Bearly Escaped

Alert readers will remember my previous reminiscence on bears. This past weekend we returned to the remote New Mexico cabin of St. Pauli Girl's brother and sister-in-law who I affectionately nicknamed Mr. and Mrs. Grizzly because they built the cabin themselves on a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

This cabin is in an area populated by people who do not wish to be found (all six of them). It is so remote that mobsters will tell you that you only need to go about a quarter ways up the road if you want to bury a body. It is so remote that even UFOs are afraid to go there (and we all know how much UFOs love New Mexico). But more importantly, this is a place where you learn what "night" really means. If you haven't been in the dark hundreds of miles from the nearest city light, you don't know about night.

During the weekend, St. Pauli Girl kept making fun of me for being afraid of bears while I maintained that I had a healthy respect for bears. She apparently thought that if a bear appeared, you packed it up a nice picnic basket and sent it on its way. We spent the day hiking up the mountain while practicing our bear scare tactics like stepping on broken branches, banging on rocks and calling out to the bears so as not to surprise them. Meanwhile, I imitated the sound of a .50 caliber machine gun and World War II howitzers thinking that would best scare bears. After barely making it back to the cabin before a thunderstorm, we spent the remainder of the day and night in the cabin.

Main Cabin

The cabin had only one bedroom and a loft which is where we slept last year. However, this year, Mr. and Mrs. Grizzly had set up an old small camper behind the cabin as a little guest cottage. We said goodnight and headed to the tiny camper.

Guest Cottage

After we went to bed, I looked out the window and noted, "It's much brighter tonight than last night."

There was a half-moon and some cloud cover which provided a surprising amount of light. About forty minutes later, as I was drifting into unconsciousness, I suddenly opened my eyes. I didn't hear anything so I must have sensed the dark now coming through the window. I saw a silhouette of an animal's head and two large paws in the window. A bear!

My bear survival instinct immediately kicked in, and I screamed. As St. Pauli Girl sat up, the shadow disappeared. We looked at each other and realized I had had a bad dream. But then the shadow popped back up in the window. So apparently, dreams can't come true, but nightmares can. I leaned forward and closed the window while we both yelled and screamed at the bear to go away because bears are supposedly frightened of humans making noise. The bear disappeared again, and we thought we were safe.

Then it appeared in the back window. I struggled to find the handle to close that window. We kept yelling and pounding on the side of the wall. I got the window closed then tried to close the curtains thinking that would save us. Then I thought that's stupid, I can't see what's happening. I pulled the curtains open and saw that was one ugly, mean looking bear. So I closed them again right as he slammed a paw against the window.

Meanwhile, St. Pauli Girl put a pillow up against the window. I sat back and tried to think of something to scare the bear.

"Oooga-Booga-Boo!" I shouted.

"Wait," St. Pauli Girl said. "Did you just go Oooga-Booga...?"

"Well you're the one trying to start a pillow fight with him!"

I then resorted to pirate talk, "Arggggghhhhh!" I shouted. I noticed the cabin lights had come on. "That's good, I guess Mr. and Mrs. Grizzly heard us. They'll save us. They must have a machine gun or a bazooka to deal with this thing."

A minute later, we heard Mrs. Grizzly on the deck banging on pots and pans. At last, this disrupted the bear because he was torn between engaging in a pillow fight and getting called to dinner.

Mr. Grizzly came out onto the deck and sized up the situation. He looked at the bear then at the twisted, dented skillet in Mrs. Grizzly's hands. "You're gonna need a bigger pot."

He grabbed a shovel and waved it over his head, cautiously approaching the bear which lumbered away. He grabbed a small flashlight and set off after the bear. And by small flashlight, I mean it would have been good for a dentist looking for cavities but not so much looking for a 300 pound black bear in the dark night.

We finally felt safe enough to step out of the camper. Figuring our noise and the shovel had scared the bear away, we began to calm down and relax. Mr. Grizzly called out from the darkness that he couldn't see the bear anywhere.

"I think he went under the camper," St. Pauli Girl said.

I jumped back about five feet. "Then why are we standing right next to it?"

