You Can’t Buy a Bear
The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born--we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny; the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg.- The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
Bears have always been a part of my life. I’m completely fascinated by them and scared as heck of them at the same time.
The other day a friend came to me with a few pictures and movie clips of a mother bear and her three cubs out behind her house in the woods. The movies and photos were taken automatically by a wildlife camera set up to capture the invisible world that happens in front of our eyes.
As the mother investigated the scene, her babies romped in the woods, running and tackling each other, crawling over logs, and hiding under her legs. They were as carefree as the morning sun that made the trees seem afire.
Watching those clips and studying those photographs, I was transported to a time and place far in the recesses of my memory, my early bear thoughts.
When I was a young eleven year old boy, I joined the Boy Scouts and set about the business of learning valuable outdoor skills. While I had never been a foreigner in the woods, I certainly was no expert woodsman. I was great at traipsing through the leaves and looking for small critters, but I really had never spent the night alone in the wilds beyond my own backyard.
In scouts that year, I went on my first overnight camping trip to an abandoned church camp somewhere near Bennett Springs, Virginia called “Vesperlands.” Lester Burke and Art LaVoie, my scoutmasters, led the way out there. It was only a five mile hike from our home church in Roanoke, but it seemed so much longer. Once we arrived, camp was set up around the sad picnic table beside the forgotten pond. A broken dock, rotted, and failing, jutted into the still, frog-laden pond. Pup tents were pitched not too far away, within easy sight of the picnic table and Art LaVoie’s Volkswagen Bus Camper. A fire was raised, and I put my Boy Scout meal; a potato, carrot, and hunk of stew meat; into an aluminum foil pouch and tossed it onto the hot coals. Then I sat not so patiently by for the concoction to fully cook. It was all guesswork. Whenever I cooked this meal, I always pulled the foil package out too soon and had a raw meal or waited too long and charred it beyond recognition.
This was a raw evening, and I was in no mood for an incomplete meal, so I tossed it back into the fire. Meanwhile, Lester, Art, and some of the older scouts were concocting a delicious smelling stew using a Coleman Stove on the picnic table. They were certainly messy, messy chefs. Food parts were haphazardly strewn around the stew pot. Some fell to the ground to be quickly trampled by the hoards of young campers. Clean-up that evening was probably not as thorough as maybe it should have been. A few half-cleaned pots and plates were left out on the table. Half-filled metal cups of “bug juice” littered the site. Blackened foil packages from abandoned meals lay mummifying in the dying coals.
As the sun set, the mosquitoes rose from the swampy pond shore and rose into the sky with a droning buzz that seemed to pour into your skin. Getting into the relative shelter of my pup tent was paramount. I quickly climbed inside and tried to fall asleep. As evening approached Art and Lester tried to warn us that bears were known to inhabit the area and that they were very scent oriented. Just the slightest whiff of food would bring them around to investigate. In fact, Lester reported that a scout had been swallowed whole by a bear not too long before that. With the idea of wild rampaging bears invading camp forefront in my mind, I tried in vain to sleep. A lantern glow cast shadows of Lester, Art and the older scouts as they played cards at the picnic table. Being my first night alone in a tent outside my backyard, I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread.
Somehow though, I managed to succumb to a fitful, sweaty sleep on the hard packed ground. I had a root under me. There was a rock under my head. The tent seemed so stuffy and humid. Bugs banged into the side of the canvas like the percussion section of some wild symphony...
I stirred what seemed like moments later to the sound of loud clanging and banging along with a certain amount of ominous grunting. The lantern still cast a silhouetted glow on the tent wall, and I saw death quite clearly; a dim, dark, and massive shape and a couple of smaller shapes moving around the table. Crashing sounds of pots falling broke into the night. Then, just as I thought I might wet my sleeping bag, one of the shadows grew larger and larger. It seemed to be coming to my tent, and it was definitely a bear shape. I wanted to scream, but I was too afraid. My paralyzed fear was broken by a sudden invading thought…There are peanut butter crackers under my pillow…Hide them! Hide them!!! Jolted into action, I grabbed the crackers and stuffed them deep inside my bag, hoping that would be enough to disguise the scent. Still the large bear came closer and closer. I could hear her grunts and see her breath shadowed on the tent wall. She was massive, and I was so very, very small. I could hear her grunts and smell her horribly foul breath as she sniffed at my head. I knew that it was a matter of seconds before I died in my soiled sleeping bag. I knew my body would be dragged out and my limbs would be torn from me one agonizing piece at a time. I’d scream and scream as long as my head remained intact. It was just a matter of seconds…
At the instant my real nightmare was about to come to a horrific climax. I heard Art and Lester out by the picnic table. They began shouting and banging pots. I saw the shadow of my foul mouthed sniffer look up for a moment before bolting away into the darkness of black beyond the glow of my green tent canvas. I remained in my bag, shivering with fright the rest of that restless night.
& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & &
It must have been the next year that I had my next encounter with bears. My family liked to go on a summer vacation each year. Usually we’d visit my relatives on Long Island New York, home of my father, or head to Upstate New York, home of my mother’s relatives. That year our trip took us to my Aunt Lou and Uncle Tommy’s “camp” in the Finger Lake region of New York.
Aunt Lou and Uncle Tommy were pretty hip people. Lou was my mother’s oldest sister, and frankly I was a little scared of her because she looked so old. Her husband, Tommy, was an English professor at Cornell (Rochester...can’t remember for sure). Both of them enjoyed their cigarettes and stiff drinks on the rocks. They had invited us to their cozy cabin in the dark woods on a small but beautiful lake.
Lou loved animals of all kinds. I remember being fascinated by her trained chipmunks. She’s go out on the deck with a bag of peanuts and tap the nuts on the rail one at a time. Next thing you’d know, the chipmunks would emerge from their holes all around and take the peanuts from her hand. This scary aunt taught me to feed them, too and I spent hours in wonderment. I felt like Dr. Doolittle. Aunt Lou also fed raccoons in the same manner. They’d come right up to her living room window and she’d pass them tasty treats. I feared those buggers though because they looked to have sharp bear-like claws.
On our last day there, Aunt Lou had a huge surprise in store for us. She told us that she would take us to see the bears. Based on past experience, I was more than a little skeptical; however, Aunt Lou assured us all that we’d be perfectly safe as long as we stayed in our car.
Loaded into our seven-passenger Chevy Impala Station Wagon (Black Bess), Aunt Lou directed us to the local landfill. Back then in that part of New York and around the country I suspect, many localities had open pit trash dumps. Very simply, garbage trucks would drive in and dump refuse on the ground and then drive off. Later workers driving bulldozers would come along and pile it all into huge garbage piles where it would sit and stink. As we drove in, it was like entering a most unusual bear zoo. They were everywhere on every pile of garbage. Some were rooting through. Others were gorging themselves on their new-found treasures. They looked so passive and content, not a bear-care in the world. Every need they had was easily being met. Safely tucked inside our tank, I watched and tried to imagine what it’s be like to be a bear in a dump.
Fascinating bears. Silly bears. Scary bears. You can’t buy bears anymore.
The other day a friend came to me with a few pictures and movie clips of a mother bear and her three cubs out behind her house in the woods. The movies and photos were taken automatically by a wildlife camera set up to capture the invisible world that happens in front of our eyes.
As the mother investigated the scene, her babies romped in the woods, running and tackling each other, crawling over logs, and hiding under her legs. They were as carefree as the morning sun that made the trees seem afire.
Watching those clips and studying those photographs, I was transported to a time and place far in the recesses of my memory, my early bear thoughts.
When I was a young eleven year old boy, I joined the Boy Scouts and set about the business of learning valuable outdoor skills. While I had never been a foreigner in the woods, I certainly was no expert woodsman. I was great at traipsing through the leaves and looking for small critters, but I really had never spent the night alone in the wilds beyond my own backyard.
In scouts that year, I went on my first overnight camping trip to an abandoned church camp somewhere near Bennett Springs, Virginia called “Vesperlands.” Lester Burke and Art LaVoie, my scoutmasters, led the way out there. It was only a five mile hike from our home church in Roanoke, but it seemed so much longer. Once we arrived, camp was set up around the sad picnic table beside the forgotten pond. A broken dock, rotted, and failing, jutted into the still, frog-laden pond. Pup tents were pitched not too far away, within easy sight of the picnic table and Art LaVoie’s Volkswagen Bus Camper. A fire was raised, and I put my Boy Scout meal; a potato, carrot, and hunk of stew meat; into an aluminum foil pouch and tossed it onto the hot coals. Then I sat not so patiently by for the concoction to fully cook. It was all guesswork. Whenever I cooked this meal, I always pulled the foil package out too soon and had a raw meal or waited too long and charred it beyond recognition.
This was a raw evening, and I was in no mood for an incomplete meal, so I tossed it back into the fire. Meanwhile, Lester, Art, and some of the older scouts were concocting a delicious smelling stew using a Coleman Stove on the picnic table. They were certainly messy, messy chefs. Food parts were haphazardly strewn around the stew pot. Some fell to the ground to be quickly trampled by the hoards of young campers. Clean-up that evening was probably not as thorough as maybe it should have been. A few half-cleaned pots and plates were left out on the table. Half-filled metal cups of “bug juice” littered the site. Blackened foil packages from abandoned meals lay mummifying in the dying coals.
