred eighty eight feet. Imagine a long giant mountain range and then in the middle of the range, two peaks just popping up above all the rest.

That’s Doogie Dowler. Almost like a little hat.

Scene 2: The Dowler Boys Do the Doog I was incredibly outdoorsy. I have a lot of pride in where I'm from. And every day you are staring at this mountain that is named after your own grandfather. I understand why you would grow the urge to climb that mountain, and that’s what the Dowler boys were going to do. They were going to summit Mount Doogie Dowler. Let’s go see if we can do the Doog, we were saying.

While we were trying to get to the summit it started raining, and I’m not an expert mountain climber and it got really scary. So with the rain, we said no, we’re going to turn around. The slippery rocks are not cool.

Just getting to Mount Doogie-Dowler from Quadra Island would be something that I don’t even think I could personally do. There is no road, there’s no like official boat. You have to boat yourself through the narrow passages of water that surround Vancouver Island to the mainland where Doogie Dowler is. The only humans in this area literally are loggers, trappers and the occasional fisherman. If you’re lucky, maybe the loggers left you like a little improvised dock or something and you’ll have somewhere to tie up your boat. But maybe not. There’s a loggers camp, a trappers cabin, a couple of gravel roads for the loggers, and that is it. The loggers drive about nine kilometers, that’s like five miles, on a gravel road out into the bush. And once you’re in the bush, you’re just in the forest, on a mountain, basically. You’re forging your own trails, you’re tracking your location just by looking around. Doogie Dowler is often covered in snow and when it’s not, the water is just pouring off of it in all directions, making huge boulders tumble down the mountain. The bushes are so thick you can’t even see your own feet sometimes. You’re constantly trying to get over streams of unpredictable depths and speed. Once you get into the Alpine, you’re climbing rocks, and these rocks can be slippery because there is glacial water melting off of them. It’s not the hardest climb in the world. It’s not Mount Everest. It’s not that thing that lunatic from Free Solo was doing, but it is very difficult and very dangerous. Also, there’s fucking grizzly bears. So the Dowler boys were going to do the Doog together. In order to do this properly they needed months of training and it was important to actually like scout a path to the top of the mountain because, like I said, there is no actual paths leading up this mountain. It would require reconnaissance. Which brings us to the weekend in question. It was a few days before my 45th birthday.

Scene 3: A Recon Mission I was talking with my wife about, Hey, what are we going to do this weekend? And I wanted to go camp with her. She would prefer to go just chill on the beach and maybe camp with her parents at a local lake. I wanted a little bit more adventure so that, you know what? This is perfect timing. The weather’s good. I’m going to go do a reconnaissance trip up Doogie. I wasn’t going to try to summit, but just see if I can do it. I think it was the night before I left and we’re out salmon fishing. I said to my brother, well, I’m going to do this recon mission. And he was kind of like, Well, you know, by yourself? And I actually said, I never read any statistics saying that you’re more likely to get attacked by a grizzly bear by yourself than with other people.

Right? So he was like, Well, I guess I haven’t really either.

Scene 4: Preparations Begin And so I had my backpack packed, you know, the food that I’m going to bring. I had a little bivy sack, so instead of a tent, it’s like a plastic cocoon thing. It really wasn’t very comfortable. So, minimal rations. I’m just going to punch and see what I can get done tonight. Wanted to get the pepper spray from my dad but the weekends get busy at the boat launches and you run out of room to launch and whatnot. And I never really had had a problem with a bear, so didn’t get the pepper spray. I left Quadra Island, steered past Bulloch Bluff, through the Plunger Pass, and then as I entered Ramsay Arm, my destination came into view. I bombed over to where the dock was and got off the dock, got my bike going and I realized, Holy smokes, there’s a generator and stuff running. There’s actually people in the logging camp. And it’s about 9:00 in the morning and the camp cook, who’s also the first aid attendant, he was napping because they get up super early, right? Do the fixings for the crew and then rest, wait for them to come back. So yeah, we were chatting and he told me that I couldn’t leave my boat at the dock because he wasn’t sure what other boats were coming in. It was a really small dock. So that was fine. He asked me, Is there anything I could use? And I mentioned, you know, some pepper spray would be nice. He said, Yeah, no problem. And he got me a nice brand new in the wrapper thing of pepper spray. Which I put in my pocket I went back to my boat and I actually I left all my clothes and things I was taking with me on the dock. I got naked back into my boat. Boated the, I don’t know, maybe 100 feet or so to the boomsticks. Tied the boat up, swam back. I toweled off the best I could because I hadn’t actually brought a towel with me, so I had some rags in the boat. There I was, buck ass naked, drying off with some rags, looking up at Doogie Dowler. His grandfather would be proud.

