THE KIDS GROANED AND WHINED ALL THE WAY UP OVER KEARSARGE Pass in the southern Sierras of California. Just south of Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the Lower 48, Kearsarge Pass, at 11,760 feet, was a favorite trip during the years I taught in California. On this particular trek Aaron and I were shepherding a group of kids into the Rae Lakes region, a beautiful area within the Sierras. High alpine lakes, rocky jutting peaks, summer snowfields, and marmots—the place had it all. It was like walking into an Ansel Adams photograph. On this particular jaunt, we had planned to be out for six days. Nothing epic, but for an Angeleno kid, or any city-dweller, six days in a tent is a long time.
Aaron Kenny was a husky guy in his early twenties. He wore a trucker hat that read “Damn Seagulls” across the front, replete with a white painted splotch on the bill. He was abstemious—said he’d spent his teenage years coming home from school, shoving two bottles of Corona from his parents’ fridge into the pockets of his jeans, heading up to his bedroom, and using the beers to wash down Adderall and Ritalin. He’d sobered up but lived a Bukowski lifestyle in Eagle Rock—a suburb of Los Angeles—that is, if Bukowski was a teetotaling vegan. He told me once how fruit leather snacks could be substituted for toothbrushing on hasty mornings, information I found both gross and potentially practical.
We got settled into our campsite by the river, and Aaron and I led the kids out in pairs to various spots in a wide semicircle around the basecamp. On this particular trip, the students were instructed to build a homemade shelter for themselves. It was early afternoon, a beautiful spring day, and the kids got to work building their shelters. It was always interesting to me to see how kids would respond to this particular challenge. They were given a big blue tarp and a coil of parachute cord. That was it. They would build little stone-walled huts, brush piles with chambers dug out of the center, lean-tos, and, one time, what resembled a tiki hut. Kids have an interesting perspective on the line that divides the practical from the aesthetic.
I could tell Aaron was a bit unnerved by being so far out in the mountains. Though we were only a single, solid day’s hike in, it was enough to surprise him with the totality of the silence, the complete absence of civilization. He had the desperate look of a Hollywood starlet who’s out of Botox.
I’m no Thoreau. While I love being outside and in the wilderness, it doesn’t feel necessarily transcendent. However, I do feel at ease in the backcountry. I love being away from the pressures of schedules, domestic responsibilities, jobs, appointments, demands, and all the addictive pleasures of convenience: streaming TV, microwaved corn dogs, Costco. To have your sphere reduced to a hissing camp stove with a pot of water just beginning to steam to make hot chocolate on a chill morning is a way to ground myself. It is as though, stripped of the hum of the world, I get the chance to return to myself for a visit. My days in civilization consist of a lot of activity, but it’s an open question whether or not any of it is fulfilling in any substantial way. But dry socks after a wet trekking day? The best feeling ever.
Aaron and I made it back into camp after spreading the kids out throughout the forest as the sky began to gray and darken with night. We pulled on our headlamps and prepared to hang our food in a tree to keep it away from bears. Normally, the best thing to do is bring a bear-barrel, a heavy-duty plastic container that fits snugly in the bottom of a backpack. The girth and shape have been designed so that bears can’t get a grip on the plastic. They end up batting it around but can’t get in. I hadn’t invested in them—they were cost prohibitive to my meager supply budget, which barely covered food and gas to get us to the mountains—and chose instead to hang what was commonly called a “bear bag.” Basically, I’d load all the food into a backpack, then find a tree with a branch that stuck out horizontally at least twenty feet from the ground. I’d toss some cord over the branch and hoist up the bag. The idea was that a bear couldn’t reach it from the ground, and couldn’t get out on the limb to hoist up the bag due to a lack of opposable thumbs.
It was dark by the time we got all the food packed away. We had also collected anything else the bears might like—deodorant, which the kids weren’t even supposed to bring but many did anyway, toothpaste, sun-screen, and anything else vaguely scented and food-like.
Aaron and I headed out beyond the camp to find a good tree. I was usually pretty assiduous about hanging food in a way that ensured it wouldn’t be eaten by bears. I solidly recognized the danger of bringing black bears near camp. Though not as dangerous as a grizzly, they’re still bears. Bears will be bears, after all.
