A Man Among Bears

Lyme resident Ben Kilham has always had difficulty with words. He’s dyslexic and reads at the level of a 3rd grader. He grew up with a speech impediment. It’s not surprising that he did poorly in school - a hardship for anyone, but the matter was made worse by the fact that Ben’s family is incredibly bright:

Ben: I grew up thinking I was dumb as a post, because my grades were bad and I was in a professional family where my brother, you know, one brother a doctor, a brother and a sister Ph.D. and father and mother both physicians.

Unable to pursue his dream of an advanced degree in Wildlife Biology, Ben enrolled in a gunsmithing trade school in Colorado. In 1982, he set up shop in Lyme where two local customers noticed his mechanical talents. They happened to be Dartmouth professors, and told Ben that universities were now making accommodations for people with learning disabilities.

Ben: I went back to school when I was 40. I got accepted as a special student at the Thayer School at Dartmouth.

In order to gain entrance to the school Ben had to undergo a six hour testing regimen to assess his special needs. And so it was that at 40 years of age Ben Kilham learned that he wasn’t “dumb as a post”:

Ben: The lady did the test, and she, her eyeballs got about this big at the end of the six hours of test. And I said, “Well, what’s wrong?” And she said “Well, you scored 131 on the Weschler scale” and she said, “You read at a 3rd grade level.” And I said, “Well, this is Dartmouth, what’s so unusual about 131?” She said, “Well, nobody at Dartmouth is at that level and with your reading thing you’re going to be a very interesting character!”

And Ben is, indeed, a very interesting character. Dubbed “Mother Bear Man” by National Geographic, Ben has spent the last 14 years caring for and returning orphaned bear cubs into the wild. His unorthodox method of mothering the bears in the wild continues to attract criticism.

Ben: But I find that criticism is really the first line of recognition because the people who criticize you never want to talk to you or read your work, they’re perfectly happy with the little teeny glimpse of information that they have and they want to ride it and slay you with it...(laughs)
Ben’s lack of a PHD means that he can’t publish the results of his work in Scientific Journals. Ironically, he’s had to resort to sneaking his theories into the margins of his popular book “Among the Bears”.

Ben: The way that I do things is not scientific. It’s not the scientific method. Because my methods are, they’re instinctive. They’re not cultural. I’m not plugged in culturally.

If he’s plugged into anything, it’s directly into the world itself. It’s not surprising that his description of his moment to moment experience matches that of his bear, Squirty:

Ben: It’s been my whole life, I like to understand. And understand with real observation.
In Squirty’s world, she only has first hand information. She doesn’t have any of this other stuff.

Whereas most people retain a principal trust with the world of words, Ben, like his bears, trusts the world before him first. Of course, he can and does read, but his dyslexia makes reading a kind of last resort.

Living at that distance from words has allowed Ben to more clearly remember that words are a representation of the world, not to be confused with the world itself. A truth he feels we’ve lost somewhere along the way:

Ben: I still have a hard time with words. I use a simple vocabulary. My book, I think, has been successful because of it. I think words are controlling in many senses. They’re a way of dominating other people. We’ve only been reading and writing for 5,000 years. We did something else the rest of the time. And I just think that I’m more of a throwback from the rest of the time. That we had to be good at our environment, we had to be good at figuring things out. And somewhere we lost it.

One part of Ben Kilham’s mission is to remind us of those things he thinks we’ve forgotten. The other part is to discover new ideas, about bears, about people, that will lead us to places we’ve not yet been.

For NHPR News, I’m Sean Hurley