Don’t Feed the Bears
My second sister likes to say I lie.
In some ways she’s not wrong, even if I prefer to think I perceive things differently from everyone else.
She’s a lawyer.
I have my rules and she has hers.
I recently returned to Boston for my younger sister’s birthday. I know you’re not supposed to tell a woman’s age. I’m a bad man. My sister is 38.
We were eating lobster at the camp at Watchic Pond. The night sky was a familiar blue and the lake lapped at the shore in a wind-driven language. All my family was there and I asked if anyone remembered watching the bears eat garbage at the Standish dump.
My father at 83 was blank.
My aunt and uncle said, “No.”
My older sister and brothers rolled their eyes.
The younger sister demanded, “Were you on LSD?”
“No, I was only four.” I was almost sure of my answer, then again no one had disproved that the CIA hadn’t experimented experimenting on children in the 1950s. “I swear I saw them.”
“My postman had a cousin up in Naples.” My uncle like my father and his sister were Maine natives and he had been coming to the pond since 1942. “This bear kept on eating his garbage. He locked the lids. Build a shed. The bear found a way in. He finally stored the trash in his house and the bear crashed through a kitchen wall.”
“What he do then?” My sister had never heard this story.
“He shot the bear dead and back-hoed a hole to bury the bear. Didn’t want to have to deal with the wildlife officials.”
“And no one was hurt?” My sister had been fined by a game warden for not wearing a life preserver in a canoe.
She understood what the law was like in Maine.
“Only the bear.”
My introduction to bears was a teddy bear. His name was Billy. I have no idea where he went astray. Maybe during the move to Boston.
GOLDILOCKS was next and I thought bears lived in houses, until my mother read THE LITTLEST BEAR as a bedtime tale. The plot was a nicer version of
THE YEARLING. A boy adopts a bear cub on a Maine island until the bear grows too big to be with humans. Yogi and Boo-boo were my next bears. They spoke funny. My concept of bears had no ground in reality, but the bears eating garbage at the dump were not figments of delusion.
After leaving Maine bears didn’t figure into our world. 
The Boston Bruins haven’t won the Stanley Cups since 1971.
I became a hippie. Long hair and everything.
In 1972 I had camped in the White Mountains. Without a permit. I overnighted in the shelter of a glacier rock. No tent. Only a drop cloth and a sleeping bag. I ate cold beans for dinner rather than risk the rangers spotting a fire. The Red Sox game on radio guided me to sleep under a starry sky. A snort disturbs my sleep. Something was lumbering through the underbrush. My hand grabbed a flashlight, but hesitated turning it on in case the prowler was a ranger. The noise went away and I spend the rest of the night with one eye open.
I found no tracks of bear in the morning.
On another occasion I was hitching through Vermont at summer’s end. A storm struck atop a mountain. Drenched by rain I forced the door of a deserted house.
No one had lived there for a while.
The mildew bedroom was a welcome escape and I read by a candle until falling asleep.
A grunt rattling through the house opened my eyes. The storm had stopped. Another bestial moan sounded from down the hallway. No human made noises like this. A bear must have gotten trapped in the house and was trying to open the door. I wasn’t safe until he got out.
I grabbed my knife and flashlight. I walked down the hallway. The noise was coming from a bedroom. I opened the door, expecting a bear to run out of the room.
Instead a man and woman were making love on the floor.
They saw the knife in my hand and screamed.
It took ten minutes to convince them I wasn’t a serial murderer.
In the morning the man headed north to Canada. The girl accompanied me to Boston. In my apartment she made everyone laugh about my thinking she was being attacked by a bear.
In fact I never heard her over the man’s passion.
We didn’t stay together too long.
Dave Van Ronk performed a wicked version of THE TEDDY 
BEARS’ PICNIC. He performed in Harvard Square. His coarse voice gave the lyrics a menace escaped by most children’s song, yet didn’t portray the teddy bears as eating at a dump.
In 1974 I worked at a restaurant on Cape Ann. The entire staff was gay. We smoked pot after work at a friend’s house on Bear’s Neck in Rockport. Gay men mauled me worse than any bear, but I escaped intact.
The universe of bears tumbles with images of them eating garbage at dumps, cartoons, movies, and story books. When I moved to New York to be a famous writer, I visited the Central park Zoo. It was sad. The elephant was chained in a smelly barn, the gorilla dogded trash thrown by school children, but the polar bear seemed to have it okay. A swimming pool, free food, and a mate. I avoided the zoo in the summer.