As the sun set, the mosquitoes rose from the swampy pond shore and rose into the sky with a droning buzz that seemed to pour into your skin. Getting into the relative shelter of my pup tent was paramount. I quickly climbed inside and tried to fall asleep. As evening approached Art and Lester tried to warn us that bears were known to inhabit the area and that they were very scent oriented. Just the slightest whiff of food would bring them around to investigate. In fact, Lester reported that a scout had been swallowed whole by a bear not too long before that. With the idea of wild rampaging bears invading camp forefront in my mind, I tried in vain to sleep. A lantern glow cast shadows of Lester, Art and the older scouts as they played cards at the picnic table. Being my first night alone in a tent outside my backyard, I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread.
Somehow though, I managed to succumb to a fitful, sweaty sleep on the hard packed ground. I had a root under me. There was a rock under my head. The tent seemed so stuffy and humid. Bugs banged into the side of the canvas like the percussion section of some wild symphony...
I stirred what seemed like moments later to the sound of loud clanging and banging along with a certain amount of ominous grunting. The lantern still cast a silhouetted glow on the tent wall, and I saw death quite clearly; a dim, dark, and massive shape and a couple of smaller shapes moving around the table. Crashing sounds of pots falling broke into the night. Then, just as I thought I might wet my sleeping bag, one of the shadows grew larger and larger. It seemed to be coming to my tent, and it was definitely a bear shape. I wanted to scream, but I was too afraid. My paralyzed fear was broken by a sudden invading thought…There are peanut butter crackers under my pillow…Hide them! Hide them!!! Jolted into action, I grabbed the crackers and stuffed them deep inside my bag, hoping that would be enough to disguise the scent. Still the large bear came closer and closer. I could hear her grunts and see her breath shadowed on the tent wall. She was massive, and I was so very, very small. I could hear her grunts and smell her horribly foul breath as she sniffed at my head. I knew that it was a matter of seconds before I died in my soiled sleeping bag. I knew my body would be dragged out and my limbs would be torn from me one agonizing piece at a time. I’d scream and scream as long as my head remained intact. It was just a matter of seconds…
At the instant my real nightmare was about to come to a horrific climax. I heard Art and Lester out by the picnic table. They began shouting and banging pots. I saw the shadow of my foul mouthed sniffer look up for a moment before bolting away into the darkness of black beyond the glow of my green tent canvas. I remained in my bag, shivering with fright the rest of that restless night.
& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & &
It must have been the next year that I had my next encounter with bears. My family liked to go on a summer vacation each year. Usually we’d visit my relatives on Long Island New York, home of my father, or head to Upstate New York, home of my mother’s relatives. That year our trip took us to my Aunt Lou and Uncle Tommy’s “camp” in the Finger Lake region of New York.
Aunt Lou and Uncle Tommy were pretty hip people. Lou was my mother’s oldest sister, and frankly I was a little scared of her because she looked so old. Her husband, Tommy, was an English professor at Cornell (Rochester...can’t remember for sure). Both of them enjoyed their cigarettes and stiff drinks on the rocks. They had invited us to their cozy cabin in the dark woods on a small but beautiful lake.
Lou loved animals of all kinds. I remember being fascinated by her trained chipmunks. She’s go out on the deck with a bag of peanuts and tap the nuts on the rail one at a time. Next thing you’d know, the chipmunks would emerge from their holes all around and take the peanuts from her hand. This scary aunt taught me to feed them, too and I spent hours in wonderment. I felt like Dr. Doolittle. Aunt Lou also fed raccoons in the same manner. They’d come right up to her living room window and she’d pass them tasty treats. I feared those buggers though because they looked to have sharp bear-like claws.
On our last day there, Aunt Lou had a huge surprise in store for us. She told us that she would take us to see the bears. Based on past experience, I was more than a little skeptical; however, Aunt Lou assured us all that we’d be perfectly safe as long as we stayed in our car.
Loaded into our seven-passenger Chevy Impala Station Wagon (Black Bess), Aunt Lou directed us to the local landfill. Back then in that part of New York and around the country I suspect, many localities had open pit trash dumps. Very simply, garbage trucks would drive in and dump refuse on the ground and then drive off. Later workers driving bulldozers would come along and pile it all into huge garbage piles where it would sit and stink. As we drove in, it was like entering a most unusual bear zoo. They were everywhere on every pile of garbage. Some were rooting through. Others were gorging themselves on their new-found treasures. They looked so passive and content, not a bear-care in the world. Every need they had was easily being met. Safely tucked inside our tank, I watched and tried to imagine what it’s be like to be a bear in a dump.
Fascinating bears. Silly bears. Scary bears. You can’t buy bears anymore.
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