The bear went over the mountain
by chuckofish
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.
So much excitement in the middle of the week and then we went right back to work. So I am taking Friday off because daughter #1 is working in town. We are going to try to go to the Art Museum and see the new exhibit, “Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Treasures.”
are heading back to Indiana this morning and it is back to the salt mine pour moi. I hope it is a quiet day!
However you want to spend the 4th of July, I’ll take my cue from those three American flyers in the German prisoner of war camp (surrounded by British officers) in The Great Escape (1962)…waving the flag, playing loud music and sipping some moonshine. (“WOW!”)
We hope this is a “big year” for him, at least in the birding sense. Come see a Pied-billed grebe or a Marbled godwit sometime! We have them in Missouri, you know. After all, we live on the Mississippi flyway.
Today we toast John Singleton Copley (July 3, 1738 – September 9, 1815) on his birthday. Copley was was an American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was famous for his portraits, but the above painting–Watson and the Shark (1778)–traumatized me as a child. It is still scary!
I also saw George M! with Joel Grey at the Muny Opera back in 1970 when it was touring.
I wonder if kids today have ever heard of George M. Cohan or heard any of his songs. I grew up with them. “Over there! Over there!/Send the word, send the word over there/That the Yanks are coming/ The Yanks are coming…” I guess Americans lost their enthusiasm for that sentiment somewhere in the 1960s. Oh well.
June was Leslie Howard and July is Steve McQueen. Have I been a good girl or what? Set your DVRs for Thursdays! By the way, the OM and I watched The Towering Inferno (1974) the other night–possibly one of the worst movies ever–but it was worth the 165-minute investment of time to see Steve McQueen…
…and Paul Newman.
The horrible 1970s sets and costumes were amusing as well. Egad, 1974 was the pits.
Today is also the start of the Dog Days of summer according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. To the Greeks and Romans, the “dog days” occurred around the day when Sirius appeared to rise just before the sun, in late July. They referred to these days as the hottest time of the year, a period that could bring fever, or even catastrophe.
Sunday was the first anniversary of her marriage to DN. We reminisced a little and were grateful that it wasn’t as hot last year as it is this year!
The wee babes came over on Sunday night and messed up a lot of what I had put right during the day. But, truly, life is too short to care about that.
They weren’t terribly interested in the like-new, handmade Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls I bought at an estate sale on Saturday.
dual personalities 