Aaron’s orbit of me was growing tighter and tighter as it got darker and darker. It was becoming apparent to me, as night fell and I could see more and more of the whites of his eyes in my headlamp’s glow, that he was a little afraid of the dark. Most people are. If held at gunpoint, I’d have to admit that I, too, get the heebie-jeebies out in the woods at night. There must be some elemental evolutionary switch that gets thrown as the sun goes down, where our perspective goes from that of predator to prey, because the second I start walking through the dark woods the hair on my neck stands up, my scrotum tightens, and I start walking briskly like I had a double helping of All Bran for breakfast and am headed to the bathroom.
I found a suitable tree, got a rope over a branch, and hoisted up the backpack, tying off the line high on the tree. The large pack filled with all our food swung lightly back and forth. The darkness was complete now.
“Have you ever faced down a bear before?” Aaron asked me, in what I thought a rather endearing, earnest, and twelve-year-oldish sort of way.
“Yeah, I have,” I chuckled, gearing up to launch into one of my many stories that had been proven by the FDA to be an effective sleep aid. We swung our headlamps back toward camp and turned away from the hanging food bag. Aaron was crowding me in the dark, our shoulders brushing. I began to tell my story as we headed back toward where we’d set up our tents earlier.
“Fwooomp!”
From behind us, I heard the food bag hit the ground. Aaron and I looked at each other, blinding each other with the LED glare of our headlamps for a moment. I turned to see a bear next to our food bag. Caught in the spotlight of my headlamp, its eyes reflected as yellow disks.
Aaron screamed. I stood frozen, blood pumping through my body as I felt my brain go instantly offline, replaced by a white scrim of sheer panic. The bear grabbed the pack in its teeth—in its teeth, people—and with a burst of incredible speed, galloped off into the darkness. I heard it splash heavily across a stream behind our camp.
“Fucking bear!” Aaron yelled, his voice sounding like his testicles were in the bear’s jaws instead of our food bag. I turned, but Aaron was already sprinting wildly back toward camp. I turned back to where the bear had disappeared into the brush. My first thought was that I should give chase. My second thought was that that was never, ever going to happen.
As my sphincter slowly uncoiled and rational thought returned, I tried to think of what to do. How would we get our food back? Should I track the bear? That would only work, I realized, if I knew anything whatsoever about tracking, which I don’t. As I stood, immobilized by my own instinctive fear, a realization dawned on me with a jolt. All the kids were spread out through a wide arc of forest, and there was a brave, hungry, and apparently rather pushy bear in the area.
Black bears aren’t normally aggressive. But they can be, when the pickings are good and they are hungry. A bear that was willing to play tug o’ war with a backpack full of food would be willing to sniff out a hidden candy bar or bag of Skittles. I could picture some of the middle schoolers I’d brought, happily munching a bag of illicit M&Ms and looking up to find a bear shouldering its way into their shelter, jaws open and slavering. It was not a positive image from a PR standpoint.
Aaron was petrified. He dove into his tent, and his voice was shaky and high pitched. When I grasped the zipper to open the fly and talk to him, he uttered a sharp squeak. I shone my light into the tent, and his hip, urban, plastic-framed writerly specs couldn’t hide the fact that his eyes were open so wide I feared they’d be locked in that position for the rest of his life. He was whipping his head from side to side, imagining, no doubt, the bear ripping through the nylon walls of the tent at any moment. I told him to stay put and wait. I headed off into the woods to collect the kids.
I am not a brave man. I can barely walk to the mailbox at night without skipping rapidly through the dark, whistling a tune called “I Am Totally Not Freaking Out Right Now” so that any hidden beasts are disinclined to attack. Heading off into the woods now was about as easy as giving myself a colonoscopy with a pair of binoculars.
I made it to the first homemade shelter. Erin and Alicia. The kids were quiet, asleep. I tried to wake them gently, without telling them about the bear. I said we were going back into camp, hoping to rouse them from sleep with as little panic as possible. Once they were fully awake, with their sleeping bags bundled in their arms, shoes on, I told them, as calmly as possible, that, yes, a bear had grabbed our food. The kids took it pretty well, most seeming rather excited at the prospect of sharing the woods with a bear.
