The Glass Man Card

My wife and I just went to see The Revenant, which is a movie that examines the age-old question: How long can frozen snot stay attached to a man’s beard in South Dakota in the winter? Spoiler Alert: The answer is six weeks.

While on a fur trapping expedition in 1823, Hugh Glass was mauled by a grizzly bear. He survived the attack, even helping to kill the bear in the process, apparently because he was the manliest mountain man who has ever lived. He is probably still alive. Because no one on earth was even a tenth of the man he was, his hunting partners ended up being less than honorable. They left him for dead without any weapons or food. They didn’t even leave him a car or a cell phone, both of which would have been super-helpful.

Was Hugh Glass just going to give up and die? Of course not. He can’t be killed. He just blew some snot onto his manly mountain man beard, which immediately froze since it was minus three thousand degrees for the entire movie, set his own broken leg, and crawled back home wrapped in the skin of the same bear that tried to kill him. That’s right. Suck it, bear. Not only did you not kill me, but now you’re dead and I’m going to wear you home.

He crawled two hundred miles back to Fort Kiowa just to kill the guy who left him for dead. Nowadays we’d complain if we had to crawl twenty feet to hurt a guy’s feelings. Two hundred miles! I wouldn’t even drive two hundred miles to seek revenge. At mile thirty I’d pull off at a burger place and decide to forget the whole thing.

Speaking of food, I was struck by the irony of my comfy modern surroundings while I watched Hugh Glass show the world what manly really looks like. We saw the movie at Studio Movie Grill, which is a new theater in our town that serves you real food and drinks during the movie. You get a tiny little table in front of your plush leather seat, complete with a little red call button for your server. It’s wonderful, but it was a strangely luxurious setting for such a harsh movie.

As I watch Glass try to stay alive by eating a rancid piece of rotten sinew off a decaying buffalo carcass, I push my little red call button to signal my server that I need more sour cream for my Loaded Potato Skins.

Glass tries to tend to the gaping claw hole in his neck and the exposed ribs on his back. Our seats are too close to the screen, and I shift in my puffy leather recliner because my neck is getting a little sore from looking up.

Glass has trouble laying down in the snow to drink from the freezing river because of the hole in his neck. I spill a little of my delicious Fat Tire Amber Ale. I push the little red button and my server brings me some extra napkins while Glass cauterizes his neck wound with gunpowder.

Glass is only wearing animal skins and keeps ending up in rivers, having to crawl back out of the thirty-two-degree water to lay in the snow. My jeans have a little beer on them from the spill, and it’s wet on my leg. I’m annoyed. I complain to my wife.

More snot and drool freeze to Hugh’s beard as he struggles to stay warm in a blizzard by stripping naked and sleeping inside a dead horse. I put my hand into my sweatshirt pocket for a while, because the ice-cold beer glass is making it a little chilly.

Glass manages to chase some wolves away from a kill and throws up while trying to force down some raw buffalo liver. My fries don’t come with the side of ranch I ordered. I push the red button forcefully, perturbed.

Glass stumbles into Fort Kiowa through three feet of snow on a crutch made from a tree branch. I remember how the only spaces left were at the far end of the parking lot when we got to the theater and consider ro-sham-bo-ing my wife to see who has to go get the car.

The whole experience reminded me of the time I was reading a book about Navy SEALs and I got a paper cut. I tried to be tough, but paper cuts really sting.

I left the theater feeling soft and weak, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I think the story of Hugh Glass might even cause some Navy SEALs to reevaluate their man cards.

Oh, well. Different times. Maybe I’d have been as tough as him if I was born in the early 1800s.

Probably.

I sure wish my wife would hurry up with the car. It’s really chilly out here.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Alaska

I am going to Alaska for a week and I’m only allowed to bring two pairs of pants. They are apparently very strict in Alaska about what you can and can’t bring with you. They gave us a packing list that we must follow to the letter. All of our clothes must fit into a 10” x 17” x 24” carry-on. Thankfully they are allowing me to bring five pairs of underwear, but that’s it. Not one pair more!

