[Edits done 5/24/13, including important one between asterisks. More edits 6/14/13.]
[For a sort of informal Part 2 to this entry's Part 1, see here.]
If you’re wondering where my next entries are, don’t worry,
they’re in process. I am writing some entries that have thematic as well as “narrative-stage”
significance and resonance, which it pays to take my sweet-ass time with. By
the way, they don’t have to do with any company I’ve worked at within the past
12 years, but they will hold interest, I believe.
Meanwhile, a little anecdote that shows how life goes on in
my little world:
In recent years, and especially frequently within the past
several months, I have taken hikes between my house and the Highland Lakes post
office, on the main roads connecting them. This is a few miles round-trip, and
takes me about one hour and 40 minutes, to and from. Part of the walk is
through an area that now is part of the local Wawayanda State Park, between the
beach in Barry Lakes and the next lake community over, Lake Wanda, which is a
smallish affair before you get to Highland Lakes. (Beach, you say? Lake communities in this area have long featured
the accoutrement of a beach [or two or three], a manmade recreation area, with
trucked-in sand on the edge of a local pond-like “lake,” that’s a hit among
kids with their mothers in the summer.) This route is also where I had the
experience I recounted early last November, here, concerning a
gas-station line in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Why these tedious facts? Well, in the wooded area between
the Barry Lakes beach and Lake Wanda—which may seem too long to trod through if
you’re haplessly walking and especially leery of the possibility of
encountering passing-by wild animals—you can, not terribly rarely, see some of
our local four-legged friends. These can include deer—and, as seems in recent
times to capture the imagination of so many middle-class Americans
(realistically or not), bears.
(Indeed, before bears became a rather notorious issue in New
Jersey in recent years, one of the first places they made their comeback, crossing
state lines, after being absent from the state for many years, was Wawayanda
State Park, in about 1987, though this was on the side of it in the area of
West Milford, Passaic County, well away from the area I am talking about now. In
1987, I was working as a seasonal worker at the state park when we happened to
encounter some work by some people who I believe were with the state Fish and
Game department, who were trapping and tagging the first intrepid bears making new
appearances in the state.)
Anyway, for weeks now, on my road-following hikes, ever
since the ebbing of winter and what we’d expect to be the hibernation period of
bears, I started carrying my pepper spray with me, lest I have to “reason with
a bear,” as I generally put it, though honestly I hope I’d never have to use
pepper spray on a bear (because then, more or less, the creature would be in a
health crisis, suffering probable respiratory distress, and you would have to
call the police, and hopefully the police could get Fish and Game, or whoever,
involved to provide the appropriate help for the bear; I certainly would not
want, or intend, to kill the bear).
If you think that my “Jersey Mountain Bear” “mask” for my
other blog, and my anecdotes suggesting I am rather bearish, mean that I
shouldn’t be afraid of a bear, actually, when I suddenly come upon a bear, as I
have numerous times in my part of the Garden State, I often have an instinctual
fear, and bears are the only local wild animals I get this from. [If I saw a rattlesnake directly in front of me, I would fear that too--rattlesnakes do live in the area--but I've not had that experience.] But still, almost
never have I had an encounter with a bear where it couldn’t be resolved effectively
and quickly, and without some sense there might be a real danger from the bear.
Actually, as undomesticated animals, bears can often be as frightened of a
human in a bear–human encounter as we can be of them.
Moreover, there are some tactical things you can do to shoo
them off. This is easiest as long as you aren’t challenging them in the paths
they choose to take (and if you find you happen to be, you should change course
and let them go the route they take, which commonly for them, and when they’re
not threatened, is pretty boneheadedly unimaginative and single-minded, so to
speak; also, when frightened, they don’t usually abruptly change course skittishly
while moving at a quick pace, as deer do). So if, with a bear conscious of your
presence, you clap your hands, or rattle car keys, or do something else that
clearly gives an auditory stimulus that can put it on notice, and thus you
alert it to your being nearby, it takes brief cognizance of you and moves on.
Sometimes it can happen to see you and be scared and move on, without your
doing anything to stimulate this.
In short, if you think of them less like some ultra-creepy
velociraptor [sp?] from Jurassic Park
and more like some furry oaf that can be managed—in terms of preventing any
direct “mano a mano” (or “paw a leg,” or “teeth a arm”) encounter—they are not the fearsome monsters that some
people seem to think they are.
