“That’s a bear”

Tags

black bears, fox hollow trail, hiking, shenandoah bears, shenandoah hikes, shenandoah national park, travel

Tomorrow’s free comic book day.  Tomorrow could be free punch me in the face day and I’d be alright with that. We’ve made it back from Shenandoah National Park having faced my biggest fear. No matter what happens for the rest of the week, at least I’m not currently being followed by a black bear.

Now we have a story to tell. This was what my hiking buddy said afterwards. As though there was a shortage on stories and I needed to fear for my life to round things out. Yippee. Would you like to hear about the time I valiantly melted into a puddle of please-don’t-eat-me?

Bears are my biggest fear. I read about them all the time, thinking filling my head with knowledge will chip away at the big bad monsters and all that will remain will be respect for these intelligent wild animals. Maybe one day. I’m not there yet, not even close.

Shenandoah is about a 2-hour drive south of Gettysburg, PA. We thought it’d be fun to go there for some hiking after a weekend of immersing ourselves in Civil War history. A detour to Antietam first. We arrived in Shenandoah National Park around 2 pm eager to find a trail. A park ranger recommended the Fox Hollow/ Dickey Ridge trail located right across from the visitor center. The 5ish-mile loop sounded like a pleasant introduction to the park.  We grabbed our walking sticks and packs and headed out. This was our first time carrying bear spray. I figured it’d be nice to have the peace of mind. Just in case. Never gonna actually need it.

Our route started us on the Fox Hollow trail. We passed a few people coming from the opposite direction. Asked them if they saw any bears. They laughed and said no but it’s a lovely trail. Lalala. About a mile in, we reach the old cemetery. More hikers pass from the opposite direction. We ask and they say they saw no bears. The trail, while more brown that I expected, was gentle and peaceful. Some elevation and brush to step over but nothing strenuous. It felt good to stretch our legs after driving. I was starting to calm down about potential bear sightings, but we continued talking loudly just in case.

About 1 3/4 miles into our hike Raj freezes and says the words I never ever want to hear on a hike.

“That’s a bear.”

I vaguely recall the ranger saying something about 50 yards being a safe distance to observe bears from. I look way out into the distance but the bear is not in the distance. Our bear was maybe 5 yards away. In the moment, I do what I’ve always feared I would do. I forget every bear safety precaution. Raj reminds me not to run.

The bear spray is in my hand, safety off. I don’t remember grabbing it but there it is. We wave our arms and start shouting for the bear to go away. It darts a few feet parallel to the trail then darts back to where we first saw it. Raj wants to stand our ground but I’m too scared to continue on for another 3 1/2 miles. We back away slowly, careful not to turn our backs to the bear. Never run. Never make eye contact. Never turn our backs.

Hiking backwards is hard. We start to realize there are gaping holes in our bear knowledge. Aren’t they supposed to be shy and run away? How long do we stay backwards. Where’d it go? Gone? Nope. There it is. We continue to see and hear the bear a few yards off the trail. It seems to be following us. It’s slightly bigger than mid-size. We didn’t see any cubs. The elevation change and roots we’d so easily hiked only moments ago are not fun to trek over backwards with a bear in sight. Torture for me – most of the hikers we’ve met aren’t terrified of bears. Most hikers probably would’ve stood their ground then continued on their way.

This was our first bear encounter on a trail. I don’t know what we did wrong. Maybe we startled him even though we were talking loudly. We were listening for bears but bears don’t listen for us. This wild animal didn’t shyly scurry away. It didn’t hear our shouts, understand we were untasty humans and back off. It didn’t notice our retreat and return to its foraging. It followed us back to the cemetery, past the cemetery, around a bend. All along we either saw or heard it so we kept talk shouting. Kept walking backwards. Kept the bear spray at the ready. It would’ve been a fantastic time to run into other hikers, but it was just us and the bear almost the whole way back.

About a half mile from the trailhead I look down a slope and see another smaller bear about 50 yards away. This one observed us and went back to its log. Finally it felt safe enough to turn around and a few minutes later we were out of the woods.

 

Our first hike in Shenandoah was one to remember. In a total of about 3 miles we encountered 2 bears. The encounter was difficult because it lasted for so long. We knew we didn’t have far to backtrack, but we were walking backwards. Every time I saw or heard this bear my nerves went deeper into overdrive.

We were going to Hike Mary’s Rock or Old Rag the next morning but I was still too shaken. I saw a bear in every shadow. Instead we hiked a few miles along the Appalachian Trail and checked out the overlooks along Skyline Drive. We ran into some lone thru hikers on the AT. One stopped to chat with us for a bit. The day before, he hiked 38 miles. He’d started in March. Guess how many bears he saw… Zero. Not a single other hiker we talked to, most thru or section hikers, had seen a single bear. We saw four in two days. According to everyone we talked to, seeing so many was lucky.

