Yosemite Bears

You’ve all had that dream, the one where you remember you have to take a test today but you forgot to attend class all semester? How many of you had recurring nightmares where you had to outrun lava flows? I did. I felt the heat and saw the lava oozing closer and closer as I franticly picked my way from one safe stepping stone to the next with the rest of my fleeing villagers. Was I reliving a past life experience or was it because I’d read about Pompeii and Polynesia and had an overly active imagination? Either way, the need to flee from an approaching menace became imbedded in my psyche at an early age and served me well, as the following tale will reveal. Our daughter was seven and our son was one. Another couple who had a seven-year-old son decided it would be great fun to share a cabin in Yosemite for a wholesome summertime family vacation. The chief strategist of this plan was my husband’s best friend, who will be known henceforth as HBF. The first thing we did was invest in good hiking boots for father, mother, and daughter. Baby boy didn’t need hiking boots as he would be hauled around on his father’s back seated in an aluminum-framed backpack. I went along with this plan because I was city-bred and knew nothing about hiking, camping, or surviving in places that had no street lights. The suede boots are integral to our story. We were so stupid about the great outdoors that we told our daughter suede must never get wet or her expensive boots would be ruined. Therefore, in her mind the main thing to remember was to keep her boots dry at all costs. I have no memory of actually getting to Yosemite, other than the road took too many turns and it was too far from smog to be comforting. But get there we did, and once we settled into our cabin, HBF charted our Yosemite excursions. The first was a jolly climb to the top of Vernal Fall for a family picnic. Lemmings, that’s what we were, stupid little rodents that follow leaders up to and over the edges of cliffs. We trusted HBF since he said he knew all about these things, so we gaily gathered our supplies for a happy day in the woods. Keep in mind I never exercised. I was the antithesis of sturdy. Also, I had no idea what climbing up the Vernal Fall Trail meant. My job was to make sure my daughter wore two pair of socks to keep her skinny little feet from being rubbed raw by her new shoes, take warm jackets, pack a few sandwiches, and bring the diaper bag. We drove to a parking lot and walked to the base of the trail where you’re supposed to stop, admire the scenery, maybe have a little nosh, and then return to your car, self satisfied. That was not HBF’s plan. No, we had to start climbing up rock stairs carved out of the granite walls flanking the waterfall. I took one look up and figured there was no way I was going to make it, but you know, climb up a step, haul your little girl up with you, climb another one, haul again, and repeat this until your head is spinning and your eyes are about to pop out of your head. Did I mention that the walk to the base was half a mile but the climb to the top was 1,000 feet, straight up? Literally. 1,000 feet. Apparently our party planner forgot to check the guidebook because he skipped the easy and moderate hikes and went straight for “Strenuous.” Two seven-year-olds, a baby in a backpack, two hardy males, and two wheezing females spent two hours or more trying to get to the end of the climb. We’re not talking gentle stairs with handrails here. We’re talking steep risers hacked out of stone, where you had to cling the the mountainside because otherwise you’d fall to your death on top of the picnickers who had the good sense to stay at the bottom. Eventually, we made it to the top and then wandered through the forest until we came to a lovely plateau where we settled down to enjoy our lunch in the shade of the pine trees. Just beyond the woods was an open area, a mini plateau of smooth rocks interspersed by runnels of water making their way to the cliff’s edge. At this time of year, the water cutting through the rocks was no more than 6 inches deep, just perfect for little children to paddle in—barefoot, of course—and the granite spaces between the waterbeds were ideal napping spots for weary adults. I rested on one of those rocks, trying to be a good sport while my brain insisted I was so high up I could feel the earth spinning faster. Worst of all was the knowledge it would take another two hours of going downstairs before I could return to earth. Eventually, it was time to pack up and head back. We gathered our belongings and had just hoisted baby boy into his aluminum palanquin and put shoes and socks on our children’s feet when we noticed a couple of tourists, perhaps Japanese, running toward us from the higher hills, stopping now and then to turn around and take