Scene 5: There Were Signs I hadn’t even started off on my journey up the mountain. Started walking in and realized, OK, there’s a lot of bear signs here, and I was stepping over a fair amount of piles of poop, but stayed loud. Lots of just whatever word would come to my head and then rhyme as many words with it as I can, and you know, I was like honestly doing some pretty goofy things. Just trying to make noise for as long as they can. Nobody’s listening, right? There was watersheds I was marking, you know, little streams that come down. All right. So Punching along with my impulsive nature, I got to what I was sure was the spot that it was time for me to turn up and follow the valley and start gaining ground to get into the Alpine. I was not in the right place to start moving uphill yet, right? I had one more draw to pass. I thought I’d hit the one that was time for me to turn and head uphill. Really I should have attempted to cross that. Totally changed the timeline of what would have been if I wasn’t so impulsive. So there I turned and headed uphill. On my way up, I would stop, look at my phone and, take pictures and use an app that would tell me elevation and whatnot. On one of those starts to take a break and do you know a little navigation stop, I was sitting with my butt on a low log and my knees up high. My pepper spray fell out of my pocket. I didn’t notice the paper spray fell out of my pocket until well later. I thought, Oh man, this could have fallen out anywhere. And hiked away until I want to say around 5:00 at night. I was at about 300 feet of elevation, so just starting to get into the subalpine.

I thought, You know what, I’m going to camp up here for the night. I don’t see any bear signs. So I camp the night.

Scene 6: The First Morning The sun rose and I rose with it. I struck my camp and headed back down the mountain. I couldn’t always see my feet in front of me. The bush was that tight and there is evidence that bears were there because there were elderberry trees or bushes about maybe a 25 foot high tree max. Short lived. But they’ve got to berry that, you know, the birds and the bears like to eat. So a lot of those appeared to be pulled down. So I’m thinking the bears are, you know, doing that and eating the berries.

Scene 7: Bear Blockade By around 11:00 a.m., I made it to the gravel loggers road. I get back down to my bike. Things are great. I’d made it through the the nerve wracking part. I’m clear of the bush. I can get on my mountain bike and head down the hill. So now I’m getting into open logging road, and I’m starting to think, man, this is awesome. It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m getting home early, I’m going to have a few drinks and see what I can talk my wife and kid into doing on my birthday the next day, right? Cruising down the road and I looked up at the mile marker, which was the seven kilometer mark, and there is a grizzly bear on the road, about 75 or 100 feet away.

So I stopped immediately and yelled aloud to it.

Hey, bear! I knew it was a grizzly right away, so I’m going to say it was bigger than the typical black bear. Definitely differently shaped. The bear had a hump and kind of a big, wide, flat head. This one was wet from having just stepped out of the bush. So, you know, honestly, it didn’t look particularly huge to me. It was nine feet long from nose to toe. So it was a big framed bear. It was four or five years old and it weighed 350 pounds. Scene 8: Confrontation Ensues I was straddling my bike, and it looked at me and then it looked into the bush, looked back at me and looked back at the bush and I’m thinking, Man, would you just step into the bush? And then it started slowly walking towards me. And then I thought, Oh, crap, OK, like this, this is not good. And so I thought, what am I going to do? I should probably ready some kind of defense here.

