Four Bearing

Photo courtesy of Idaho Fish & Game

1.
Ostensibly, I was the man.

In reality she was the bear. I could tell by the side-eye. 

There was barely enough time to register that singular side-eye moment as I straddled the trunk of a downed Doug-fir on this hot, lonely mountain trail on a Monday afternoon somewhere in the Idaho panhandle.

Of course, there was no real way of knowing if the bear was male of female in that too brief moment. But all my mind’s eye could see was a nearby litter of cubs and my body being segmented and quartered into separate slabs for each one of them.

But it turned out this particular black bear, like most bears, are more afraid of us than we are of them (correctly so.) 

Without even giving the full once over, she bolted off the trail downslope and into the forest before I could divine much more.

The lesson could not be clearer: always choose the bear.

2.
“Hey bear!”

My head turns sharply to the right, toward the early Saturday morning callout from further down Clarion Alley in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.

There, striding calm and purposely in my direction from thirty yards out was a burly, blond haired and blonde bearded man in a polka dot skirt flashing me the brightest, warmest, square jawed smiles I’ve ever borne witness to.

I bolted downslope into the concrete jungle before I could divine much more at a pace that would hopefully get me to a safe haven of avoidance before I had to be a prudish bitch.

The only place open at this early hour I could find potential shelter was a diner called “The Pork Store.” In retrospect, this likely was not the best omen.

3. 
My grandpa Okie had a pet bear. This was on the homestead in the Idaho panhandle. I mean, it wasn’t really a “tame” bear per se, but it would wander out of the woods into the yard where the old retired ironworker would be reclining in his 70’s style lawn chair, cold brandy in hand, and they would more or less “converse” with one another, gramps usually telling really corny dirty jokes, and the bear more or less mewling for free snacks, which he would usually get, and in this way, gramps made sure he would keep coming back for entertainment value.

Foolhardy?  Absolutely. He was a foolhardy man, with an iron hook for a left hand replacing the one that had been caught between a couple of I-beams on a downtown LA high rise, and a willingness to engage danger that usually ended with him walking way unharmed, a few dollars richer and that goddamn cocktail between the clamps of his hook, his other hand offering a snack to an animal that could have easily taken his other hand.

He even named it Blackie.

4.
Did you fuck up? Did you hurt someone you didn’t mean to hurt? Do you need to make nice?

Nothing beats the gift of a teddy bear. 

All my life I had teddies. The not-so-secret talisman of childhood safety and comfort.
At some point though, people started thinking of me as a teddy bear. I began to think I was a teddy bear. I began to think this was going to be the defining totem of my life.

4b.  
Then someone who cares about me very much reminded me that Teddy Bears also have claws.

3b. 
Grandpa Okie’s homestead didn’t include the entire mountain, but the 48 or so acres did include the trailhead that led to the mountain’s summit. And since no one else lived closer to the summit, the consensus in the small town of Worley, Idaho…or at least Leo’s Bar in Worley where Gramps held court…was that by default, the tall hill was known as Okie Mountain. 

On a completely proprietorial level, Okie thought of the mountain as his own. And because he convinced his neighbor Rosie that he was one sixteenth Cherokee, he was able to get a sweetheart deal leasing land from her. Anything he wanted, he was able to get. Hell, he thought of the town of Worley as “his town.” It was only natural that the young black bear that kept wandering into the yard for snacks would be his “pet.” 

When my gramps got wind of one of his neighbors was looking to shoot Blackie so he could start a weed patch, it wasn’t clear if Gramps had threatened to make the hippie’s life a living hell if he even thought about shooting the bear, or if Gramps had just gone ahead and kicked his ass. What was clear was that the hippie had split less than a week later, and word got around the local tavern…and therefore around town..that bear hunting would not be tolerated on Okie Mountain.

But Gram got a couple of dogs a few months later, and Blackie wasn’t seen on the homestead much after that.