I didn’t get any bear pictures. Too scared to even consider it that first day. We saw the other two bears from the relative safety of the car. The third was a cub heading towards the section of AT we’d just hiked. The fourth was massive and still. He looked so much like a black bear he had to be fake but then he ran away faster than I ever imagined something so large could possibly run.

While I was hoping our first bear encounter would lessen my fear – because I’d wave my arms and shout and the bear would run away – at least now I know the What Not To Dos are correct. We made it out unscathed. Raj kept his cool. I managed to function while facing my biggest fear. A few days have passed and my heart still races when I think about it.

We’re bound to cross trails with bears again. Now I know I can sort of deal with it. Maybe someday I’ll get over this block of bear fear and be one of those hikers hoping to see a bear from a distance. Probably not. Maybe one day I’ll go back to being one of those hikers who never see them at all.

Still it’s spring and I’m counting down the days till our next Catskills hike. Bear spray: check.

Advertisements

Surviving Survival by Laurence Gonzales

Tags

deep survival, laurence gonzales, survivalist nonfiction, surviving survival, surviving survival book review

As I child of the eighties it was a pretty big deal when my dad replaced our book-sized television that had rabbit ears and dials with a big screen T.V. He moved the old one to our cool girl club house, a.k.a. the basement, and needed a dolly to wheel the new one in. Measuring 2 feet deep, it was like a piece of wood-paneled furniture with a 24-inch screen, no rabbit ears and a box clicker with 33 channels. We were a modern family who no longer had to pretend to know what MTV was.

Fast forward some twenty years to my cozy Brooklyn apartment. My media has taken a few big steps back: the VCR is still hooked up, and we need a cable box and rabbit ears to view our 3 channels. None of those channels happen to be Discovery or NatGeo, but that’s okay. I have Laurence Gonzales, the man responsible for every flight I will ever miss.

Surviving Survival is about the aftermath of survival, focusing more on psychological recovery than physical. Gonzales details how the brain maps out memories to prepare us for future crisis, like when you crash a car and for months after potential accidents will play out in your mind at every corner.

In the brain, the cardinal rule is future equals past; what has happened before will happen again.

Each chapter introduces a survivor and the events that changed his or her life. These are people who lived through ship wrecks, shark attacks, concentration camp, war, cancer, loosing a child and abusive husbands. The meat of their stories focuses on what happened after the bandages were removed. Regardless of their unique traumas, they all note feeling as if they no longer belonged to this world.

If you think some of these case studies sound hard to read, remember that someone actually lived through it. Kathy Russell Rich fought bone cancer and responded to a grim prognosis by traveling to India to study Hindi. She refused to think of herself as someone who was dying. Someone who takes on a new language presumes she has a future. Rich wrote about her time in her memoir “Dreaming in Hindi”, a slow, beautiful book about throwing yourself into the unfamiliar. Sadly, Rich passed away this year, but she lived for decades longer than doctors predicted.

Gonzales breaks down what happens in the mind when the body endures the unimaginable. He writes that a new set of memories obscure the old, good ones, which is why a part of the survivor stays where they were trapped – on that raft or in the mouth of a bear. Not every story has a happy ending, but many of these people found a way to stand up again and live a better life.

The “Be here now” mentality is what drove many of them through their dark times. So you wonder why we all don’t put on our “Be here now” caps. But re-conditioning your mentality takes more than might and main. Gonzales picks at the relationship between brain and body, but he’s a writer and there’s not even a word for this relationship. He defines it as:

…the thing that gives rise to motion, thought, consciousness, feeling, and to the self that we perceive as a whole.

While the process varied for each of them, Gonzales isolates a few key similarities. The “survivor voyage” continues in mind and body long after physical wounds heal because psychological wounds cut deeper. Again and again he illustrates the importance of surrendering to the process of survival. Survivors don’t stop fighting. They’re always moving on to the next action.

My favorite parts dig into the mind’s influence on our physical world. For instance, a room looks brighter when you see someone you love because your eyes dilate. Gonzales even explains how knitting and embroidery can be therapeutic. It should come as no surprise that the choices we make have a domino effect, but some of the most obvious givens are easy to forget when you’re in a dark place.

Good survivors always concentrate on the present, but plan for the future.

I recommend reading Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why first.  These accounts focus entirely on extreme situations, kind of like Into Thin Air. I read it years ago so my memory is a little fuzzy, but it goes into the alarm that goes off in your brain when something doesn’t feel right. Few of us heed this alarm. We board planes on stormy nights despite our gut’s input because our minds know the odds of crashing are slim. We rationalize until potential life threatening situations are a dull murmur in a fog of Dramamine.

