Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.
day three
Bears have long held a kind of place of abstract mythology in my head. I’ve seen bears. I’ve seen bears in the distance. I’ve seen bears out the car window. I’ve seen bears in captivity. And all thru my life I’ve been taught over and over, with practiced regularity at the start of any adventure into the wilderness the core tenets of bear safety. Yet the bear, at least the bear as a beast of aggression and adventure ruining mischief has stood at this distance of a thing I’ve heard about but never had to deal with. And then, while backcountry camping we are in the position of making that bear drama come to a place of all too reality—in fact we suddenly find ourselves sharing a campground with a bear. A bear came through as we were eating breakfast this morning. Probably that bear has pooped all over the trails.
That same bear was on the path between us and the campsite as we came back from our afternoon day hike and we had to stop for a few minutes and let him wander off to the side so we could pass.
As I lay here in my tent recounting my day, there is the very real possibility that a bear will wander through our site and sniff around nearby as we’re sleeping tonight. This random creature which has been nothing but a subject of stories or a rhyme in a kids song, is suddenly our neighbour and everyone is just kinda okay with that What are we to do, after all?
It’s the bear’s home first, right?
