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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