Danielle Truscott

On your way to a table on the upper floor of New York’s fabled Russian Tea Room, you’ll pause—if not naturally, the maître’d will, with a practiced drama, pause you—to take stock of a nine-foot-tall acrylic bear filled with live fish, juggling plastic balls while revolving on a pedestal. Backdropped by a life-size tree “blooming” with Fabergé eggs, this Ursus, symbol of Russia, is so kitsch that it actually becomes über-kitsch, throwing off some legitimate, if kinky, grandeur.

The few times I have encountered this bear, I always think of the renowned Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko—not just because he was Russian and attention-commanding but because, on the day I had occasion to meet him in the mid-1990’s, it was the one time in my life I encountered an actual bear.

I was thirty, working in Asheville, North Carolina as a reporter, and starting to publish my own writing in some literary journals.  Yevtushenko was guest lecturing at a nearby university, and a publisher had convened a group of local literati (including myself) to celebrate him at a popular craft-beer taproom. I lived just south of town, atop Little Mount Pisgah, a spot elevated and remote enough that generations-bred locals called it “way back up the holler.”

Wearing the weathered motorcycle boots, vintage cocktail dress, and sequined cardigan that was my go-to party wear in those days, I walked down the rough road that led from my house down to where I kept my car. It was a glorious, late spring afternoon. The Smokey mountains’ waves of peaks rippled across valleys. Up closer, flame azaleas pinked wildly, bright as flamingoes. The rhododendrons were a cotillion of white blossoms. I sang out loud, as I often do when I’m alone. I remember the song, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.”

And then I stopped. I heard the noise of something large and scrambling and smelled a dank, earthy stench. About fifteen feet off to the right, in a thicket of rhododendron that blocked a clear view, I saw what looked like a sizeable black bear. 

Random bear info flashed through my mind. No cubs: good. The stink meant it must have rolled in carrion, as bears, even fresh out of hibernation, don’t reek. It whizzed happily through my brain that I didn’t have my period, in case those bear-attack tales were not myth. I remembered everything every old-timer local, and everything my dad, who’d retired to Montana and had his fair share of experience with bears, had told me about what to do under these circumstances. These options included, among other pairs of opposing suggestions: “Make as much noise as you can” and “Make absolutely no noise at all.”

Consensus held to make no eye contact, and I cast my eyes down. That bear could charge me at any moment: I could feel the possibility like an electrified cord between it and me. My senses were so alert my nerves writhed like snakes inside me, yet I had an eerie sense of myself outside the organism of myself, still as a statue. A lifetime athlete, I was a very fast runner, and the density of rhododendron growth might possibly slow the bear some, but there was nowhere to go. I was almost exactly halfway down the road, not close enough to make it either back to the house or to the car, not that either was a realistic option. I had no cellphone and if I’d yelled, there wasn’t a person around for miles to hear the sound. I heard some grunting and panting and cumbersome shuffling and thought please, for fuck’s sake, let that be motion away from me. I didn’t dare look up. I studied one tiny pebble on the ground as if it were the Book of Kells itself and then, as if someone other than me dictated my course of action, I began, very softly, in a whisper, to speak.  

I remember very little of what I said. Bits of poems. In those days, I had lots memorized. Sentences about nature and my family and love. Hilariously, a kind of manifesto to the bear regarding my anti-bear-hunting views, how I’d call the sheriff on the drunk yahoos that sometimes rumbled up in trucks onto the vast property I caretook, aiming to bear hunt.

Later, my then-beau remarked that I’d gotten myself out of the difficult situation the way I always did—by talking.

After what seemed like half an hour but was likely three or four minutes, I heard an outsize, indeterminate, terrifying series of thuds. Then my ears delivered to my pounding heart the blessed news that the sound was receding, the movement heading away from, not toward, me.

I waited longer than I probably needed to before I moved a muscle or an eye.

I still had to get to the car, knowing the bear was out there somewhere. I walked slowly and quietly, reading the dirt on the road beneath me as prayer, antennae silently blazing. I opened the door and started the ignition with hand fumbling and shaking the keys, then drove like a bat out of hell into Asheville, as if my driving speed could somehow compensate for the harrowing stillness and slowness I’d just endured.

I cranked the radio and sang my ass off. Had I nearly just died? I had no idea what the odds were, but by the time I parked and strode into the festivities, I was feeling extra alive.

Apparently, Yevtushenko was having nothing to do with the beer at the tap room. An undergraduate lackey had been dispatched to the liquor store for vodka, which all those present were now doing shots of, less and less discreetly, from a half-gallon bottle of Smirnoff under the table in a paper bag.

The famous poet, four times wed and famous for his indiscretions with the ladies, had been none too discreetly seated next to the two of us deemed lookers by the organizing publisher. Breathless, I told him of the adventure I’d just had. He told me stories of bears and of talking with the poet Robert Frost about hunting them in Russia, little of which I recall other than that brown bears were the main species. We all talked poetry, Russian and other; I spoke of and recited some lines from Anna Akhmatova, my favorite Russian poet, though of course I didn’t reveal this.

At some point, I climbed onto the table, stamped my foot with what seemed like a Russian, or bear-like, certainly vodka-fired ferocity, and gave a toast to poetry, bears, and our esteemed guest. Applause, most loudly from the poet himself, ensued. 

He was a handsome, virile man, strikingly so even in what seemed to me, at the time, the absolute dotage of his early sixties. I’d flirted with him, and at the evening’s end he invited me back to his room for a nightcap. I knew better, despite the intrigue of being asked, a youngish poet myself, to ostensibly wile away some hours pondering poetry and politics with this great poet, this poet of powerful protest, an activist whose verse raised up a generation to fight Stalinism, who a New York Times writer called “a graying lion of Russian letters” in his later years. 

But his air was not leonine. There was not, to my eyes, a lion’s prowling majesty about him; no roar, nor predatory air. His charisma, which was mighty, had the characteristics—at least to me, in that single evening—more like that of a bear: fierce, somewhat aggressive; but also, social, affectionate, fearful; joyful, too.

I had thoroughly enjoyed his enriching company, but he was old enough to be my father, after all.

All things considered, one bear encounter that day would do.