The Grad School Diaries: Some Days You Get the Bear…

When I was younger, I was heavily into wilderness activities, on the grounds that I enjoy natural settings and new experiences and you don’t have to interact with people all that much when you’re walking through an old-growth forest in the middle of nowhere. Rafting is fun if you like getting wet every few hours and don’t mind staying close to the river. Rock-climbing is strenuous, but the sense of accomplishment you get after going up a rock face without benefit of stairs or a ladder is amazing, provided you’re not afraid of heights. Mountain biking wasn’t really a thing, yet; there were BMX types available, but those were for closed-course rides similar to the “motocross” tracks for motorcycles. I think I would have enjoyed a proper mountain bike track, but by the time I could have afforded such a vehicle I had neither the time nor the appropriate mountain on which to ride one. And while I’m a passable horseman, I’ve never had the money (or the inclination) to rent, let alone buy, horses…

Consequently, I spent most of my time hiking and backpacking. I wasn’t a particularly fast walker, even then, but when I was in shape I could easily keep going long after many of the faster people had to stop for the day, and I’d maintain the same pace with a five-pound day pack or a fifty-pound fame pack; when you’re already overcoming the inertia involved in moving a body as big as mine, the additional mass isn’t that big a deal. I really enjoyed being out in the woods alone, or hiking along a ridge with a view of dozens of miles with no other humans in sight, and I’d cheerfully put up with the disadvantages of freeze-dried food, lack of bathroom facilities, or various animals (ranging from ants to bears) attempting to make off with your food. It’s interesting to note, however, that despite all of the time I’ve spent in wilderness areas, I had never seen a bear in the wild as of 2010. I’d been close enough to bears to hear (and in one or two cases, smell) them, and I’d had my food stolen by one on occasion, but all I had ever seen were tracks, claw marks, and the occasional dropping…

I had just finished recounting this point to my long-suffering spouse (who has known me for the better part of three decades at this point, and knows all of my stories by heart) when a large brown animal broke from the underbrush to the right side of the rural highway we were driving long, and sprinted directly across our path. For a split-second, I thought it might be a large dog, a stray cow, or at most an errant deer, but as we came closer there was no mistaking the gait, the shaggy coat or the small ears; it was a North American black bear. I’d estimate its mass at a little less than mine, which would make it about half-grown; a juvenile, not a cub. Assuming it got enough to eat that summer and filled out properly, it would be a fine, 400-pound specimen by the following winter. I stared at it, as it ran off the road and vanished into the brush on the left side of the highway. Then I cleared my throat, and added, “I stand corrected…”

As it happened, my wife had been reading the map and ignoring me when the bear appeared, as any reasonable person will when hearing one of my stories for the forty-eleventh time, and I had to point out the (still just visible) rump of the animal vanishing into the space between the trees. It’s too bad she couldn’t have seen the whole bear, but that view settles what it was; neither a cow nor a deer has a tail like that, and no dog has hindquarters that size. If you believe in synchronicity, I suppose it would make sense that I’d finally see a bear running free just after telling someone that I never had. If you’ve been reading these posts, however, you already know that wildly synchronistic events just happen in my life. It’s possible that these things happen to everyone, and my child-like sense of wonder is the reason I keep noticing them, but I prefer to think it’s the other way around: that the on-going “audio-visual weirdness” that is my life has helped me to retain my child-like sense of wonder in an increasingly unpleasant adult existence. Either way, though, the world is a strange place – and I haven’t seen even the half of it yet…