We made it back into camp. There was no sign of Aaron until I got close to the tent.
“Aaron! What’s up man?”
The zipper on the tent fly whipped up and Aaron’s head popped out.
“The bear! He came back! He was here!” Aaron said, his voice high with giddy fear.
Apparently, Aaron had tried to brave it alone at the camp, standing out in the open to act as a beacon with his headlamp for me. The bear, whose tracks could be found the next day, cruised close enough to camp for Aaron to catch a glimpse of its reflecting eyes in his headlamp. It proved to be too much for him to handle, and he dove back into the tent.
Aaron pulled me aside. “Erik, the bear looked at me. He was looking right at me!” he said as he gripped my arm, trying to convey the terror of that moment.
What happened next is a series of vignettes lodged in my memory. Loudly walking and whistling through the dark forest, guiding sleepy kids back to Aaron’s tent. My headlamp’s beam bouncing around crazily, reminding me of every scene from The Blair Witch Project During one of my trips back, I found the discarded backpack. The contents had partially spilled. The bear must’ve dropped the pack in its escape, or dug something out that was particularly appealing and taken it away. I debated whether or not to bring the bag back. It was, after all, what the bear was after. It also contained all our food, so giving it up seemed a poor alternative. I hauled the bag back to camp, and when I got there the kids were in a frenzy. The bear had returned, circling the camp and staying just beyond the reach of headlamps.
I headed out to collect my last batch of kids. Matthew, son of a German cinematographer, and Todd, a graceful, athletic kid whose sweetness and vulnerability was overshadowed by extreme video game addiction and a penchant for the kind of annoying behavior that makes a teacher want to take a two-by-four soaked in heavy-duty motor oil and whack the little shit upside the head. The boys were conked out in their shelter. Todd awoke in a panic, as he was a certifiable LA city kid whose fear of the dark, and the wilderness, had been apparent on this and many previous trips.
“Wha what?! Erik! What’s going on?” Todd sputtered, raising himself on his elbows in his sleeping bag.
“Shhh, it’s okay guys. We need to head back down into the main camp. A bear came into camp and tried to steal the food bag. We’re all going to sleep down there.”
Todd’s eyes widened in the dark. He leapt out of his sleeping bag, grabbed the bag and a little Swiss Army knife, which I would find out later he slept with by his side. He was naked from the waist down.
“Let’s go!” said Todd in a panic, clutching the knife and sleeping bag, clad in only a T-shirt. I watched his naked rear end begin running away through the woods.
“Todd, you don’t have any pants on!”
“I’ve got all I need!” he said, and barefoot, he and Matthew began running back in the direction of camp.
Despite the dark, camp was easy to find at this point. I had told the kids that standard bear protocol states that in order to ward off a bear from camp, make a lot of noise. According to a report from Aaron when I returned, the bear had circled about a few times as I was off collecting Matthew and Todd. The kids were screaming, banging pots, and creating such a racket that I was pretty sure that all bears in a ten-mile radius heard them and ran the other way. I was able to get Todd to throw some shorts on, by the way, before he went down into a campsite full of adolescents all a-dangle. Poor kid never would’ve lived that down if he had.
I left Aaron with the kids and their cacophony, and headed far out into the forest and re-hung our food bag, not at all hopeful that it would work. It was well after midnight by the time I got back. The kids were all sacked out on the ground, in a tight circle, their heads facing in. Aaron said they had talked excitedly for a good while, and most were in high spirits. Nothing like a brush with Mother Nature to fuel a kid’s sense of adventure, I thought.
The next morning I headed out early to retrieve the bag. Our ursine friend had indeed rediscovered the bag, and once again, despite my best efforts to the contrary, got it down from the tree. The bag was ripped and torn, and food was spread all over. The most interesting item was a jar of peanut butter. The cap seemed bitten, or, for all I know, screwed off using some clever Yogi the Bear trick. The bear had used its claws to scoop out the contents, and I could still clearly see the large marks of its claws in the bottom of the peanut butter jar. I imagined the bear sitting the way bears do when we imagine them as harmless teddys, on its butt, holding the jar between its legs and scooping out bite after bite of peanut butter, contently licking the goopy stuff off its claws.