Off the Beat 4: Searching for the bear

You can’t tell me that a bear was spotted less than a mile from my house in Garfield Heights You just simply cannot do that. 

You can’t do that and then tell me to lay low and stay safe. That is the most irresponsible thing anyone can possibly do. Especially at my age.

I’m not old, but I don’t think I’m particularly young anymore. Professional athletes are retiring at my age. I still feel like I could do everything I could at seventeen, which isn’t much, but there are few small differences. Last year, I threw my back out lifting a 40-pound bag of kitty litter, and going to the bathroom has become less of a suggestion and more of an emergency. Everytime. 

I’d like to think I’ve gotten wiser, though. I finally learned about condoms and credit scores, albeit the hard way, but it’s not about how you start; it’s how you finish. I am wise enough to understand I have limitations, but too dumb to figure out what they are. Or, maybe I just don’t have any. Maybe I am the Ubermensch, but I digress. This isn’t about me. This is about me and a bear, and it’s finally going to happen. A meeting that took billions of years of evolution and migration, and it’s finally going to happen. Can you imagine? Two forces of nature standing side-by-side. One, a savage showcase of biological machinery that bends the woods to its will and could rip a man asunder with its bare hands and teeth… 

And then there’s the bear, who is pretty good at that stuff too…

I need this bear.

Not to hurt it, or kill it! God no… Just to see it. To stand face to face with it so I can give that bear a memory of a confident middle-aged man standing on the wild edge of nature looking incredibly pleased with himself. 

On Saturday, I went looking for this bear. 

Don’t tell my mom, though. She’d be so mad. This has to stay between us, OK? Just you and me. If I tell you about this and she finds out, I’m going to be so mad at you. 

You can tell my dad. I don’t think he’d care too much. He’ll probably just say something like, “What can I do? I live in Oklahoma.” Something he’s said quite a bit since he moved to Oklahoma. It upset me at first, but in moments like this, when I want to go find a bear and he can’t stop me, it’s worth it not to have the old man around.

“What do bears like?” I asked myself, and stewed on it for a minute… “Fish!” I thought. I’ve seen a million nature documentaries, and all of them include a scene where a bear yanks a fish out of a river and chews on it ’til it dies. So I immediately went to McDonald’s to get a Filet-O-Fish to put myself in a bear’s mindset. I sat there, opened the flimsy cardboard box housing my sandwich, and had lunch. As I was scrolling through my phone, googling bears, a gob of tartar sauce dripped onto my shirt. While I was wiping it off, I wondered if that bear was reaching his giant bear claws into a creek, yanking out a Filet-O-Fish, and wondering what I was doing. Was he excited to meet me too? 

I got into my car and headed towards the Garfield Metroparks. I parked and started trekking into the woods, but here’s a fun fact about me: I had my gallbladder removed about 10 years ago, and I need to be near a restroom within a half hour after I eat; otherwise, I’m in big trouble. So, I hit the head and made myself less cumbersome before I made my trip into the woods. 

After I finished, I swung the door open like a saloon, feeling confident, empty and ready to see a bear. I made my way towards the trees, and as I crossed the grassy picnic area and into the forest, I could instantly relate to Davy Crockett. Being out there deep in the forest, away from technology and society, made me long for a time that I didn’t live through. 

I pulled out my phone and googled Davy Crockett, sat on a stump and read about him. Ten minutes later, I learned more about him than I had intended and found him to be a complex and flawed person. Then I read about how he died an incredibly violent death and realized I’m here to find a bear, not to imagine how painful dying at The Alamo was. 

[Editor’s note: AJ has never seen “The Revenant.”]

I walked for a good half-mile without seeing the bear, and frankly, I was getting quite sick of it. I had done everything I could to find the bear, and I felt like it should at least meet me halfway. They apparently have an incredible sense of smell, so I find it hard to believe that it didn’t know I was there. Between the scent of my sweat and the tartar sauce, along with the sound of branches breaking under my feet, I was the most detectable thing in Cleveland, Ohio. What gives?

I kept moving through the bush, stepping on leaves and traversing uneven terrain. I even found a really cool stick! I swung that around for a bit and hit it as hard as I could against a tree and it exploded. That was super neat. After it broke, I startled something and heard a rustling from behind me. I froze for a second, slowly turned around, and saw a squirrel running up a tree trunk. That squirrel was the most wildlife I’d encountered the entire time I was there and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone. I imagined the bear emerging slowly out of the brush and locking eyes with me and both of us understanding the significance of that moment. I would stay calm, and the bear would sense my kind heart and we would recognize something ancient in each other. 

Then, I would bring him home with me, and we would be friends. I’d give him a tiny little hat, and teach him how to ride a bike and grow old with him. Maybe even let him officiate my wedding one day.  

So I went deeper, and the deeper I went, the more I felt as if this wasn’t going to turn out the way I thought it would. That’s the painful reality of it all I guess. You spend a surprising amount of time imagining all the things you’d like to do but never getting around to doing them. I had created an entire future in my head, and in an afternoon it was over. I have, at best, 40 more Julys left, 45 if I’m lucky… Probably less because of the cigarettes and fish sandwiches, and I just don’t have the time to walk around the woods all day looking for a bear. 

I stopped, sat on the stump of another broken tree, and just listened. I listened to the noise I hadn’t been listening to before because there was so much other noise in my head, just talking all the time. Never shutting off. But for a second, I was able to listen to the trees talk and the birds chirp. I wanted the woods to make me feel powerful and connected to something bigger than me, but I also kinda wanted another Filet-O-Fish. I had spent an afternoon stomping through the woods, demanding that a bear meet me by the flagpole after school, but it apparently had better things to do. It could have been sleeping or eating garbage; either way, I admitted to myself that I was never going to find him.

The woods looked less dense and mysterious on my way back to my car. Less like the edge of nature and more like a place behind a canopy where a family was having a Saturday cookout. My legs started to ache, and my shirt was damp, although every now and then I would turn around and look back out there, hoping to see a bear staring back at me. It wasn’t until I got back to my car and saw my reflection in the window and saw that I had a leaf on my shoulder and the tartar sauce stain on my T-shirt that I realized I spent an afternoon motivated by food, making noise in the woods and frightening small animals.

I understood why I never found the bear.

Because I was the bear all along.

Maybe not the biological machine I like to imagine, but the kind that gets confused and “is more afraid of you than you are of it” even though everyone knows that isn’t true. The kind of bear that doesn’t have a plan but keeps moving forward because there will eventually be a Filet-O-Fish or two along the way.