2b.
I summered seven straight years on the homestead, until the year I enlisted in the Air Force. During that time I was introduced to the exotic redundancy known as biscuits and gravy, Oklahoma style, and it was there I fell in love with that most Southern of delicacies.

In my life as a Mission rat I learned the Pork Store served up one of the best plates of biscuits & gravy in the Bay Area, with a brilliant chorizo gravy complementing poached eggs lovingly spilled over the top of scratch made biscuits.  

This was the calorie bomb I was just about to dig into when I happened to glance toward the diner windows and saw the polka dot skirt scanning the cafe from outside. My fork froze at the pearly gates of my open maw, as I wondered if he had tracked me here.

I turned my head back toward my fork and plunged the simmering mass of oil and fat into my mouth, and realized that yes, I was in fact…a bear myself, and decided I was going to be comfortable being that person and there was no reason I needed to withhold that from anyone and lose my sense of me. 

In that spirit, I took two more full and enthusiastic bites, washed them down with a freshly topped off mug of coffee, and confidently...defiantly even…looked back toward the windows. 

The streets were once again deserted.

1b,
The black bear had scurried away, but I wondered if I should continue my journey up to the top of Okie Mountain. I suspected, correctly, that this would be the last time I would ever see this mountain or spend the night on it. It was the first and only time I would be here since Okie had died.

I pressed on toward the summit, with no further sign of any other living creature besides birds and bugs. The big tree which had once been visible all the way from the Washington border had been cruelly chopped down. It put a damper on the joint I had always wanted to smoke on the top of the hill. 

The descent back to the homestead was fraught of course, as I fully expected to encounter the ravenous and angry omnivore laying in wait for me. I couldn’t rightly relax until the final half mile of the hike.  

Only then did it occur to me that there was just the faintest possibility that the creature whose hearty meal of god knows what I had interrupted might well have been Blackie. He would have been fully grown, and there was a chance he would have survived beyond his normal life span due to the fact that Okie hadn’t allowed any hunting on the mountain during his own life. Or maybe it had been one of Blackie’s offspring.

Was it a sign from Gramps? Keep going. Don’t let what your fear prevent you from going where you need to go.

Within five years Gram would finally relent and move to a duplex in the Spokane Valley, and the renters who moved in afterward managed to burn down our old mobile home on the property. The magic of nostalgia may be the cruelest of all…it cares nothing for the places we leave behind and changes them beyond the scope of anything we could have dreamed while we were in them. 

Ah well…at least the Pork Store is still somehow there in the Mission District.

This CNF piece was a result of a writing challenge prompt posed in a meeting of my new venture with my new colleagues for the upcoming launch and schedule of the Caravan Writers Collectives’ events and courses. This is one of the wildest and most creative collaborations I’ve ever had the joy of being a part of. In the words of my colleague Holly Starley: “What if we shared more wildly? say, at a breathtaking vista where we think, What if we made this a community project?!” What she is…what WE’RE saying is… we want YOUR variations on a bear.

Better yet, join us for the weekly Caravan Write-In workshop/gathering, starting Saturday, June 7 and see where a prompt, a comment, an idea, an insight, a conversation, a spark of connection, and the interconnectedness of writing in community lead you. Take part in the kind of magic that happens when writers gather and hosts share prompts they’ve seen open up work you wouldn’t come to any other way.

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For the comments, have you seen a bear in the wild? Would you want to? What’s your favorite wildflower? When have you folded yourself into shapes that don’t quite fit you? And what’s your variation on a bear?

Share here and/or make your own post and tag

Caravan Writers Collective

in the post and/or a note to have it included in the collection! I would LOVE to see yours alongsidethis one by

Marya Hornbacher

on another wild encounterand those coming from my other two Caravan colleagues,

Matt Smythe

and

Paul Corman-Roberts

and you can find their Bear stories here:

HOLLY STARLEY

MARYA HORNBACHER

MATT SMYTHE

Together we are the Carvan Writer’s Collective.