The Rights of Bear Arms

the right to bear arms

has me thinking

of bears and their ‘arms’

[their legs?  are the front

ones arms or legs?

who keeps track of such

things?]

and why would I care much

about the walking, food

carrying appendages of bears?

do bears really require a 

constitutional right to

have arms?  isn’t that a bit . . . 

excessive? . . . silly? . . . 

odd?

or perhaps it means that

as a human, I have an

inalienable right to 

own me some bear arms

well – I know some folk

who have bear paws

and bear heads and

even bear skins,

but what would they do

with bear arms and why

do we need to protect

their privilege to 

collect them?

But maybe it really was

a typo and they – our

forward-thinking

fore-fathers really

were thinking about

bare

rather than

bear

arms

which makes a bit

more sense to me

as a gal kind of human

kind of being

given that there are places

like Saudi Arabia

and the Vatican

where somehow

my decovered

yea bare

arms

are cause for

great offense

and chafing

of hands

and gnashing

of teeth 

[I wonder why it is

that teeth are gnashed

and hands chafed

rather than the reverse]

for it seems that the

mere sight of my 

arms bereft of cover

reveals something

unseemly afoot 

in the ’verse 

but in my

puzzlement I am

sure that I am unsure

what it could possibly

be – so no – fore-fathers

surely did not think upon

the nakedness of my 

upper extremities

[even the name

is suggestive – extremity?

what then is so extreme

about my arms, I continue

to wonder in vain]

surely they meant guns

to protect and protect

and protect – for 'twould

make no sense to be

protecting naked arms

or polar, black, brown,

panda, grizzly and other

of the ursine kind in the use

and enjoyment of their

own arms, now would it?

Bears and Bobcats and Such

Last night a friend visiting from Galax (not exactly NYC, but apparently a buzzing metropolis compared to where I live) and I went over the mountain to dine out.  I drove.  That, enough, was cause for concern.  I thought I was driving reasonably, well within the speed limit.  Helen, however, experienced a ride of terror.

Then there was the deer.  Dead.  In the middle of our lane.  I swerved and missed all but a hoof of the carcass.  Crisis averted.  Then I stopped at the nearest house to ask if they’d call the sheriff about moving the carcass (I wasn’t dressed for the occasion and probably couldn’t have managed the dead weight on my own anyhow).  Back in the car, I noticed Helen’s wonderment.  “That’s how you do it.”  “Do what?” I asked.  “Take care of something like that.”  “Yep, that’s how you do it,” I replied.  Actually, moving it out of the way yourself is how you do it – shame on whoever left it there for me to come upon.

A little ways on, I asked, “did you see that?”  “What?”  “The bear,” I replied, having noticed a bear scooting into the undergrowth on the right of the road.  “No!  And I’m glad I didn’t!” was Helen’s somewhat chagrined reply.  Truly baffled, I considered my own delight at spotting yet another ‘bear in the woods’ and wondered at Helen’s dismay.

Helen:  “The next thing you know, we’ll see a lion.”  Me: “no lions.  A bobcat, maybe; but no lions”, meaning to be reassuring.  Somehow my words had the opposite effect I’d intended.

Off to dinner, good conversation and lots of laughter, as we got back in the car to return home, Helen put on her heavy coat saying that now we could safely return, since she was wearing her ‘lion coat’, as she put her right arm forward in a protective posture.

We laughed and laughed all the way home – no bobcats, more’s the pity.  Helen was ready.

Bear Stuffing

“What do you want to enter in the fair next year?  You could do a drawing.”

“I don’t want to draw.  I want to stuff a bear.”

This was the exchange grandson Rowen and I had during his first county fair.  In the morning we saw the “aminals”, even touched a cow, a sheep and a goat (but it was a no go to touching the pig).

As amazing as the animals were to him, the exhibits really captured his imagination, especially the Lego creations and the taxidermy displays.

Thus did Rowen decide that next year, his entry should be a stuffed mounted bear – until I told him “that’s fine, but first you have to hunt and kill him.”

“But I don’t want to kill a bear, Gran.  I just want to stuff him.”

“I understand, Rowen.  Believe me, I understand.”

