Bears and Chin-Up Bars

and peanut butter

Well dang it. I’ve dislocated my shoulder, again. The first time was five years ago, almost to the day. It was the dawn of the pandemic, I was walking in a snowy village in British Columbia, slipped and broke my fall with an outstretched arm.¹ This time I jumped up to hang from a pull-up bar at my friend Victoria’s house in Toronto. The upper back, chest and arm muscles are supposed to support us when we do this maneuver. Instead, my right humerus took the weight and pulled from the scapula, popping out just like the Barbie arms of my youth. And like a Barbie arm, if I remember correctly, the more they popped out, the looser they became. I’m becoming Old Barbie.

The internet told me to relax. The arm wants to reconnect, it wants to go back inside its socket. So I laid horizontally on the back of a sofa and let my arm dangle down towards the floor. I closed my eyes, I breathed. I thought about Jamie from Outlander,² how Claire put his arm back into his shoulder socket with a violent twist. How if he had just meditated his arm back into place, there wouldn’t have been a love story. And then, just like that, my arm twisted all on its own, back into place.

All this to say, I’m writing with my arm in a sling. It’s not ergonomically correct, but I wanted to report on my week. Aside from the dislocation, it’s been very special. I’ve been in Toronto along with sisters, cousins and friends for the launch of my cousin Claire Cameron’s book, How to Survive a Bear Attack.³ This book is many things. Claire describes it as an investigation. Her editor calls it a memoir. Knowing that Claire, an outdoorsy person, has a rare genetic form of melanoma - the same cancer that killed her dad, my dad’s brother, when he was 42 - it is also a confrontation with a diagnosis and a life spent hidden from the sun. I think writer John Vaillant, in his blurb on the back cover, puts it best: “Claire Cameron’s wonderful book is, at root, a braided love story, by turns heartbreaking and terrifying, but above all brimming with a fierce affection - for her family, for her subjects, and for the precious, precarious act of staying alive.”

This book is also about peanut butter. Claire loves peanut butter. Her birthday cake of choice is chocolate layer cake topped with fluffy peanut butter icing. Her wedding cake was the same. Peanut butter sandwiches have sustained her throughout her life - on canoe trips, while ice climbing, camping, tree planting, after a run, while writing, and even as a quick snack between the office and the pub when she lived in London. “The English can flow straight to the pub after work,” she warmed me when I too moved to London. “A quick pb+j will sustain you.”

Bears also like peanut butter.

There’s a scene early in the book where a younger Claire is tree planting in Northern Ontario. She moves through mud, rain, sleet and scorching sun with duct-tape covered blisters to plant up to 4,000 scrubby seedlings a day. Peanut butter sandwiches were her fuel, her highlight. She kept a stack of them in a tupperware inside her backpack along with all the other backpacks in the work truck. One afternoon a cinnamon bear, named for her reddish coat, managed to “thread her arm through the window, pop the lock, and get the door open.”⁴ Claire later found her pack tucked in the stump of an old tree. The bear had made a perfect incision with her claw along the length of the zipper. Cinnamon was smart. Claire found the empty tupperware tossed nearby. The bear had managed to lift the lid with a claw, leaving behind one single puncture mark. Claire was relieved; she ate between six and nine peanut butter sandwiches a day. The tupperware kept them “fluffy and dry, one small luxury in what were otherwise fairly brutal conditions.”

After my arm was safely back in place, after I stopped sweating in that panicked, pukey way that comes with pain, I was hungry. Victoria put a thick slice of sourdough in the toaster for me then slathered it with peanut butter. I ate it with my left hand, and all felt right with the world.

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PS -

Before I left for Toronto my aunt Sandra invited me over for a cup of tea. Sandra makes everything special, including peanut butter cookies. These ones are rolled in sugar before baking, then crowned with a single peanut. You can find the recipe here.

1. For the full embarrassing story, click here. There’s also a recipe for marshmallow sauce, more importantly.

2. Ooh I found the scene! Click here.

3. For more on the book, visit Claire Cameron’s recent post over here on Substack.

4. Claire Cameron, How to Survive A Bear Attack: A Memoir (Knopf Canada, 2025) p.44