Mr. Grizzly shined the light under the camper, but the bear was nowhere to be found. We all stood next to the deck and breathed a sigh of relief. After a few minutes, Mrs. Grizzly shined her flashlight just beyond the camper and onto the bear's head. He had been sitting there less than ten meters from us the whole time. Now if Yogi was smarter than the average bear, this bear was valedictorian with scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and naturally, the University of Maine.

We shouted and yelled and banged on the pans again. He slowly got up and began to saunter away like he had been caught with a fake ID at a bar. As he moved up the trail, he looked back over his shoulder at us. I couldn't decide if he was thinking, "You guys are no fun" or "yeah, I'll be back."

We weren't taking any chances. We moved our belongings into the cabin and the spent the rest of the night in the loft.

Outhouse in the distance. That's a really long walk after dark.

The next morning we conducted a postmortem over coffee. We decided had we simply closed the windows and kept quiet, the curious bear would have eventually left of his own volition. We also learned that bears can be vewy, vewy, quiet, fearless and leave no footprints despite the rain of the previous day. In short, bears probably prowl the area more than anyone realized. But then the discussion degenerated into puns like "we bearly escaped" and "it gives you paws for thought."

But if you're keeping score at home: Bears: 1, Pots and Pans: 0 (with one skillet on the disabled list).

Bears Everywhere

Back in August, St. Pauli Girl and I went to visit the mountain cabin of her brother and sister-in-law in the mountains of New Mexico. The rocky dirt road leads to a location so remote that the only area inhabitants are people that don't wish to be found or are up to no good.

“Have you ever thought of building a still out here?” was the first question I asked my brother-in-law.

But it is a very nice cabin, built completely by hand, which is why I refer to my brother- and sister-in-law as Mr. and Mrs. Grizzly. We spent the day hiking around the 25-acre-mountain lot where Mr. Grizzly pointed out the decades-old bear trail and all of the rocks bears had recently turned over looking for grub. Or in this case, grub worms.

Later that night, Mr. Grizzly started grilling some sausage. “Supposedly bears can smell grilled hamburger meat from two miles away,” he noted.

I glanced all around. “And how far away can they smell grilled sausage?”

“That’s five miles.”

Luckily we didn't encounter any bears. That’s especially lucky because the only restroom was an outhouse necessarily situated some running distance from the cabin.

Last weekend, St. Pauli Girl and I returned by ourselves to New Mexico where we had rented a secluded cabin on the side of a mountain. A notice on the door of the cabin warned about high bear activity in the area. The flyer included a cute cartoon picture of a smiling bear wearing a chef's hat and grilling hamburgers, with a warning underneath that read: “The real bear will not look like this.”

Thank you! Yes, we were actually expecting him to wear a tie and green hat. If you want to warn people of danger, a cartoon may not be the best way to go. This would have been far more appropriate.

That notice, cute as it was, pretty much ruined my weekend as I spent the rest of the time worrying about bears. I wandered around the outside of the cabin looking for evidence of bears, just like Mr. Grizzly had taught me. Every time I entered a different room I plotted my escape, depending on where the bear might come from. And the fact the front door was a simple sliding glass door didn't make me feel any safer.

“Do you think we should close the curtains on the door?” I asked St. Pauli Girl.

“No, why?”

“If the bear can see inside, he may be more likely to break in. I mean, what if he smells the coffee?”

I then pointed out if we wanted to use the hot tub on the deck, we should do it before we grill the steaks. “I bet they can smell prime rib eye from ten miles.”

We did make use of the hot tub, but I didn't enjoy it very much. I was on the lookout for bears.

“Will you stop it and just relax,” St. Pauli Girl said at one point, noticing I looked ready to bolt at the slightest rustling through the pines.

“I think the only thing worse than being eaten by a bear would be getting drowned by a bear,” I said. “Heck, if he tossed some carrots and onions in first, he could just turn this hot tub into a big stew pot.”

But once again we survived the weekend with no bear sightings. On the last day, we wandered around the property a bit. On the hill behind the cabin, I noticed a sign that marked the boundary of the national forest.

“Oh I'm so stupid,” I said slapping my forehead.

“What?”

“This is a national forest, and the government is shut down. The bears are on furlough.”