I guess maybe it’s not really the whole state of Alaska that is regulating my wardrobe. I think the list actually came from the fishing lodge. My wife’s folks are taking us to an all-inclusive fishing resort in southeastern Alaska. “Southeastern Alaska” is another way of saying, “the funny little hanging down part on the right side of Alaska that is really basically just the western coast of Canada.” So really, my wife’s folks are taking us to western British Columbia, so we should be able to get good strong beer but we don’t need our passports.

Whoever it is that is telling me I can only bring five pairs of socks, I think they are possibly concerned about the float plane. They are not the only ones. We fly on Alaska Airlines into Ketchikan, which is located on the southern tip of the U.S. portion of western British Columbia, Canada, where we will spend the night. In the morning, as the fishing lodge’s brochure tells us, a float plane will pick us up at our hotel. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I must assume our hotel is floating on a wharf in the middle of a large body of water. I can’t wait to sleep there. The float plane then takes us directly to the floating fishing lodge. Yes, the entire fishing lodge is also floating. Apparently everything in Alaska has to float. That could be why they limit the amount of pants you bring to their state. Too much heavy luggage and the entire state could go under.

Float plane… Hmm… The only parts of the float plane trip I am really worried about are the takeoff, the flight itself, and the landing. Everything else should be fine. A float plane is basically a fuselage with boat parts and plane parts that is not good at being either a boat or a plane. Who thought that was a good idea? I mean, I’m all for adventure and everything, and life is about taking risks, but let’s face it; you’re going to try to take off from and land this thing on the ocean. Do you know what a concrete runway never does? It never goes up and down. Do you know what never jumps up in front of planes taking off and landing on concrete runways? Humpback whales, that’s what.

As far as the flight itself goes, the boat parts of the float plane do absolutely nothing to help the plane fly once it’s in the air. In fact, they create quite a bit of what pilots call “drag.” Too much extra weight - let’s say from carry-on luggage containing excessive amounts of pants and underwear - and that drag can become a problem, causing the pilots to do something they call “swearing,” and something else they call “ditching.” You do not want to be in the same plane as a pilot who is saying the word “ditch” or anything through his teeth that rhymes with it.

I am thinking only of my children. I am not personally scared of float planes, or of any other type of obviously dangerous multi-use craft that appear to be the unholy spawn of a drunken hookup between Boeing and Boston Whaler. I am far too manly for that. The thing is, there is a very minute chance that something could go horribly, horribly wrong with the virtually foolproof task of removing a top-heavy catamaran from the choppy, wavy ocean at high speed using a propeller and wings, flying that boat in the air for miles and miles over a large, wide island that you cannot land on even if you wanted to, and then putting it safely back down in the whale-infested ocean. I mean, I’m sure it will all go fine, but on the off chance it doesn’t, I would simply prefer not to orphan our children in one fell swoop if we can avoid it. So I’ll try to get separate float plane trips for me and my wife, but if we have to fly together, I will personally go through each passenger’s 10” x 17” x 24” bag and count their pants.

My wife, on the other hand, was never worried about the float plane ride. (At least, not until now.) Since we’re talking about Alaska, and we’re talking about my wife, naturally she was worried about bears. She heard “Alaska” and thought, “No way. Too many bears.” Then she heard “floating lodge” and changed her mind. No problem! We’re out in the water. Bears can’t get us. Let’s go!

I heard “floating lodge,” took one look at the aerial photograph on the website (no doubt taken from a flying catamaran of death), and noticed that the lodge was in fact floating in a nice, protected horseshoe bay, but it was only twenty or thirty feet from the shore on one side. It might have even had a little gangplank.

I didn’t bother to mention to my wife that not only can bears swim really well anyway, they could probably walk to the lodge. I want her to come with us.

Neither of us have ever been to Alaska, and we’re looking forward to it. After looking at a map, it turns out it’s pretty big. I have relatives who live there, (in the real Alaska, not western B.C.), and when we were invited to come along on the fishing trip, my first thought was, “Hey, cool, maybe we can go see my cousins.” Then I looked on a map and realized that was like living in Florida, going to Wisconsin on vacation, and while you were there, trying to swing by California to visit someone.

