“Anybody hungry?” Nick said when we’d gotten back into the car and were on our way again. “There should be someplace soon we can stop and cook some lunch.” “All right,” I said, “but you have to change your clothes before we go to bed, then.”
“Why?”
“The bears can smell what you’ve been cooking.”
“Aw, come on, where’d you pick that one up?”
“You want me to find it in the book?”
Ahead rose a sign for a Great Western. By way of answer, Nick swerved onto its driveway.
A busload of Japanese tourists had just arrived and, on their way to the restaurant, stopped to watch something in the grass. Alex ran ahead to see what was going on. A tribe of ground squirrels were diving over each other into an underground highway of tunnels. More and more squirrels appeared, like hidden pictures in a drawing for children. Alex was mesmerized. Inside the restaurant, I read the menu as he looked out the window.
“Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, …” he chanted.
“What are you counting?” I asked, charmed at his fascination. “Ground squirrels?”
“No,” he said. “Japanese tourists.”
After the meal, Alex wiped his hands on his pants.
“What – !” I cried. “Don’t wipe your hands on your pants!”
He looked at me in alarm. I usually don’t make a fuss about messiness.
“You have to change those before you sleep outdoors.”
“O.K., Mom,” he quavered, more scared of me than of the creature that caused my alarm. Walking back to the car, I lingered over the ground squirrels, exclaiming, “Ooh, look at that one! Isn’t this great?” With what now seems like touching optimism, I hoped to distract the others and put off our encounter with larger game.
“Come on,” said Nick, without breaking stride towards the parking lot whose inviting, manmade concrete I wanted to chain myself and Alex to.
We drove another three hours, or rather, Nick drove. A corollary of my born-and-bred New Yorkerhood is that I can’t drive. I sometimes feel guilty about this on vacations. But not now, as we headed up the mountain of Death. I stared out the window thinking Canada really did look like the pictures in National Geographic, vastly green and boring; and wondering if we might reach a campsite too late to pitch our tent which would give us another night at a motel.
Shortly before dusk we arrived at the site Nick had been heading for.
The camp was Edenesque. As Nick got the tent out of the car I looked around. I was determined not to pitch in and make it easy for him to put our lives at risk.
Stellar jays hopped on the lowest branch of the pine under which we would sleep. A chipmunk stared then darted into a hole. A long-eared rabbit crossed from stage left. A scene out of Disney. I could almost hear the Pastorale Symphony rising like the smell of pine. In the middle of the campsite was a tall tree stump that looked like a hooded St. Francis preaching to the surrounding fauna. The beauty of the place startled me out of my fear and made me think nothing bad could happen here. That night, on one of our newly acquired inflatable mattresses I had the sense of surrendering myself to Fate and outer space. I slept well.
Monday afternoon, wearing our bear bells and carrying bear spray, we drove to a nearby trail for a hike. Every ten feet I shouted in bold but cheerful tones a paraphrase of the Act Up chant: “We’re here; we’re not deer. Get used to it.”
There was no wild life in the woods that we could see. Not a squirrel. Not even a pigeon. Then, as we rounded the path back to the road I saw bear skat.
“Let’s hurry up,” I pleaded, remembering the advice of the guide books. Since we were heading out anyway, no one complained.
On the way back to camp, we were stopped by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They were mounted in a white police car.
“What’s that?” asked the officer, pointing at the bear spray Nick had next to him on the front seat. “Give it to me nice and slow.”
Nick did as he was told. He’s been stopped for speeding in thirty-six states and knows how to treat cops. Weighing the can the cop said, “Do you know what this is? This is a concealed weapon. What are you doing with this?”
“We’re camping,” I said, eager to oblige him. “It’s to use if a bear comes. You’ll give it back to us, won’t you?”
“Why, ma’am? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”
He was the sixth person to tell me that but none of them knew how afraid I was. And anyway, fear or no fear, the bear was stronger than I was. I refrained from pointing this out to the cop.
“Do you have any other weapons in the car?”
Nick shook his head. I thought of the knives, the hatchet and the other can of bear spray.
“Any other bear spray?”
“Yes, I have some bear spray,” I offered.
“Where is it?”
“In here.” I patted my pocket.
“Could you give me that please?”
I, too, am interested in staying on the right side of the police. With an impulsive flourish as of generosity, I handed over our sole immediate defense against bear attack. The cop read the label, lectured us some more, wrote out a ticket and returned the small can of bear spray though not the big one. It was dusk. There was no place within a hundred miles where we could replace the bear spray.
Tuesday: another drive; another hike, this time to Bear Creek.
As it turned out, this was no whimsical name. Immediately, we encountered bear skat.
“Let’s go,” I pleaded again.
