Out of the Wild

No one was all that impressed when we told them we'd seen bears.

by Brian Howard

Since I last wrote in this space about the efforts of a group of Philadelphians to organize a naked bike ride in September (they're making tons of progress — check phillynakedbikeride.org), I've been everywhere. At the beach. In the mountains. In a cavern. And in a kayak in the Jersey Devil's backyard. It was just a one-week vacation away from the office that turned into an unplanned four-week sabbatical from my column. For which I apologize. But only a little. It's good to get away, and away from the grind, for some perspective. And to encounter wild animals that might eat you. And to realize what a city boy you've become.

I spent four days of a week long vacation at Shenandoah National Park's Skyland Resort — a shockingly rustic and quaint outpost at the highest point of western Virginia's vaunted Skyline Drive (which makes it either very good or very bad for cycling, depending on your hill-climbing abilities; for instance, I have no hill-climbing abilities). The park is teeming with some of the world's most brazen deer and daddy-longlegs spiders, along with, as myriad signs point out, bobcats, groundhogs, snakes, rabbits, foxes and bears.

I'd seen a bear in the wild once in my life, on a camping trip with some high school friends who thought it would be funny to throw rocks at it from their car. I've recently developed a weird obsession with the four-legged beasts, having seen Grizzly Man, um, let's just say more than once. So when my girlfriend and I spotted a smallish bear picking through a pile of garbage just off the path between our cabin and the resort's restaurant, I had immediate images of Timothy Treadwell flashing through my head. Sure, this one was a wee little guy, but the first thing they teach you about bears is that where there's a little one, there's probably a big protective one lurking. They also teach you to not surprise bears and to accomplish this by making a lot of noise. So we started whistling "76 Trombones" (just popped into my head) and marched off to eat dinner.

The next day, while driving along Skyline, I spotted out of the corner of my eye a significantly larger black bear darting into the bushes. There's something oddly graceful about the speed with which such a large and lumbering animal can move. It's a grace you ought not think about while hiking through the very same woods, or while pulled over at a scenic overlook in the dead of night.

Of course, no one from around the Shenandoah is terribly impressed when you tell them about the bears you've seen (or when you warn them about them). The guy we heads-upped about that little fella in our campsite — and who happened to be walking right toward it — shrugged and kept walking. The woman at a winery we visited said, "I have bears in my front yard every day."

That night, I stepped out onto our porch, which overlooked a vast swath of mountainous wilderness, to resume a conversation with birds I'd been whistling back and forth with that afternoon. Not 10 seconds into this admittedly asinine act, the high-pitched rawr-RAWRRRR of what certainly must have been a jungle cat — Penn State fans can imagine the Nittany Lion roar blared at Beaver Stadium — erupted from the bushes not 15 feet away. I'm told this was a bobcat, and, according to the cryptic,folksy wisdom of the woman running the resort restaurant's cash register, "You hear them more than you see them."

I won't say I feared for my life at any point, but I definitely was at least aware of the potential for impending doom at every waking moment. I suppose you get used to that. But I'm not sure how.

On a Monday morning 6 a.m. bike ride with my friend Justin, as we flew up Columbus Boulevard on our way back from FDR Park, over treacherously criss-crossing train tracks and badly eroded pavement and were passed continuously by careening garbage trucks and 18-wheelers, I don't think I considered my own mortality for a second. I guess you can get used to anything.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)