Maybe we can catch a quick ride over to see them on the float plane.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Lions and Tiger Sharks and Bears, Oh My

My wife’s folks live in Morro Bay, California, and we have traditionally loved to go and visit them in their sleepy little beach town, but at this point, we may need them to move. Apparently, all the dangerous animals in North America are descending on Morro Bay, no doubt lured in by the bargains on touristy sea shell art and good clam chowder.

We were there with them last week, and everything with large teeth showed up at the same time. We were greeted with the news that a shark had bitten a surfer’s board just south of the bay two days before our arrival. The surfer was uninjured, but the board did not fare as well. Officials said the eleven-inch diameter bite ring left in the board suggested a shark length of approximately “holy-crap-who-the-hell-cares-how-long-it-is-its-mouth-is-a-foot-wide!” That was obviously just an estimate, since officials were unable to determine the species, but one unnamed Fish and Game officer was quoted as saying, “Whatever kind of shark we’re dealing with, it’s not too bright. It chose to bite into the hard foam surfboard, when the soft, tasty surfer was right there.”

Choosing to believe that the bungling shark, which may or may not have learned from its culinary mistake, would obviously go further south in search of warmer waters and softer prey, we bravely made our way down to the beach. We were greeted by flyers posted at all the public beach access points, warning us of a “Confirmed Shark Sighting” in north Morro Bay the day before. The flyer advised us to “enter the water at your own risk,” and to “keep away from marine wildlife.” In an apparent jurisdictional mix-up between the coastal first-responders, the flyers were printed and distributed by the fire department. No one could figure out why, since, as far as anyone can remember, no sharks in Morro Bay have ever caught on fire.

Since none of us had brought surfboards - the obvious preferred dining option of central coast sharks - we were reluctant to venture too far out into the water, for fear of becoming the backup meal plan. We did allow the children to play in the ocean - in this case, the ocean being defined as the wet sand instead of the dry sand - and considered ourselves to be perfectly safe. Boy, were we wrong!

Little did we know, the water may have been the safest place. We returned to the house later that day to the news of three confirmed mountain lion sightings in and around Morro Bay that morning. We had foolishly been facing the ocean all day, paying no attention to the trees and bushes behind us that could have contained a deadly beast. We considered ourselves lucky to be alive, having literally been surrounded by dangerous wild animals all day. One official from the Harbor Patrol was quoted as saying, “Now we need the fire department. It’s a cat.”

We stayed inside for the rest of the trip and played gin rummy.

This infestation of carnivorous beasts is nothing new. In May of 2013, morning surfers alerted city officials that there was a bear wandering around on Morro Rock, which sits on a small peninsula, basically out in the middle of the ocean. After drug testing the surfers and coming up negative, the officials were forced to look into their story. Sure enough, there was a 250-pound black bear sitting in the bushes at the base of the big rock, less than fifty feet from the beach that would soon be populated with tourists.

Since there were apparently no concurrent shark or mountain lion sightings to deal with, almost every agency within a thirty-mile radius was called in for support. State police, local police, firemen, State Parks, Harbor Patrol, Fish and Game, the marines, guards of the national, life, and coast varieties, EMTs, meter maids, boat captains, a small detachment from the local VFW, and even the janitor in charge of the Morro Rock Beach public bathroom were all on-scene and available to help.

The bear caused such a panic among the Morro Bay officials that the high school, over half a mile away, was put on lock-down. The Morro Bay High School principal ignored the opportunity to have one of the most epic impromptu all-school field trips ever, in favor of locking the kids in their classrooms to stare down at their phones some more. That seems short-sighted to me, but in all fairness, he might have been worried that many of his pasty-white, video-game-generation students would simply not be able to physically make it a half-mile down the beach. It’s all about the children’s safety, after all.

Despite the fire department’s insistence on being the lead agency, stating repeatedly that the bear looked awfully dry, the California Department of Fish and Game finally took control of the scene. They shot the bear with a tranquilizer dart and relocated it to California Valley, which was viewed by many to be inhumane, since California Valley is nothing but hundreds of thousands of acres of dry brown grass, and does not have good fish tacos. In any case, the wayward bear was certainly not the first Morro Bay tourist to take drugs and wake up in an unfamiliar place, but he was definitely the hairiest.