But the Mace I’ve carried when on hikes in bear area simply
to be on the safe side. (If you want
peace, prepare for war, as they say.) *[Note that, with a bear, I would always exhaust all diplomatic options first.]*
Anyway, I was walking along a few days ago, and the
vegetation around had grown up so much. Trees had their leaves, and low brush
was all leafy too. The area looked as jungle-like as it ever can, and looked
like such a lush recovery from the leafless zone, subject to dismaying downage,
such as we had around Hurricane Sandy time. Now, if you wanted to be a young liberal
arts “daydream believer,” you could think, “Here I could be like Dylan Thomas,
enjoying a ‘green thought in a green shade.’ ” For whatever that would be
worth.
But per ordinary discretion, I listened for noises in the
woods. Just a squirrel? Something else? I looked carefully around, in a different
strategy than in the barren winter, as I walked ploddingly on that route that I
generally take, whatever the season, in a mechanical way anyway (I don’t jog).
Then, I was in an area that approaches a stream that goes
through a big metal pipe under the road, a major stream that flows from west to
east and is a tributary to, I believe, Lake Wanda. The area is low, and on rare
occasions, this stream has overflowed a bit onto the road, and I think it
overflowed enough with Hurricane Irene in late summer 2011 that, if I’m not
mistaken, it caused temporary closure of the road (which is a remarkable event,
given that the road is an important main artery for Barry Lakes residents to
drive out of their community) (the road has closed at that place under such
conditions at some point, anyway,
even if not with Irene). [Update: A set of journal notes from that time isn't explicit on this closure, but other stuff they report, as well as my memory of that time, suggests the road was closed for a short time because of flooding from that stream.]
And on the east side of the road, as opposed to the west
side which climbs in an embankment, it is all flat, basically a swamp area—and loaded
at ground level with big leaves of skunk cabbage. Skunk cabbage, maybe you don’t
know, is one plant that bears eat, especially when their other foods aren’t
available. Now, this vegetation, along with the smallish trees that populate
that swampy area, makes it look somewhat reminiscent of the jungle scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard
and Chef, looking for mangos, encounter the tiger.
And there, on this hike day, deep in that swampy area, about
100 feet off the road, shaded and looking like a coal-black jungle denizen foraging
in his natural habitat, was a black bear. It looked about 1+ years old, definitely
not the usual smallish “yearling” you might see in the spring, but not either
like the big ones that are about 450 or more pounds. I watched carefully, and
moved steadily along, a little more worried to keep moving. The bear didn’t
seem to become aware of me.
I was nervous. I thought silly things like, ‘I hope I don’t
have an encounter with this guy; I have a business-related phone call to make
around 10:30.’ I played in my mind things I could do if the bear, just pursuing
its own meandering route, trundled all the way out of the swamp and happened to
come toward me. Or if, aware of me, it intentionally, curiously came over to
me. I played out the method of getting out the pepper spray, how to open the “safety
cover” and put my finger in position over the trigger….
I walked on, eventually, a few hundred feet away, stopped at
a favorite location well off the road where I often pause to relieve myself
(hidden from passing traffic, of course; in winter, it’s the “freeze-a-tree”
sort of activity). This location is a bit uphill from where I’d seen the bear.
I watched and listened cautiously, down the slope in the general direction
toward the low, flat swamp, through the new riot of greenery that has come with
spring (which wasn’t terribly much; visibility is now really restricted). There
was no bear in sight.
I continued my walk to the post office. After checking the
mail and having a break there, I headed back. Again, was leery around the swamp
area where I’d seen the bear, but this time, no bear in sight, and no sound in
any direction that could be attributed to such an animal, either. But you could
never be too sure. Vigilance was the watchword as I plodded along in that
stretch, maybe about three-quarters of a mile, between Lake Wanda and the Barry
Lakes beach.
As I said later, now that I had had my first bear sighting
of the season, and on my hike in that one region about which you could playfully
fashion a movie tag line, “In this
wooded area, no one can hear you
scream,” I felt readier if the same thing happened. I had played out how I
might use my Mace, if needed. I could use the same “mental heuristics” in the
future.
And I found that, as often happens with bears within sight
distance of you, what typically happens is quite reasonably anticlimactic. You’ve
been provided with a story for dinnertime, that’s about it.
