dual personalities

Our North Country heat-wave has finally broken (glory, hallelujah!), and I am actually wearing a sweater this morning, though it will warm up into the upper 80s later today. There’s nothing like a spell of real hot weather to remind us of how hard our ancestors had it. The true pioneer had to face all sorts of difficulties: inclement weather; lack of food, and wild animals — even BEARS.

Speaking of our ursine friends, son #2 and his lovely lady will soon be leaving for six weeks in bear country. They are going to Kodiak Island, home to the world’s largest bears. No kidding, on all four feet Kodiak bears stand up to 5 feet at the shoulder, and when they stand upright they can reach 10 feet tall.

Just a friendly bear hug! Look at those claws!

Fortunately, they are also shy and mostly keep to themselves, but one should exercise caution when hiking near salmon streams.

I will worry about my intrepid hikers the whole time they are gone! Still, this job-related trip offers a great opportunity for adventure on the side, especially since there are fewer and fewer wild places.

Not so long ago the wilderness started in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, where “Indian trails still ran crooked through the woods, and the timber was thick and untrodden enough to hide miraculous things. There were catamounts still claiming this new country — or painters, as some folks described them — and bear marks still showed upon trees where the animals scratched them.”  Most of those early pioneers could have said, “the family ways had always been the ways of the man who cuts a deadfall and sets it up, and not the man who cradles grain. They were more at home with fishing poles than they were with hop-vine poles, and there was memory of ancestors on both sides of the family who had come out of the Kentucky mountains during the Indian days.” None of them “ever made a sock of money. But one of them did kill a bear with his knife.”*

Let’s hope no one needs to do that on Kodiak Island!

If you’re not feeling up to a face-to-face encounter, you might want to tackle one of these grisly grizzly movies, though they are about smaller bears.

Night of the Grizzly traumatized me as small child and I don’t think I’ve seen it since. Equally traumatizing, though for different reasons, is Werner Herzog’s documentary,

If you want something more family friendly, you might try

but don’t be misled, bears are more Grizzly man than Grizzly Adams. They’re wild animals. All of this makes me think the young travelers ought to concentrate on whale-watching!

*The first quote is from MacKinlay Kantor’s short story “The Witch Doctor of Rosey Ridge” and the second from the same author’s story, “The Comforter Returneth”. You can read them both here.

All photos were recovered from Google image.