Summertime in Bear Country

There is a list of known fatal bear attacks on Wikipedia. It lists the victim's name, age and gender along with the location (looks like Sarah Palin isn't the only thing that will keep me out of Alaska), and various points of interest about each incident. The list goes all the way back to poor William Waddell in October of 1875, killed by a brown bear at his lumber mill in Santa Cruz County, California.

After a week of rereading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods (highly recommended, by the way), I really should not have looked at this. You may have noticed from my sporadic postings of Bryson quotes that he describes some alarming facts and observations regarding this subject in his book. My bear preoccupation has already reached a boiling point; I've focused on the worst case scenario of being outdoors (um, nothing tops "eaten alive" does it?) in that unhealthy way that makes the relatively rare occurance of a bear attacking a human seem downright inevitable.

One of my favorite things to do is go camping, and obsessing about bear attacks is not exactly going to give me the kind of confidence (or brazen naivete) it takes to sleep through the night in the woods. In the interest of outdoor fun, I'm putting my bear-related research in hibernation mode for the summer, so no more pithy bear quotes until winter, dear readers--I have to preserve the tattered remnants of my poor frail moxie.

"Nearly everyone I knew had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping in blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness."

-Bill Bryson

"Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning, and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but--and here's the salient point--once would be enough."
--Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

Top of the Food Chain...

Saw a book on wilderness survival today at work. It was one of those hardcore expedition type guides that assume the reader is going "off the grid" to live in the far reaches of some Thoreau-inspired backcountry. I get a little excited when I read these kinds of things, imagining myself hiking along the Appalachian Trail, communing with nature and experiencing life in its most elemental form. Rediculously romantic and naive, I know--it's just the thing that every sensitive, doe-eyed philosophy major beard-o who cites either Walden or On the Road as their favorite novel pines after.

I have been camping many many times. None of these outings would be anything like what that wilderness guide or Thoreau had in mind. I like to go out into the woods of the lovely and serene Daniel Boone National Forest with my folding chair and cooler full of beverages and listen to agreeable music on my portable stereo while staring at a fire. Maybe some hiking, a little light rock climbing, I even spelunked there once (bar none: one of the most terrifying experiences of my life). While the area does offer some "extreme" options (rock climbing, kayaking, rappeling), it ain't Alaska.

There are virtually no threatening wildlife (save for an occassional copperhead, though I've never seen one in 15 years of dumbly tramping about the bushes and underbrush), and the locals are pretty tame and friendly (it's actually a little touristy along the main roads--I guess the residents would rather sell me firewood than murder me in my tent at night). I enjoy getting out there and away from the city, I even NEED it from time to time or else I get rather grouchy.

I sometimes fantasize about going somewhere a little more remote, somewhere you'd read about in one of those adventure magazines, but there are two major issues that strike very real fear into my heart: 1. murderous hillbillies, 2. bears. That's it. Not scared of insects, poinson ivy, falling off cliffs, breaking an ankle in the middle of nowhere, pooping in the woods, hypothermia...just other people and bears. But those are the Big Two, aren't they? We are human F-ing beings: top of the food chain, the dominant life forms--If we are going to get killed off, it will most likely be by the destructive forces of other human beings and the terrifying creatures that still manage to roam around outside of zoos. To leave behind the relative comforts of home--piece of mind, safety, security, convenience--is to strip away quite a lot of that buffer zone between our trivial concerns (jobs, cars, computers, etc) and certain death. I guess thats part of what is attractive; I can tell you from personal experience that your life gets put into perspective post haste when you are laying prone in a tent in the middle of nowhere in the deep dark woods, sure that you just heard twigs snapping...