Scene 9: Pole Position So I slung my pack off and I had the hiking poles and I started extending my hiking pole… to as long as I could get it, and then I started to bang the pole on my bike a few times as well. Hoping that that might, you know, get it to move into the bush. So then I’m standing there with the pole, you know tapping away on my bike and it continued to walk slowly towards me and looked into the bush a couple more times on the approach.

Scene 10: Downhill Battle They do this funny head swing sometimes while they’re making a decision. With maybe 30 feet away, and I thought, Man, OK, like this is way too close. I’m not comfortable straddling my bike right now, so I stepped off my bike. And it made the bear nervous, right, like that amount of action from me, and it did like this four paw shuffle. I could hear his toes, like his toenails, his claws, hitting the ground as he walked too. There was this scratching sound as they hit. The bear paused for a moment and then just started slowly approaching again. And he just continued forward and got til he was, I don’t know, like right there, you know, a few feet from my bike. Scene 11: Can't Bear to Look The bear and I made eye contact for a moment and I am not man enough to hold eye contact with a grizzly bear. I know that. It just all sorts of wrong, so I dipped my head and looked away. And as he cruised past the bike and we’re talking two or three feet away like I could have reached and touched him… And he dipped his head a couple of times, you know, like a shy dog might it it’s not sure he’s going to let you pet it or not. It didn’t seem aggressive to me like I, you know, really didn’t know what to make of it. I remember thinking, Man, I wish I was filming this because nobody is going to believe that I was this close to this bear and he’s going to walk right by. Scene 12: Not Taking No For An Answer Its rump was about eight inches from clearing my back wheel. And he made a 180 degree turn. Now the bear has chosen to engage, right? And he started to move towards me, so I took the pole and I reached it out and placed it between his eyes on the flat part of his head. And I held it with force to hold him steady, and honestly, it felt like it was going pretty well. And he rolls his head to get the pole off him and then chomps down on the pole. Scene 13: Tug of War So now we’re having a little tug of war. And it lasted maybe a second or two and he let go of the hiking pole and started to advance towards me again. And now he’s clawing at my bike, and I don’t want to be stuck under my bike with this bike on me so I threw my bike at him. He got momentarily tangled in it, like I’m sure one of his legs went through the frame.

And then he stepped forward and and lunged at me, and it all seemed like super slow motion… And he grabbed me by the by the flank, and next thing you know, I’m just I’m hanging there, suspended in this bear’s jaws. Scene 14: Hanging on For Dear Life I might’ve had a heal dragging because I’m a really light guy too. Like I’m, you know, anywhere from 125 to 130 pounds. I remember thinking that, oh, man, if he carries me into the bush, I’m dead for sure. And he was angling towards the bush, 30 or 40 feet. And so it was maybe 20 or 30 seconds back in the other direction of me hanging there. So he angles me towards the ditch, and I’m not sure if I like if he needed a break or if I was sliding from his grip. Scene 15: The Ol' Eye Gauge So he put me down near the ditch and with my head, you know, almost in the ditch, my legs point towards the middle of the road. And he cinched up his grip. So he opened his mouth and bit in and gave another little shake to sink his teeth in deep. And I thought, OK, like it’s go time now. I have to do something. So I went to go for a double eye gouge move, and in my mind, I’m going to grab him and I’m not going to let go and I’m going to like pop his eyes in, like in the movies. I couldn’t reach his right eye, which was the further one from me. So I thought, Well, I guess I’ll go for a single eye gouge here. So I got my fingers around his ear and then poked into his eye as hard as I could. The next split second is a blur. I’d been spun a hundred and eighty degrees. Scene 16: This Bites I am on my back like bicycle kickin, with this bear that’s in spazzy thrash mode on me, and he’s using his paws to corral my legs and bite into my thighs. And I’m just trying to kick and thrash as wildly as I can. I ended up not being able to keep up with what he was throwing at me. He’s biting into one thigh and then the other. And he would bite in and shake, but not like a huge, violent shake, just like a sink your teeth in deeper shake… And then let go and bite in again and shake. And he did that maybe two or three times. So I thought, Man, I got to do something here. I thought to myself, like this is so feeble, but I have to do something. I’m just going to try to peel his mouth off my leg. And so I reach down and you can kind of hear him like, like huffing, like, like breathing and like making a crazy noise. So I reached and got my thumbs up under his lip and started peeling with everything I had. And there is the drool and his yellow teeth. I felt like it was doing nothing but it bugged him enough, he let go and he bit my hand. Scene 17: Bone Appetit The bear bit the ball of the thumb there. So yeah, I guess I got lucky. And then he went back to chewing on me further down my leg where I couldn’t reach or do anything. I could hear his teeth grating against bone. It sounded like when a lab is chewing on a cow bone. The things I do remember yelling was "stop" and "why". I definitely didn’t yell help because I knew no help was coming, right? I remember feeling like serious remorse for being so foolish and abandoning my family. I remember wondering is like, is this it? Do I die here? Do I get eaten alive? Do I get dragged in the bush and die and rot?