Reading a Gonzales book feels like you’re having a one-sided conversation with a giant mind who knows a lot about everything and enjoys connecting the dots. Or like we’re Martin Short in Innerspace, drifting through the human body with a chatty tour guide (Gonzales as Dennis Quaid as Lt. Tuck Pendleton) telling us what’s what. The writing is concise and deeply invested in its subject. And let’s face it, we’ve got a lot to learn about resilience. By “we” I mean “me”, but maybe you, too.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Tags

climbing boks, into thin air, jon krakauer, mount everest, non fiction climbing book, survivalist nonfiction

Have you ever imagined what it would take to climb a mountain? Not the kind in the Catskills that you drive up and picnic on – think we all have what it takes to do that.  Before reading John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, I didn’t think about what it takes so much as how exhilarating it would feel to stand alone on the highest peak in the world. The hardest part would be leaving, right?

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster six months after returning home from a summit that made 1996 the deadliest year in the history of Mount Everest. He was there on assignment to write an article on the commercialization of the mountain for Outside magazine. The fee for his spot on a guided climb was over $60,000 (paid by the magazine).

He begins this account with what you think would be the climax, standing on top of “the roof of the world” with one foot in China and one in Nepal. As the reader you feel like you’ve cheated to the end. You ready yourself for a vicarious taste of the purest exhilaration possible, already forgetting the book’s subtitle. Instead of a thrill you get dread and lots of it as he takes in the scene for all of five minutes, anxious to begin the descent.

Descent? Can’t we ascend first? Have a little fun? Why do we begin at the end, says the reader who imagines descending a mountain to be a lot like riding down a super long twisty slide. The first thing Krakauer wants us to know is that the descent is harder and more dangerous, especially when the climber looks down and sees dark heavy clouds already swallowing the lesser peaks below.

Fortunately, Krakauer does go back to the beginning to orient us not only in this specific climb, but in Everest’s history from the climber’s point of view. It wasn’t until 1852 that a Bengali computer (“computer” being the job title of one who computes) compiled the Great Trigonometrical Survey finding peak XV to be the highest in the world. Later named Mount Everest, it was successfully climbed (and descended) 101 years and 24 lives later.

To put the scale of this climb into perspective, Krakauer had decades of climbing experience, but at Base Camp he was already higher than he’d ever been in his life. He talks a lot about the culture of ascent and how, for such a commercialized climb, the number of people who have died attempting it is staggering. Why? Much of this account is his attempt to answer that question. Some of the answers are obvious – skilled climbers get cocky and fail to connect their ropes while others are as inexperienced as they are rich.

The first one hundred pages are packed with historical notes, some climbing background and set up. We get to know the other climbers, the leaders and the sherpas who carried gear, set ropes, cooked and took care of most of the physical logistics. At first the reading feels scattered from past to present and you’re plodding along from page to page again forgetting you’re reading a disaster book.

The structure mirrors the pace of the climb in a way, they go up to Camp 1, then down to Base Camp, then up to Camp 2 and Down to Camp 1, and so on. This allows climbers to acclimate to the extreme altitudes. For the reader, it allows you to forget everything you thought you knew about climbing and learn why it is one of the most physically and mentally challenging things a human do. Krakauer puts it much better:

When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional.

The final ascent was scheduled for early May, during the short window of time when the weather was expected to be most agreeable. This window is no secret in the climbing world, which meant Krakauer’s team had a lot of company. Things began to go downhill from the beginning of the final leg. They set out for the peak around 11 pm in order to reach the top early enough to give themselves enough time to descend before dark.

The night had a cold, phantasmal beauty that intensified as we climbed.

As you lose count of the number of frozen corpses the climbers have to step over, it becomes clear how many moving parts must fall into place for a climb to be successful. From the beginning of the book, you know that nine people don’t return, but reading what happened to them isn’t easy.

These events, one after the other, had one guide asking “What have we done to make this mountain so angry?”

Krakauer pieces together the events and tragic circumstances that snowballed on top of the already dangerous givens of a climb – the effects of extreme altitude on your ability to make judgments and take action, the sheer physical exhaustion of climbing in extreme temperatures with little oxygen, and the surprise of severe weather. When those cumulonimbus clouds he’d stared down at from the top of the mountain opened up:

I could scarcely tell where the mountain ended and where the sky began…

After the first hundred pages, you can’t put the book down. The person sitting next to you has to ask what’s wrong because you look like you’re the one in pain. Had this been a work of fiction, you would’ve declared it too far fetched already. The play-by-play is not delicate, it’s startling how many things went wrong, and difficult to tell why some survived over others. Krakauer offers this on his own survival instinct:

…staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one’s “inner voice”…Problem was, my inner voice resembled chicken little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

It’s all very sobering, an absorbing example of human nature choosing the extreme over the safe, risking their lives for a glimpse from the edge. A wild read.