The Morro Rock bear was by far the most exciting thing to happen in the little tourist town last year. I’m fine with a little excitement once in a while, but it really seemed like the animals were ganging up on us this trip. We will probably still keep visiting, though, if for no other reason than the fantastic local news coverage of these events.

The 2013 bear news highlight had to be this gem of an observation by one local reporter: “While this is the first sighting of a bear at Morro Rock, bears have been spotted just south of here in Los Osos.”

That revelation may have even prompted the first-year Spanish students at Morro Bay High School to glance up from their phones long enough to say, “Duh!”

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Bear Box

We’re going camping again, and I really don’t know why. You may recall my June 22, 2011 column entitled “The Mama Bear,” recanting the harrowing tale of my wife’s brave battle with some bat guano-crazy bears at Lake Tahoe. If you have not read it, please do so now. We’ll wait for you.

Just a Smidge: "The Mama Bear" - 2011-06

OK, now that you’re back, we’ll continue. My wife and our friend Carrie have not fully recovered from that incident, and I’m not sure they ever will. After the Tahoe trip, my wife quickly abandoned her Rambo-like bear hunting persona, and reverted back to a more recognizable version of her old self, complete with her former healthy respect for bears, and now an additional non-healthy fear and loathing of bears, brought on presumably by some sort of bear encounter PTSD.

We have been “camping” since the Tahoe trip, but only in cabins. Our last adventure with Carrie and Jeff was earlier this summer at Manzanita Lake in Lassen National Park. Our cabins had four thick wooden walls, a roof, and a door that closed and locked, so the ladies were moderately at ease. Each cabin also had a large steel bear box, located outside the cabin, just like the one we didn’t use quite right in Tahoe two years earlier, so the ladies were also moderately on edge. I figured the Lassen bears were probably just regular black bears, and not the Cheetos and hotdog eating, quasi-domesticated, lethal house pets posing as bears that roam the campgrounds of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, so I tried to put their minds at ease.

“We’re far more likely to be killed in the night by that giant volcano right there than by a bear. There have been a lot of little earthquakes here in the last few months. This place is ready to blow its top. The bears probably already left.”

They didn’t seem any more comfortable after that pep talk. Go figure.

Since there was no way I was going to get away with any type of behavior regarding the bear box other than strict adherence to the policies that my wife is now intimately familiar with, I began my Lassen trip by “cleansing” our vehicle of any food, food related products, and anything that has a smell of any kind. That was easy. The hard part was figuring out what to do with the kids’ car seats. If you had enough glue, time, and patience, you could reconstruct an entire case of granola bars from the crumbs hidden in the fabric and crevices of each seat. Even though the ten pounds of crumbs are old and stale, they still qualify as food to a bear, so what do I do with these seats? Cleaning them out is not an option. If I was ambitious enough to do that, they wouldn’t be full of crumbs in the first place. I can’t fit all three of them in the bear box and still have room for the actual food, so now what? I finally decided to just remove them from the car and set them on the ground. I figured if a bear wanted them, he could have them, but at least he wouldn’t total the car in the process.

I foolishly assumed I was done with the bear box and other bear-related issues after I had finished unpacking the car and cleaning up after dinner. Boy was I wrong. We stowed all the food and coolers back in the big steel locker with the creaky door hinges and locked ourselves safely in the cabin for the night. Or so I thought.

3:00 A.M.

"Dad, wake up. I need to pee."

“OK, go for it.”

"Don't you dare send him out there alone!!!"

“Hey, buddy, why don’t I come with you?”

Creak, groan (the sound of my body moving at night)

“Dad, do we have to walk all the way to the bathrooms?”

“No, of course not. We’re camping. Pee on that tree.”

“OK… Dad, my foot got pee on it.”

“Important lesson here, son. When you’re wearing flip-flops and peeing on a tree in the dark, stand on the uphill side.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Back to bed

3:30 A.M.