Teddy No-Eyes with some friends

Perhaps it was no accident that the next day at church, Pastor Gran did her sermon illustration during the time for the young by bringing out her own childhood teddy bear and pondering whether his torn and ragged body and holes leaking stuffing evidenced a lack of care or the greatness of the love bestowed.  Rowen just thought it was funny that he had no eyes, little understanding the heathen I was at his age, ripping the plastic eyes literally from their fabric sockets just to see if I could.

I imagine my 5-year-old treasure of a grandson in his bed dreaming about stuffing bears and I wonder what that looks like to him.  Somehow I suspect it’s a much gentler vision than my own.  Oh, how I envy those 5-year-old dreams.

I think I'll take Teddy No-Eyes to bed with me tonight.  I wonder which will be keeping the other safe and from whom.  Such is the certitude of the 5-year-old that I'm pretty sure Rowen wouldn't even have to ask:  "why, we're keeping each other safe, of course!"

Bears in the Middle of the Road

Who cares why the chicken crossed the road?  Nor do I care why a mama black bear and her three cubs crossed the road in front of me near the top of Jack Mountain yesterday morning, but I definitely care that I was there to see them.

I wonder if bear cubs usually come in threes.  And I wonder about the last cub to cross, who was lagging behind, not quite as sure or as brave as his siblings . . . or maybe just stopping to enjoy the smells of the mountain day while the others bounded forward, sure never to lose sight of mama.

Life is good:  Grizzly bear scratching his back on a tree in
Glacier National Park.  Photo by Glacier NPS at FlickrCommons

They look so cumbersome but move so gracefully.  And even we people of the mountains who know they’re there, receive the actual laying eyes on them as a gift.

Years ago a friend had a series of questions supposed to elicit something about one’s psychological makeup.  The first went something like this: You’re driving on a road when you come upon a bear in the middle of the road.  What do you do?

I thought the answer was obvious – drive around her.

Little did I know then that other people would turn back and still others would simply stop and watch her for awhile.

This question was supposed to determine one’s approach to problem solving: my own technique was assessed as ‘plowing through’ them, probably a pretty accurate insight.

But most of the bears I’ve seen in my lifetime weren’t on roads, literal or figurative.

Photo by Glacier NPS at FlickrCommons

Most of the bears I’ve seen are of the grizzly variety when I spent a summer working in Glacier National Park in Montana.  If you’ve never been, it’s well worth your time and trouble to get there.  

During our orientation to life in a national park, one of the rangers told us bear avoiding and surviving strategies.  When he finished, I noticed that he had made no mention of the bells we sold to guests in the lodge store.  Responding to my question about the efficacy of bells (as a sort of warning to the bears, reputed to be shy, that humans were approaching), he smiled and as gently as he could, told me that when bears hear the bells, what they think is “dinner!”

Needless to say, I saved myself the cost of the bells.  Nor was I comforted when a fellow worker, a man young enough to be my son said with a grin on his face, “Beth, I don’t have to outrun the bear.  All I have to do is outrun you!”

I saw lots of bears that summer, most of them from a safe distance.  The most compelling sight was a mama grizzly and her three cubs crossing the river far below where some friends and I sat enjoying the sun.  Mama crossed with confidence, either not knowing or ignoring the falls just a few feet away from her and her babies.  Inculcated with the instinct to follow mama, all three cubs went into the water, one by one.  And one by one, all three were swept over the falls, accompanied by our shouts and screams above, as if we could somehow communicate the impending danger to them.  Of course, we could not.

We then watched as mama, discovering none of her cubs behind her on the other side, made her way searchingly down landward to the base of the falls, calling out to the cubs.  One emerged and then another.  But not the third.  She spent a long time walking the water’s edge calling for her third cub, but he never came.

Maybe he made it to shore farther down.  Maybe.  But somehow I doubt it.

We cried with her, my friends and I that day.

Life and its ending are like that: sudden, inexplicable, safely in hand one moment, gone the next.  All we’ve got in this bodily form is the here and the now, which is never to be taken lightly, never, ever, for granted.

I saw three bear cubs today and remembered the day years ago when once there were three and then there were only two.  And I was blessed – blessed by their sheer existence.  And I wished them well.