We’re not beating a dead horse, but seeming to find that there would
not be an ideal compromise to allow, or live comfortably with, a bear–human “two-state” solution
[This follows up an entry viewable here. Edit 8/18/13.]
On August 2, a bear appeared next-door, got into a garbage
can, and left a mess in my yard. This came with my being awoken by the dog
next-door (with striking efficiency) barking me out of a sound sleep. The whole
set of phenomena shows just how bears insinuate themselves into middle-class
life in these Jersey mountains, underscoring how there’s no formula for
interrelating with them so that all interests are respected.
I had written a blog entry that day, stirred by the energy
inspired by the event: anxiety, leaping into action like a soldier, anger (not
simply at neighbors—not much at all, at first): all focused my mind for a
quickie, pungent blog entry (an unusually rapid production from inspiration to
posting). Then I withdrew it about a couple days later; editorial discretion,
you could say. (By the way, there had been no exchange between the neighbors
and me about this blog entry.)
Then came Thursday, August 15, and many of the same
phenomena occurred. There was alarming dog barking (this time, two dogs—one was a visitor that is more
apt to bark at a range of things than the one that usually lives there). But
however barking-apt the new dog was, the two (which were both indoors) were in
accord in sounding off in line with this simple fact: bears and dogs are
natural enemies. Have a bear loom into the area, and Man’s Best Friend is
fierce/a little fearful as you rarely see him.
Again, I was deep in sleep. In fact, earlier, I had woken
about 4:50 a.m., went to take a pee. Had been dreaming; woke simply at the
beckoning of bladder, I think. Wasn’t sure if I’d get back to sleep. And DID
get back to sleep; was dreaming again. Suddenly, at about 5:15, the “barking bear-alert
siren.” Awake in a snap. Got up…I’m not sure what I did next. Maybe I looked
outside (via an upstairs window) to the house next-door at one point. Very dim
out; some of their outdoor lights were on.
Back into bed. Felt now it was more futile to think I’d get
back to sleep. Heard some sounds at some point like something being dragged
around. This wasn’t the rumble, as from plastic, I heard August 2 that was very
much able, later, to be associated with the plastic can I later found lying in
my yard like a dead soldier.
Eventually I got up again at about 5:40. Went upstairs,
looked out. Soon, visible (from my elevated viewpoint) over a fence separating
part of my yard from the neighbor’s, I saw a dark, puzzling shape, like a big
bush or rock, black. Suspicious, I watched to see if it would move. It did. And
eventually it morphed into a more recognizable bruin shape as it headed to the
neighbors’ back deck. I called my mother up to see the bear. She came up and
looked, somewhat like a rapt fan.
The bear climbed a bit up to the deck…and eventually he brought
down a yellow garbage can, the plastic type with the screw-top lid. He put it
on its side…and eventually worked to unscrew the top. Years ago, in psychology,
I learned about what was called, in the psychology of learning when applied to
animals, “insight” as opposed to mere learning by crude operant (or, different,
Pavlovian) conditioning. When a monkey sees it can join two sticks together to make a bigger a stick with which to drag a banana
into a cage, it is showing insight.
Well, this crude, lumbering bear, a black hulk in the dim
morning light, showed a Frankenstein-monster level of insight (“Food! Good!” or
whatever Karloff’s fellow croaks out in Bride
of Frankenstein, conforming with the director’s requirement to have the
creature speak for the first time). I saw the bear’s arm/shank reach, clumsily
grabbing onto the side of the lid, as it worked to try turning the lid. How did
you like that. It used to be that you heard that the bears bumped and squeezed
the can until it popped the lid off, but this oaf actually worked to turn the
lid—not with human agility, but with more than squirrel-type dopiness.
Well, when it was lighter out, I eventually went outdoors.
Took my pepper spray, to be better safe than sorry (never wanting to give the
bear a blast). Went to get the newspapers in the driveway. Walked to where I
could see the bear from the street in front, perpendicular to the view I’d had
from upstairs in my house. He was like a devoted lump of dark who-knows-what
working over the garbage he’d spread on the ground.
I went back to the house, asked my mother if she had film in
her disposable camera. Yes, she did. I went back outside, with camera, and this
time with baseball bat—I was a bit overloaded between camera and bat in hands,
and Mace in pocket…plus I wanted my keys at the ready in case Bruin started
locomoting, and I had to hurry back into the house.
I faced the bear, about 75 feet away from it, again from the
street as before. Took a picture. It was lighter out, but still not full
sunlight. I didn’t know if I’d get a good picture of the bear at all, flash or
no flash. But now the flash had agitated the bear (this was hardly what I
intended; but knowing how wild animals react to unusual, blunt perceptual
stimuli, this made sense). The bear started moving as if he was startled, and
would leave his trash breakfast-plate. He moved through a wide parting in the
fence into my back yard.
At one point, I tapped the baseball bat hard on the pavement
of the road, which I don’t think made as arresting a noise as I could have made
if I’d clapped my hands hard. (The bat was more for relatively mano-a-mano
emergency self-protection. I’ve availed myself of it before as a precautionary
measure in similar situations, though never had to use it.)
The bear rearranged his position in the backyard, still
about 75 feet away from me, as if he would head toward me. I moved more toward
the back door of my house, toward the opposite end of the yard from where he
was; this, by the way, was the same door I’d used as mentioned in the blog entry of late July. The bear was now out of my range of sight, since my
house was between me and him…and as I moved toward the back door, I wasn’t sure
but what he would appear from around the back of my house, toward the end where
the back door was. I moved firmly but not in a hectic rush, getting keys out,
managing the clutter in my hands (bat and camera).