"Honey, wake up. I totally forgot about the Tupperware container in one of the tubs. It has dish soap in it. We need to put it in the bear box right now."
"No we don't. The bears aren't going to do dishes."
"Yes we do, it's scented. Plus I really have to pee, and you need to come with me."
"These are Lassen bears, sweetheart. Not Tahoe bears. The Tahoe bears were certifiably insane. These bears are normal. They don't want to eat dish soap, and they don't want to get you when you pee."
"Wake up!"
"Oh, well. I have to pee too, anyway."

Creak, groan

“Go to the uphill side of the tree.”

“What tree?”

“Never mind.”

“Get the Tupperware into the bear box and then walk me to the bathrooms. Hurry up, I’m cold!”

Whap. Creeeeeeeeeeak. Slam. Creeeeeeeeak. Bang.

“Be quiet!”

“It’s a bear box, honey. It’s not a quiet thing.”

“Shhhh!”

“OK. The soap is safely in the bear box. Let’s go to the bathroom. Watch out for bears.”

“Shut up, that’s not funny!”

Back to bed

4:00 A.M.

“Honey, wake up. I have ChapStick in my purse!”

“No thanks, I don’t need any. Why are you waking me up to offer me ChapStick, anyway? Wait, do you want to make out or something? Sure, I’ll take some.”

“It’s not for you, idiot! It needs to go in the bear box!”

“No it doesn’t. It will be fine in here.”

“My purse isn’t in here. It’s in the car.”

“It’ll be fine. The smell of your rosy hand lotion will overpower the ChapStick, anyway.”

“I forgot about the lotion! You need to go get them both!”

Damn you, mouth. Listen to it inside the brain before you just say it!

“OK. I’ll go take care of it.”

Creak, groan

“Did you put them in the bear box?”

“No, the bear box is too loud. I didn’t want to wake everyone up again, or worse yet, attract the bears. They know what the bear boxes sound like, you know.”

“Shut up, that’s not funny. What did you do with them?”

“I put them on one of the car seats.”

“Great, now the bears are going to eat our car seats.”

“If they haven’t come for the granola bar crumbs yet, they’re not going to show up for ChapStick and hand lotion.”

Back to bed

4:30 A.M.

“Are you sure it’s going to be OK to leave the lotion outside?”

“Honey, I love you, but I’m going to pull all the food out and make you sleep in the bear box if you don’t stop waking me up!”

This next trip coming up is going to be an actual camping trip, where we sleep in tents, not cabins. That should be great.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Whittling

We went camping this past weekend with two other families. All three families have only boys, so our campsite consisted of six sleep-deprived parents and eight single-digit-age, wild and excited boys. So we gave them all knives.

Two of the brothers had received their very own Swiss Army-style pocket knives from the Yosemite gift shop on their last camping trip, so they brought them along. This led to all the other boys clamoring to have a turn with the knives. Not wanting anyone grabbing for a fast moving blade, in the interest of safety, us dads dug through our camping gear and gave them each their own pocket knife, and taught them the manly art of whittling.

It went something like this:

“Dad, can I use your pocket knife?”

“Sure son.”

(Glare from wife)

“Hey, son, if that knife gets dull, you can use one of the daggers your mom is staring at me with.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Here, check this out. This kind of single-blade knife is cool, because if you put your index finger on this little lever and flick your wrist like this… bam, like a switchblade.”

(Icier, dagger-ier glare from wife)

“Never do that, though. Sorry, honey.”

As is so often the case, the fatherly approach to this type of situation differed slightly from the motherly approach. We dads thought the proper approach was to give our sons detailed instructions on proper knife safety and whittling technique, make sure the first aid kits were fully stocked, then sit back and watch them learn by doing.

As near as I could tell, the mothers’ approach was to attempt to keep them away from all sharp objects until they turn 25.

The dads finally won out, once we promised to take an active role in the refereeing of all knife-related activities, and soon all the boys were happily seated in their camp chairs around the fire pit, whittling like mad. We did, however, run into a few unexpected issues that we never got fully worked out.

For starters, we couldn’t get them to keep their elbows resting on their knees, allowing them to whittle straight out away from themselves. They kept leaning back and bringing the work closer to them and higher, ending up with the stick up by their face and the knife whipping rapidly past the tip of their nose.