In Paris my friend had decorated his 16th arrondisement house with bear furniture. Kurt was a German junkie criminal. We shared a few interests. Art was one of them. He thought I was the next Henry Miller. I wanted to be John Steinbeck. My spelling was atrocious enough to be Hemingway.
He hired me to work at a nightclub in Hamburg. His apartment overlooking the Reeperbahn was packed with bear figurines. All sizes.
When I asked about his collection, Kurt said, “This? This is not a collection. These are my friends. I am a bastard. My father never came back from Russia. As a child I had
no one to protect me. Believe me Hamburg is tough. I created an imaginary bear and he was inside me to get me out of any trouble. After I started making money, I bought these. They protect me now. You want another line?”
Kurt’s drug problem killed him. I broke into the house and stole a small bear. His step-brother put the rest up for auction. I still have mine somewhere.
I forgot about Yogi. and misplaced the edition of THE LITTLEST BEAR in New York. The Bruins continued to go nowhere. I still wear their shirt. It has the old logo. Bears became a beast from Wall Street. Brokers hung in the East Village. They spoke about ‘bulls’ as their friend. Bears were their enemy.
During my journeys throughout Asia in the 90s, I saw trained bears in India. These creatures were shadows of the grizzly bear of legend. A beast standing on its hind legs towered over a man. I was seeing Mrs. Carolina at this time. My father asked what our relationship was. Since she was married, I answered, “We travel together.”
She originally came from Appalachia.
I told her the story about the bears eating garbage. How people watched from lawn chairs, until the police decided the proximity of bears to humans was a danger better not tested. She laughed about them using dynamite to scare the bears. This wasn’t true, but it made the story more interesting.
“If you’re being chased by a bear, throw your jacket at them.”
“You mean like giving a mugger your wallet.” I was for the running like hell school of bear escape.
“No, a bear can run 30 mph. The jacket will make him curious. At that point you’re supposed to get a tree between the bear and you. Maybe you’ll be lucky.”
Her woodlore came from a childhood in the mountains.
On a trip to Montana and Wyoming May 1995 we stayed at the Chico Springs Hotel. I hiked into the mountains. After an hour I reached a sign saying, “Anyone proceeding after this point without a guide will be prosecuted if not eaten.”
It didn’t make any sense.
Eaten?
By what?
I gazed around the slopes. Across the river the wind swayed over a pasture. Bears could be in the grasses. Waiting for me to get closer. I picked up a rock and threw it hard. It barely reached the river. I walked back to the lodge faster than my incoming journey. Mrs. Carolina was soaking in the springs. I joined her.
“How was your walk?”
“Fine.” She didn’t need to know I had been scared.
The next day we stopped in Yellowstone National Park.
A major fire had denuded the forests. You could see far through the trees. A geyser was spewing in the distance. We walked to it. A pool of azure water foamed beneath a rock. Tracks led away from the water. Bear tracks and I started following them. Mrs. Carolina asked, “What are you doing?”
“Following these tracks.”
“And why do you want to meet a bear. Maybe a grizzly bear?’
“No reason.” The bear wouldn’t have any answer to whether my story about his eastern cousin eating at a Maine dump was true or not.
On a later trip to Glacier Park we spotted a grizzly crossing the road. The rangers told us this sighting was very rare.
“It looked like a big dog.”
“Just we glad you didn’t pet it.”
Recently I watched a movie GRIZZLY MAN. This incredibly naive amateur naturalist goes up north to live with the bears. Videos 
them every year. Without them Timothy Treadwell had no life. Werner Herzog assembled these recordings into a movie.
The pay-off is a bear considered a friend mauls ‘grizzly man’ and his girlfriend.
No survivors.
I felt sorry for the girl. The guy was annoying.
Now I’m living in Thailand where the only bears are those sold to the Chinese to cure their impotence or the few in a zoo not far from Pattaya. My daughter loves going to Khao Kio. We feed the bears bananas. No one orders us not to feed them. In ignorance there is freedom.
I tell the story about the bears eating garbage to my wife and daughter. Nu thinks I’m lying. She’s also heard the other stories. Somehow she thinks I’m the man having sex with the girl in the mountain cabin.
Thai women are very jealous.
But all these stories are true.
Maybe not the one about the bears eating at the dump.
But I’ll not tell my sister that.
After all we sometimes need to believe in something that isn’t the truth.
Suggestions for avoiding a bear mauling
http://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/epubs/ht66.html