Scene 18: Last Ditch Effort And then I remembered I got this pocket knife. That my dad had picked up at Canadian Tire for 80 percent off. I shit you not, it’s probably the first gift my dad ever given me out of the blue that wasn’t a hand-me-down or for a birthday or Christmas. Like, I gotta get my knife. And my knife’s in my right hand pocket. I had to push my stomach down with both hands and slowly wiggle for I don’t know how many seconds to get across to my other side while this thing is literally eating me. So I’m crawling with my fingers for the knife and I get it out. Takes both hands to open it.

So then I went to give like this huge, great big swing with this knife. And I swung with all my might. And stabbed into the bear's neck. And pulled the knife out. I think I kind of identify with professional hockey players when they’re streaking through the crease. They talk about all these options that they saw and thought and were going to do, and they slow down time and space. As I pulled out, he lifted his head up off me. So he’s still got me pinned. I don’t want to stab him in the shoulder, because right nowhe’s he’s not eating me anymore and this is good, right? I was happy with the stalemate that we were in. I’m just going to wait and see what happens. And then this huge gush of blood came out of the bear’s neck and splashed on to my waist.

And so then I said, and this is my bad ass moment, I said, "Now you’re bleeding too, bear." Scene 19: Retreat The bear pulls up off me and starts to walk away. So he walks up around me and then veers towards the bush. So now he’s standing at the trail, he’s looking at me and looking back at the bush, looking at me looking back at the bush and I’m thinking to myself, Just die. Fall over. And then I looked over and the bear was gone.

Scene 20: Stop the Bleeding So I don’t want to say I’m stoked at this point, but now I’ve got options. I need to start getting a tourniquet tied, so I started cutting my sleeve off and I started tying the tourniquet around my leg. And what I thought was my pants all bunched up around my leg, I realized that it wasn’t bunched up pants, but it was meat bulging out of the holes that he’d created. So I have total chicken legs, right? My wife calls them Wednesday legs. When’s they gonna break? Thank God they’re that skinny because I was able with just a granny knot to get the tourniquet tied on. I thought about waiting for a crummy, like a crew truck of loggers, to come back down the mountainside. And I looked at my watch it was 12:01 and I thought, Man, they’re not going to be rolling back down till, you know, three o’clock at the earliest. I didn’t think I had till three o’clock.

Scene 21: The Getaway Vehicle I need to try to get on my bike and get help. I tried crawling back to my bike and I couldn’t take the pain on my knees for the gravel in the road, so I don’t have any open wounds on my knees and I’m cursing myself saying seriously, Dowler? You can’t take this? So I flipped over onto my butt. I pushed with my one good leg and skidded on my butt back to my bike. I tried using my hiking pole to get onto the bike, and I fell over on that and bent it and collapsed.