They would also get easily distracted, but would continue to whittle, while their eyes wandered off to something more interesting beyond the fire pit. We kept having to say, “Either stop whittling or watch what you’re doing.” Again, the learn-by-doing method would have taught this quite a bit faster, but I guess the moms wanted to save the Band-Aids in case of a bear attack or something.

The kids would also regularly get up and walk around the inner perimeter of the campfire chair circle. It turns out that seven-year-old whittlers have little to no awareness of their surroundings, and neither do five-year-old walkers while in a campfire chair ring of whittlers. Most of our time was spent yelling, “Stop walking! Watch the knife! Be careful! Don’t stab your brother!” etc.

We had to make sure that the whittling remained the standard “sharpen the end of the stick,” or “get all the bark off the stick,” because some of the other things they came up with were not optimal. I found Son Number One with the stick pressed against the top of his knee, sawing a notch all the way around the stick with the knife blade. He was almost through when I stopped him. “Let’s try not to test out dad’s tourniquet skills on this trip, OK buddy? Besides, your mommy would faint and hit her head on a rock. We don’t want that.”

The next day Son Number One and Two both decided that they wanted to make miniature canoes out of ¾” diameter sticks that were 6” long. I just couldn’t see the interior of the mini canoe getting hollowed out very safely, and I figured our first aid kit would probably fall a little short if we had to attend to a knife sticking all the way through a hand. “Why don’t we just stick with ‘standard whittling’ instead, OK?”

For the boys, almost as exciting as being allowed to whittle was the prospect of simply having the knife with them in their pockets. My boys kept asking me if they could take the knives with them into the woods.

“No.”

“Aw, dad. Why not?”

“Because you are not allowed to whittle unsupervised, or more than 50 feet from the first aid kit, and whittling is all you're allowed to use the knife for. Why do you want it?”

“For bears.”

“If you see a bear, I would like you to call to me, instead of trying to take it on with a 2-1/2” dull blade… Unless we tied the knife to the end of a long sturdy stick…”

(Icy dagger glare from wife)

“Never do that, though. Sorry, honey.”

It was a fun weekend. The boys started to learn a new skill, and they all lived to tell about it. As a side bonus, the activity of whittling did serve to slightly lessen the requests to throw another pine cone on the fire, although wanting to throw the other guy’s whittling stick in the fire did result in a few near knife fights.

Even though their mothers refuse to believe it, they were in far more danger after the whittling than during, from running around with the sharp, smooth sticks they made. Our knives were pretty dull.

All in all, it was a successful trip. We came home with all eight boys with the same number of holes in their bodies as they arrived with, and by the end of the weekend they had successfully whittled hundreds of sticks, which was fun for them. They had also successfully whittled their mothers’ nerves down to sharp, raw edges.

Thankfully, we don’t whittle at home.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Mama Bear

We went camping with friends this past weekend at Sugar Pine Point State Park at Lake Tahoe. We were expecting a fun weekend of campfires, hiking, and swimming, but we ended up getting much more than we bargained for. By the time the weekend was through, our kids had some great bear stories and I had a brand new wife.

We arrived Friday afternoon and listened to a ten-minute bear advisory lecture from the park ranger, complete with an affidavit we were required to sign, stating that we understood the bear rules and would gladly be subject to a $1000 fine if we did not keep our food and toiletries locked in the big, green, steel bear lockers provided at the campsites.

OK, OK, we get it. There are bears here. We’ll put the food away. Can we go to our campsites now?

We set up camp in two adjoining campsites and had a fun evening of men setting up tents and making fires, women laughing at the men’s lack of skill in the tent and fire-making departments, and little boys playing in the woods and peeing on trees. Dinner and s’mores and off to bed without a bear in sight. Good times.

I had a book signing back in our home town the next day, so I got up early and drove the two hours back to our house to take a shower. I went off to the bookstore and occasionally received a text message from my wife about something or other to bring back with me that afternoon. When my phone rang around two o’clock, I was expecting to hear about another camping-related item that we’d left behind. Not so.

What I heard my wife say was, “We’ve had some bears. They’re stalking our campsite.”

Hmmm. That’s different than what I thought you were going to say, honey. As the ever-concerned father figure, my first question was, “Is everyone OK?”