Got into the house, door locked, and looked outside the
windows of the sunporch, which the back door opens into. The furry lummox was
trundling along leisurely behind the house, in the basic direction I’d been
leery he might move in, toward the side yard. He looked about 375 pounds, not a
yearling. He had a weird scuffed/rumpled look at his head, and his right ear
seemed folded or damaged. He didn’t appear to have tags, but I wonder if he’d
been tagged on his right ear, and had somehow ripped the tag off (injuring his
ear in the process). I am not sure if he was not the same one that had appeared
either in late July or August 2 (on those dates, there were probably two
different bears).
When he headed toward the side yard, his rump was facing me
as I looked out from the sunporch. He seemed to have a wobbly gait, as if he
was old or a little infirm, but maybe I had this impression because I had never
watched a bear walk from behind this close before, so I was unfamiliar with the
look of the movement. He seemed to have a shaky writhe as he moved. Bears (somewhat
like gorillas) are narrower in their rump areas than their chest/front-end
areas suggest, and also….
Let me see. There are two kinds of animal styles of
four-legged walking, based on whether the two legs on the same side are going
in the same direction or are going
in the opposite direction. In the
opposite-direction style, the right side may have front leg stepping back and
rear leg stepping forward, while at the same time, on the left side, front leg
is forward while rear leg is back. And those positions switch in rhythm, as the
animal walks. One style is called “pacing” (or the animals are called “pacers”—I
think this is the style with the legs on one side stepping in the same
direction—giraffes walk this way), and the other style is called something
else, I forget what.
Anyway, a bear walks with the legs on the one side going in
opposite directions (not like
giraffes). Cats do this too. When you see a cat walk this way, it can seem to
have a mincing saunter. Well, a bear being so large, and with its tail end
rather narrow, looks odd from behind as it seems to writhe along with legs going
in this opposite-direction style. This is a cumbersome way to describe how this
beast was walking on August 15, looking like a wonder, but also making me a bit
puzzled as to whether it was sick.
It moved on across the side yard, turning by about 60 degrees
to the side facing the road in front. In the dim-ish light, it was set off
against light wood chips all over the ground, and I called to my mother who was
inside the house—she was in the kitchen, feet away, but with inner door closed
between us—to look outside in the side yard; the bear was there. For some
reason, she headed toward the front of the house, at an angle where she
wouldn’t see it. She looked out and, as I glimpsed her, she showed she couldn’t
see it. Frustrated about her move, I told her it was now heading to Frank’s, a
house across the street….
##
Long story short, I went outside a few more times, after the
bear had moved out of view, and peered around warily; never saw it again.
However, I took my pepper spray to the destination I had outside the house,
amid preparations for my day before I headed out on the road.
The garbage can that we’d seen the bear lift off the back
deck lay sideways, garbage strewn near it, unsightly in the neighbors’
backyard. The female owner had earlier left for the day. The other male
regular-worker left a while after 6 a.m., I think, and this time I never even
saw him outside, meaning there was that much less a chance we’d cross paths.
Ultimately, probably a young son of the household would have
to deal with the mess. (This seems to have happened, as I found when I got home
several hours later, and found the mess cleaned up, without any of the working adults' cars back yet.)
By the way, in the morning, I inspected my backyard, well
after the bear had passed through. Wanted to see if I would find some bear
scats, so often a calling card left by a bruin you had seen pass through. I
found some mounds of weird orange stuff right next to a tree where I’d seen the
bear, from my safe position 75 feet away, after it had passed into my yard. It
was hard to tell which end of the bear it had come out of. It looked a bit like
pumpkin mush, complete with seeds, or maybe some cooked squash or who knows
what else, with seeds or such in it. (It was a classic variation on what, as a
habitual expression of hers, my mother describes as “shall I or did I?” [See End note.]) If the
bear had barfed it up, by the looks of it I wouldn’t have blamed him, but
anyway, most carefully assessing, I think he had crapped this out. The point, as I’ve said before: Bears so often
take a country dump when they are momentarily scared by humans.
(Rather vexingly to me when I got home, when I talked about
the mound of scats to my mother, she said she hadn’t seen it. She had walked in
the backyard… I was almost indignant. How could she miss it? She who, in the
recent past, was the one to diligently go out and remove bear shit from the
lawn with a shovel. Eventually, after dinner, I took her outside and pointed it
out to her, at the base of a tree. It’s orangey-yellow color made it a little
hard to spot, but her having missed it the first time suggests to me how her
vision is failing. And even when we stood in front of it, I had to work to get
her to recognize it on the ground. Then, once she could see it, it made enough
of an impression that her assessment
was that it was shit rather than puke, too.)
If bears wanted a “two-state” solution to the problem of
Jerseyans coexisting with them, this is one of the things we’d be apt to become
familiar with.
End note.
This does not mean that my mother would consider eating excrement. Her expression "shall I or did I?," meant as a noun phrase that expresses an evaluation and a sense of disgust and confusion, would normally be used in situations such as, in looking at a plate of something that could equally be identified from a certain perspective as chicken a la king or as puke, her saying, "That looks like 'shall I or did I?'" That would be a classic example of what the expression means. Applying it to a pile of bear scats, as I did, is merely to say you don't know what the stuff is at first, while it also is a bit disgusting; you wonder which end of the bear did it come out of? This plus the fact that it was orangey really sealed the notion of describing it as a "classic variation on... 'shall I or did I?'"
