This World: Hunter Bear / Dr. John Salter Jr.

            One of my American Heroes is Hunter Gray, also known as Hunter Bear, whose name was Dr. John Salter, Jr., when he taught a class in social justice that I took at the University of North Dakota.  At the time, I was 19, coming out of a small, Minnesota town, and had never met someone who’d both 1) been a key figure in the national struggle for civil rights, playing a key part in the 1963 Woolrich lunch counter protests in Jackson, Mississippi (that's him being assaulted in the foreground of the photo at left), and also 2) been “abducted” and studied by friendly beings from another planet.  Most students found him really captivating, or at least quirky and interesting, and for me, meeting him was challenging—his life was hard to assimilate.  On the one hand, you had to put your body on the line for causes you believed in; I still have a hard time imagining myself exhibiting the courage that Salter and his companions Anne Moody and Joan Trumpauer displayed in Jackson. Then, on the other hand, you could be driving along the highway one night with your son, and you could experience an episode of mind control that caused you to travel far off of your planned route into the wooded hills of Wisconsin’s “Driftless Region” where you’d be pulled over by friendly aliens who would not only study your body but actually improve it. 

     Over the years, I think John’s stories have stayed with me partly as cautions: at no point should I believe that I’ve got it all figured out. Life’s possibilities are incredibly diverse, and people like myself, who are fortunate, and whose lives are somewhat contained and sheltered, shouldn’t be out there trying to tell anyone how it is.

     Also, I think that John’s abduction story helped me to be open to an experience of contact that I had a few years ago—not with extraterrestrials, but with the spirit of someone who’d died and who, I believe, made contact with me for a brief moment (It’s a story I tell in the poem “Memorial,” part of my 2011 collection Absentia). My availability to that experience is something that connects, when I think about it, to what I valued most about studying with Dr. Salter: his very simple, but profoundly noticeable, attitude of overt kindness and acceptance. He brought it to his lectures and to his individual conversations, and it helped make me more open, less prone to pre-judge an experience.

      Dr. Salter spoke quietly, although he was a large man—maybe 6’2 or 6’3—and with commitment, and he smiled in a distinctly curious, generous way that carried over into his actions. I remember one day a student fell asleep in his class—Dr. Salter’s speaking style was really very relaxing—and when a couple of other students laughed about it (I think the guy might’ve actually snored a little), Dr. Salter noticed.  I remember that he stopped whatever he was saying and spoke even more quietly than usual. “Oh, we shouldn’t wake him,” he said. “Sleep is very important. If any of you feel like you need to sleep during this class, you should absolutely feel welcome to do so. You have to get your sleep.”  This was so incredibly kind I thought—almost to a fault, really, right? I mean… students shouldn’t be sleeping in class, should they? But that factor of disrespect or appropriateness slid completely away from Dr. Salter—no power-based consideration entered his thinking even for a second, it seemed. And it was doubly ironic because one of the ways that the friendly extra-terrestrials had improved Dr. Salter (I think I remember this correctly) manifested itself as an ability to go without sleeping for long periods of time. He could sleep if he wanted to, but he didn’t need to sleep more than an hour or so per day. Still, he realized that the number one thing that particular hung-over late adolescent slacker needed at that moment was to sleep. Everything else could wait.

     Recently, I reached out to him and we exchanged emails. He remembered me and seemed happy that I’d looked him up. He’s about eighty, now, and has had some remarkable experiences in the intervening years.  His website is an incredible chronicle of a life lived with earnest commitment, open-heartedness, wit and moxy.  It honestly reads like some kind of avant-garde novel—remarkable accounts from a singular human. 

      No surprise—he has continued his activism and social justice work. His book on the civil rights struggle, Jackson Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism, was re-released by the University of Nebraska Press, he’s been honored by national Native American organizations for his commitment, and he continues to write and speak about organization and activism. This, I know, is his real legacy: his unflagging commitment to this world is the most important thing that he has to teach.

      But of course I read the account of his 1988 close encounter with another world, entitled “Friends of the Vast Creation: An Account of the Salter UFO Encounters of March, 1988.” It was a text version of the story he'd told our class that year, inspiring us all to laugh and shake our heads and debate and imagine. Only on this occasion did I realize that I now live just a few miles from where the encounter occurred. Dear friends of mine have a little off-the-grid forest and farm property, nestled in a valley just off the highway where the aliens pulled him over (I wonder if they turned on their sirens…).  When I drive out that way, I think of how a good-sized flying saucer could practically disappear in one of those old coulee crevices remaining from before the last ice age.