the dharma blog

Last July, I mentioned I was planning a trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness as a volunteer, working with another volunteer and a wilderness ranger to dig latrines and do other work in the Wilderness.

I finally got the newsletter for the organization I work for published which includes my account of those days in canoe country. You can read it here.

Reading the piece, you might find a sidebar article on page five about our run-ins with bears on that trip. It might ring a little familiar. And while you’re over there, you might also note I just recently launched a brand new website. It’s got a blog and all kinds of other fun BWCAW-centric features. Enjoy.

I wish I was a better blogger, but I’m not. I like corresponding with you via this vehicle, posting thoughts and observations about things which seem important in life right now. It is good to put the words together, for it forces me to find some structure to the seemingly random cycles and acyclical events of humanity and ecology.

Not even photos have ever proven able to capture memory like writing and the act of have. My “true evolution to writer” happened when the act of writing became equal to the product. Writing is a means to make sense, to make art of reality, to make sure certain things do not slip by unnoticed, unremarked, unappreciated, and thus it is something done, rather than something that is.

It is a narrow path to walk. At times I have found my inclination toward written record superseding the living of the life itself. Or even if that’s not true, one is led to believe that constant documenting is in opposition to doing. Or that the mark of true greatness is to be able to do both equally, but yet more fully than mere mortals. Or not. Like I was saying, it is a narrow path to keep one’s footing on.

This weekend brought winter. The air is now dry and frozen, the dark sudden and deep. Six o’ clock feels like the middle of the night and mornings it is an ordeal to extract one’s self from flannel sheets and down comforter. I spent Saturday afternoon washing the big windows in the back of our house. I removed the screens and scrubbed the glass inside and out. They needed it badly and as I cleaned them it was like rubbing fog out from sleepy eyes and I could see outside little pieces of snow wobbling down to Earth, scattered against the sky and the dark green of the white pine in the backyard.

This was not the snow of last week, a sloppy rain-like precipitation that was really a last autumn rain just a little late, moistening dead leaves and making puddles for Lola to slosh through on our morning walk. Saturday’s snow was dry winter snow, sparse and sparing, and I watched the flakes fall to the ground as I washed the windows.

I listened to the stereo quite loudly as I worked; I was all alone for the afternoon. The music sounded great, clear as the cleaned windows and an unequivocal joy to know that when all else is stripped away, there is always music. The afternoon went by as such. No morn nor eve considered, just the gray afternoon, the task at the hand, and the rock and roll on the stereo.

There was a mix-up on Saturday morning when I met Thompson and Curt at the portage to Splash Lake. I didn’t have the solo canoe I was supposed to have. Curt headed back down the Moose Chain with Cavan to get the canoe and Thompson and I headed to Splash’s sole campsite to do some “solitude monitoring” (recording how many people you see in a given amount of time). It was a pleasant, warm late morning sitting on the rocks and catching up.

Thompson tells me he’s been dreaming about bears.

As the three of us are paddling around the east end of Ensign that afternoon, checking campsites, permits and latrines, nearly every person we talk to has either had bears in camp in recent nights or heard of someone who has. We have secured a site on the north shore. The last site we visit before heading back to camp is our neighbors. They offer us fresh cornbread (which we resist) and tell us that, the night before, they heard the people that were camped at our site yelling and banging pots and pans every two hours, all night long.

In the quiet evening hour after dinner, as we digest and converse, I ask Curt, who’s been a wilderness ranger in the BWCAW for a few years, if he’s ever had a bear in camp before. He says “yes, just once.” I ask him where.

“This site, actually,” he says.

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When the bear finally comes crashing through the brush a short while later, it strikes me as more funny than anything. We yell and throw rocks and otherwise make noise. I never see the bruin, it circles our camp for 20 minutes, obscured by the thick bushes, occasionally pausing and grunting and blowing and growling. It’s the growling that pisses Thompson off, making him unafraid by anger at this ursine affront. At one point he grabs the axe out of the tool bag. Before he manages to unsheathe it, Curt asks him what he’s doing and, without getting much of an answer, tells Thompson to put it away.

Eventually, the bear splashes into the water of our little bay, again obscured by brush, and swims to the next piece of land. That seems like a commitment that it will seek its dinner elsewhere and we relax again.

About dusk, when the mosquitoes are getting bad, we retire to our quarters. I climb into my hammock (which I’m convinced looks like a low-hanging food pack to any bear) and am still getting situated when we hear crashing from the brush again. Goddammit. Thompson and Curt are up and they yell and go through all that. It seems that the bear might just be passing by on its way back to wherever it came from, though at the time I’m sure we will be fending it off every two hours until morning. But, either it is quiet enough not to wake us or it doesn’t return.

I am woken once though, just at the tail end of a long wolf howl from across the lake, its song in my memory from the space between sleep and waking. The howl is followed by the yips and barks of the rest of the pack but it is not repeated.

The next day, we find a much better site on the other side of the lake and we move camp there. After getting camp set up, we are standing on the point, looking a half-mile across the lake toward the campsite we’re about to paddle over to and dig a new latrine. We’re talking about bears. We see a small, black dot run along the shoreline right in front of the destination campsite.

The last night of the trip, the rangers paddle away at dusk to check up on a group that was stretching the definition of “nine-person group size.” The three of us volunteers have just finished hanging the food pack high in a white pine when they return. It is almost dark. We are standing around talking when Andrea, the other ranger, calmly says, “there’s a bear.” I look up toward the area around the fire grate and see a big black shadow recede back into the night. It doesn’t seem to go far away and we again are left to hoot and holler and throw rocks into the bushes. After a few minutes, we no longer hear it and we relax. Twenty minutes later, we hear yelling and pots and pans banging from the next campsite over.