Which reminds me of a man I met in a hot tub in Colorado.
After a day of skiing last week, my sisters and I submerged our aching leg muscles in the hotel's outdoor hot tub as the sun went down. An older gentleman was stewing in the same tub. He'd been there for awhile it seemed. He wore a baseball cap, clutched a beer, and offered us shots of whiskey. But first we overhead him telling some other guy that the bears were coming out of hibernation.
Sister: Bears don't eat people, do they?
Other sister: No, they just attack when they're threatened.
Me: BEARS EAT PEOPLE.
I'd just seen Herzog's Grizzly Man a few days before we flew out to Beaver Creek. If you haven't seen it, it's beautiful and elegiac, a dismaying portrait of a man who so loved himself in the presence of bears, he lived near them until one killed him.
The man in the hot tub found it incumbent to tell us a grotesque story about his brother-in-law's wife's death. Apparently, while camping in the mountains in a cabin, the brother-in-law, his wife, and a group of campers encountered an aggressive bear which they successfully managed to chase away. However, the wife (a "mountain woman" who knew her way around a shotgun) was left alone at one point, and the bear returned to the cabin. It chased her onto the roof of the cabin, knocked her off the roof of the cabin, then ate her on the ground. Her husband returned to find his wife mostly eaten by a bear.
Though horrified, I can't say I was surprised. Not because I'm familiar with the murderous wiles of bears or the chaotic, destructive force of nature, but because I more or less expect no less of life. This is likely why I write fiction. Stories are a love song to a bear that will eat your wife while you're out chopping wood.
I realized that I'd said as much to my friend in a way that I thought relevant to her book. There are ideas--loneliness, surprise, death--and then there are things happening to people--bears. If there's a problem, there should be a solution. Then the next part is when the solution disappoints, and how that becomes the new problem. But it can't be bitter; it's more like a joke taken in stride by one who understands she deserves nothing. The world didn't ask for you.
My sister wanted to know what happened to the bear. Hot tub man said they went out and shot it. I found that unnecessary; it hardly seemed satisfying for a hungry animal to be brought to justice. How would they even know it was the same bear? The man said that bears had their own land, so much land you could hardly believe it, and if they didn't get shot, they'd eat more people because they got off scot-free the first time. "I guess that's true," I said, and left the tub to towel dry in the falling snow, which I meant to imply: I would just leave the bear alone. Maybe this means I find peril to be the natural state of things, and any attempt to lessen the impact to be a futile exercise. But, then again, that's only if you refuse to see it from the perspective of the bear.
This is what I was thinking about today as I stacked cans of cat food under the sink.
I'll have a story published in the next CANTEEN, out in June.