Not only do the guide books advise you to leave the area when you encounter bear skat. (Ah! But in which direction should you go?) They also tell you to avoid running water where you cannot easily hear bears approaching.
“Just give it another five minutes,” said Nick. Thirty feet away was another lot of bear skat. And another and another. Either a bear lived nearby or four bears were traveling together in the vicinity and had made this a pit stop. I didn’t know which scenario to prefer. Later, recollecting in the relative tranquillity of the car, I realized it was probably a mother and cubs, the most dangerous configuration of all.
As we drove back to camp, Nick planned the afternoon’s hike. That done, he asked where I wanted to go for lunch. This sounded to me like setting the date of our execution and asking what I’d like for my last meal. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
The afternoon brought reprieve. The car putt-putted and we had to drive to town to get it fixed. During the night I was haunted by the question that overcomes timid campers in the woods: To pee or not to pee. I decided not. While in town, Nick had scheduled us to go riding the next morning. The ranch was an hour away so the next morning we woke up at six. The rest of the camp was still asleep.
I was brushing my hair when Alex said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”
I’m overprotective, I thought, but what the hell? I’ll go with him.
In the foliage a black shape stumbled around. Not only am I a New Yorker, I was also in a state of some denial. “It’s a homeless person,” I decided, “rummaging for cans.” The shape stood up.
The postcard I wrote later that day to my mother read:
“Alex and I were on our way to the bathroom this morning when what did we see twenty feet away but a BIG BEAR.”
He was over six feet as he leaned with both paws against the trunk of the tree. In his ear was a red tag. He looked at me with curiosity like someone at a party who’s open to conversation.
“Mommy,” I whimpered. As somebody remarked later, it showed where my faith lay. For reasons I have turned over in my head ever since, I decided the best place to be was in the bathroom with a solid door between us and the bear. To get there, however, we had to pass him. Alex was ahead of me and oblivious to the creature he was about to walk by. Did he think the bear was supposed to be there? I didn’t want to call out to him.
What I did next is a road map of what you’re not supposed to do. I grabbed Alex’s hand and ran past the bear to the men’s room which lay straight ahead, closer than the ladies’. When we were at the door I remembered the advice I’d collected. I turned around, waving my arms and pleaded, “We’re humans.” The bear looked at me with the uncomprehending yellow eyes of a drunk. There was no getting through to him. Dumb animal. We ran inside and I cranked open the window.
“Get the bear spray,” I shouted to Nick, waking the rest of the camp. The sounds of a tin orchestra started up as people banged pots and pans to scare the bear away. If he was more afraid of us than we were of him he was putting on a good show of nonchalance. He sniffed a tent in which a half-naked couple with a French accent clutched each other. In the car later, Nick described apologizing to the couple for sneaking up to their tent with the bear spray. “Ees all right,” they said. “Please do not go.”
Nick didn’t get the chance to use the bear spray. A lanky, stooped man who looked like a woodsman in a fairty-tale fired a blank shot. The bear took the hint and ambled off.
“He probably came during the night and fell asleep there,” said the ranger when we reported the incident at breakfast. “They’re nocturnal animals.” I was glad I’d decided against going to the bathroom during the night. “Was it a black bear?”
“Yes.”
“Huh! You’re lucky. They’re usually more aggressive.”
Another piece of information I’m glad I didn’t have at the time.
“You say he had a red tag?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah; they do that when the bear’s causing problems. It’s like when you’re a kid in school, you get a bad mark; the next time, you get detention? If a bear’s acting like that, we gotta shoot him. Well, thanks for stopping in. We’ll send somebody after him.”
I got no satisfaction from this. My quarrel with bears was nothing personal.
Over breakfast, Nick studied the map, turning every so often to his sidekick, the guidebook. “We’re not too far from the coast. What do you say we pack up, then after riding, go down, maybe see some whales.”
“O.K.”
“What do you say?” was a figure of speech. Except in matters that are trivial to Nick, it doesn’t matter what I say. We both understand that because he pays the bills, he is entitled to get his way. Where we deviate is at those times when I consider his way dangerous.
But that was not the case now. At the word “coast,” my heart leaped. Bears live at high altitudes. Heading for sea level, I believed we would leave the bears behind us forever. I realized, now, that in spite of the line Nick had taken back in New York, “There are all kinds of animals out there; nobody ever sees a bear; people go camping for years who want to see bears – the bears run away,” the rabbits and the ground squirrels had been, for him, child’s play. Seeing a bear had been Nick’s purpose in the trip itself as well as in all the hikes. It was Nick who was Captain Ahab. Now that we had seen our bear, he wanted to move on. I would not stand in his way.
Real Travel Adventures 