After she assured me that everyone was safe and in good spirits I switched to ever-financially-vigilant breadwinner mode. “Is the State Parks Service going to fine us $1000?”

Luckily, the answer to the first question was yes and the second question was no. She then had to hang up because the park rangers had just arrived at our campsite for the second time that afternoon to get the latest bear report. I drove really fast back to the lake.

When I arrived back at the campsite, the rangers were still there. “Have they been here the whole time?” I asked.

“No, we just had a third bear about ten minutes ago,” my wife answered casually, as if close bear encounters were a common occurrence in her life. “I tracked him through the woods until they got here.”

Excuse me? You did what? I have been away for nine and a half hours and when I get back you are tracking bears? What in the hell happened while I was gone?

Here’s the condensed version my wife and our friends, Jeff and Carrie, told me:

They woke up shortly after I had left, had a leisurely breakfast, went on a long hike, and came back to camp and made lunch. They were all assembled together eating at the picnic table in Jeff and Carrie’s campsite, but my wife had left one of our plastic storage bins out of the bear locker and on top of the table in our campsite. No one thought anything of it, since they were close by, until Jeff saw the bear coming through the woods. They watched in awe as the 300-pound black bear walked into our campsite, a mere 25 yards away, and knocked the bin off the table. He (or she) grabbed our big bag of marshmallows and sat down for a delicious and delightfully fluffy snack.

By this time, three adults and five boys had been shoehorned into Jeff and Carrie’s midsize SUV, and were driving away from the bear and toward the ranger station. While they were busy alerting the ranger to their predicament, the bear devoured our entire box of graham crackers.

The rangers came back to the campsite with them and shooed the bear away by yelling at it and banging pots and pans together. When the bear had retreated, the rangers explained the “no food left out farther away than arm’s reach” rule which we had missed during bear orientation the day before. It was at this point that my wife asked the ranger, while crying, if the bear would come back. They reassuringly said, “No.”

Apparently the rangers don’t speak for the bears. They obviously did not take into account the fact that the bear had unfinished business, because he came back about a half-hour later looking for the crucial third and final ingredient to his lunch of s’mores. To the bruin’s dismay, the chocolate bars were locked up tight, and he was out of luck.

Over the initial shock of their close proximity to long-clawed wildlife, Jeff and my wife shooed him away on their own this time while Carrie took the five boys for a nice ride back to the ranger station. Knowing my wife, I think at this point she had gone from being scared to being aggravated that this thing was threatening the safety of her children, not to mention putting a severe damper on the night’s dessert.

When the rangers arrived back at our campsite, they questioned my wife on which way the bear had gone after she and Jeff had shooed it away. Unbeknownst to the rangers, by involving my wife in the hunt for the bear, they had apparently deputized her as an assistant park ranger in her own mind. This became shockingly obvious to everyone a few hours later when a new bear showed up near our campsite. Upon spotting the interloping omnivore, my wife casually asked Jeff and Carrie if they would keep an eye on the boys while she went off and made sure this pesky varmint didn’t cause any trouble around these here parts.

Into the woods she went, armed with the formidable defensive weapons of choice, the universally-feared pot and pan combo. She quietly stalked the bear through the underbrush, making sure she could relay the beast’s exact coordinates to her new comrades-in-arms when they arrived. I guess her plan was to fall back on her extensive deputy park ranger training by banging the pot and pan together if the bear showed any signs of annoyance at being followed.

Thankfully, the actual rangers with actual guns showed up and took over before she was forced to make a move with her deadly cookware. What a difference a few bear sightings can make! My wife went from suburban housewife to Grizzly Adams in the span of two hours. I am convinced that if a fourth bear had showed up before I had arrived, she surely would have slipped off her shoes, clamped a kitchen knife between her teeth, and tried to sneak up on it from behind to teach it a lesson about messing with her kids and her meal plans.

The really funny part is, if I had been there and even hinted at wanting to shoo the bear off, either by myself, or with Jeff by my side, she would have asked in an exasperated and slightly panicked voice, “Are you crazy? Do you want your boys to grow up without a father?”

It just goes to show you, there’s no telling what a mama bear is going to do.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


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