Kitsch
Originally uploaded by barbfi.

In high-school I went camping in New Mexico with my Boy Scout troop. We would hike anywhere from five to fifteen miles every day over some really beautiful mountains. It was a lot of fun.

About an hour after we went to sleep one night, I heard some noises outside of the tent. My tent-mate, Stephen, looked over at me, as he clearly heard the noises as well. Panicked hand gestures started flying in the tent. Somehow, we managed to communicate without sound that we both agreed that there was a bear just outside the tent — clearly not a good situation.

The first thing you have to understand about North American Black Bears is that they’re possibly the most lazy creatures on the planet. If they have to lift a finger to do something, odds are that they won’t do it. That considered, the most common prescription for dealing with aforementioned creatures is to make as much noise as humanly possible, letting them know that whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, you’re trouble and that maybe they should go on to deal with something easier.

We screamed. At the top of our lungs, we yelled and hollered and whooped and carried on. We stopped and listened, and it was still right there, outside of our tent. Again, clearly not a good situation.

We took a second go at screaming. Equally loud, but with a fire that we simply didn’t have the first time around. That’s what we needed — fire — to make the bear go away. Otherwise it would rip open our tent and eat us.

The rest of our camp took issue with our screaming in the middle of the night. They all had to wake up and hike ten miles with sixty pounds on their backs the next day and would like their rest, thank you very much. What on earth were we screaming for, any way?

“There’s a bear right outside our tent!” This seemed perfectly reasonable to us. Why not yell and hoot and holler in this situation? It was the correct thing to do.

We heard a tent unzip, presumably to get a look at the bear that was about to eat us alive. “Yeah, you sure do have a bear there. It must be six, eight point.” There was much laughing at us after that, but we went to sleep anyway, secure in the knowledge that the deer probably wouldn’t eat us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Found, Random, Uncategorized, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.