Scene 22: False Start I used my bike to pull myself up, pulled my badly damaged leg up over the bike, got the pedal ready and stepped on it to launch and go and immediately face planted and fell over the other side of my bike. It was a truly disheartening moment. It was a really tough one to bear. I’m talking to myself in my head. You know, "you’ve got to get this." Got to get this, Dowler. Got to get this, Dowler. And I just remember taking a moment to get my resolve. Using my horribly dysfunctional leg to stand, got my better leg over and stepped on it and pedaled and took off. I was on my way. I was at the seven kilometer mark. I had to get to approximately the three kilometer mark until I could coast downhill. Scene 23: One Legged Pedal of Death So I got a four kilometer pedal ahead of me. I’m doing a one legged pedal. I didn’t have toe clips. So my really badly damaged leg was just weight to help the pedal fall so that I could push the next pedal stroke forward. So I’m doing this goofy, one legged pedal. Any time I got a chance to take a break and coast, like kinda get on the crown of the road and then coast towards a ditch, I was coasting as much as I could. It was a real challenge. I was watching the wheel go around the bear’s blood on it, you know, it was red. I could feel my seat heating up and I knew that was from that flank wound. I didn’t at this time know that my kidney was visible through that wound. So, you know, I’ve got this, you know, a 4K or two and a half miles to make it. And I was at a point where it’s like, OK, like just over this rise, like, that’s where I got to get and then I’m coasting the rest of the way because I’ve been going for so long, it felt like forever. Or if I came around a bend, you know, same thing, around this bend, I’m home free. And then I saw the five kilometer marker, and I realized that had only made it halfway through the pedaling part. And that, sincerely, was my lowest moment of this survival journey. What kept me going was my will to live. But then at one point, my left foot fell off the pedal, and it was while I was actively pedaling, and I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t have been able to get back on the bike if I fell off, right, like I did not have that kind of stamina. And so this is a serious situation.

So I angled my bike towards the ditch so I could keep coasting. Reach down with my left hand to grab my left pant leg and pull my leg up onto the pedal while I’m taking my right foot to pull that pedal up to get the left pedal down where I can get my foot back on and get pedaling again. And that that was truly nip and tuck. So I got that sorted, and here I’m telling myself: concentrate on keeping your freaking foot on the pedal. Like I had to simplify at that point on just thinking the most basic things: breathe, pedal, and a simple rescue plan.

Scene 24: Coasting is Not a Crime Finally, I started coasting down the hill, so it was five weeks earlier, I coasted down the hill and when I was healthy and with a helmet on, I had to use both sets of brakes and brake on my way down to be under control.

It was a really steep gravel logging road hill. I face planted onto the deck at the Logging Camp with my legs on the stairs and my upper body on the deck.

Five loggers who were at the camp rushed to my aid. I laid there while they started yelling for first aid kits. Scene 25: Holy Shit Man, you know, on my right leg I sincerely only remember him biting it once.

But I mean, there’s got to be 15 puncture wounds and, you know, and some of them are inches long. So I don’t know if that was like a chomp chomp chomp as he’s shaking away. Each time they would get the hole that was bleeding the worst, another one would start leaking, so they were chasing the holes like whack a mole. They burned through all three first aid kits that they had in camp, burned through all their tourniquets and started using random things they could use to to cinch down gauze. When they discovered my flank wound, I could feel the panic in the air. They thought that I was going to die.

So they had me making phone calls. So I started with my wife. I knew she was camping but I thought I’d try anyways. I didn’t want to leave that on an answering machine. Um so I just hung up.

Scene 26: Soundtrack To My Life The whole time, the loggers didn't stop the music they were playing. It was a Beastie Boys tune.

And I’m like, Hey, guys, that the Beastie Boys? I don’t necessarily know the names of their songs, but it goes "you can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop.

You can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop." And so I’m thinking wow, that’s actually quite fitting.

The only other thing I remember is "Fuck the Police."