pictures, then racing past us into the woods whence we’d come. That was odd, we thought. Then we realized why they were running. There was a very large California Brown Bear lumbering after them. It stopped when it noticed there were easier pickings and headed toward us instead. We were so stupid, we thought if we moved to the far side of a stream we’d be safe. So my husband and I each picked up one of my daughter’s arms and lifted her between us as we backed through the rivulet, raising her so she wouldn’t get her suede shoes wet. (She remembers that clearly, the effort it took to keep her knees raised up, because getting her new shoes wet was worse than getting eaten by a bear.) I keep telling you we were stupid. I can’t repeat it enough. We were so stupid we should have been eaten there and then. Of course 6 inches of water is not going to stop a bear. What were we thinking? I’ll tell you what I was thinking. As I watched that bear padding toward me I was thinking I’m going to get rubbed on the side by a brown bear, just like a big dog. I’m going to be the only kid from Echo Park to get a nice shove on the side by a bear in the wild. Before that could happen HBF’s wife yelled for him to do something. Literally, “HBF! Do something!” So 6-foot-something HBF and my husband strode forward to wave their hands and yell at the bear to vamoose. Then the bear rose on its back legs to 7-foot-something, gave a mighty roar, and took a big swing at HBF, almost beheading him in one swipe. It was then that I noticed our bear had tags in both ears. You know what that means, right? It means said creature had already been felled by Park Rangers’ dart guns, tagged, and released…twice. The next time it threatened humans, the rangers would kill it on the spot. Fortunately, HBF and my husband were agile. They ducked and ran back to where we stood in terror, shouting to us, “Throw some food at it!” Unfortunately, we had no food. We ate it all before the bear showed up. So intrepid HBF grabbed the diaper bag, tossed it over the bear’s head, and as it turned to investigate, we made a mad dash for the forest and the waterfall beyond it. (My daughter remembers being appalled that we threw away a perfectly good diaper bag. That’s memory number two, number one being don’t get her shoes wet even if a bear shows up. We’ll get to memory three in a bit.) I remember calculating how long it would take the bear to shred the cloth bag and rip open the plastic bags inside, looking for leftovers, only to find poop. Would it give up and head back uphill or get pissed and get even? Before we could find out, we reached the waterfall plateau where we collapsed in exhaustion to regroup our resources and tell the other hikers gathered there what had happened. This is where the running-from-lava dreams turned out to be good training. We appeared to be safe but I knew better. When my husband started to take our son out of the backpack, I yelled, “No! Keep him in there in case we have to run again!” He actually listened to me, which was one of the miracles of the day, but he did shrug himself out of the backpack. The other mother begged me for a pair of my daughter’s socks. They had not trained their son as well and his socks were wet which she knew would cause blisters on the downward trek. Reluctantly, filled with the urgency to flee, I ripped open my daughter’s shoes, stripped off a pair of socks, flung them at the other mother, and hurriedly retied my little girl’s boots. As soon as her shoes were tied, the bear showed up. Apparently the diapers were only appetizers. Some of you know exactly what the clearing looks like next to the top of Vernal Fall. It’s a more or less flat area surrounded by waist high iron railings. On one side of the railings are tourists; on the other side is a river falling off the mountain. During winter and spring, I have no doubt the river rushes right up to the iron railings, but this was late summer and the water had receded two or three feet from the poles that were supposed to keep tourists from going over the edge with the water. Lemmings. I’m telling you, we were Lemmings. One of the crowd decided to climb over the railings to get away from the bear. In an instant, we were all slipping between the top and middle horizontal bars. Why? To get to the other side, the water side, the fall-off-the-mountain side, where we’d be safe from the bear. I hesitated a moment before I climbed through. My instinct was to lift my daughter to the other side first, but then she’d be on the slippery rock without me to hold her safe. So I climbed over and turned to lift her but before I could, HBF was right there, lifting her up over the top bar and placing her next to me, making sure all the women and children were safely on the wrong side of the fence before climbing over himself. (Here’s where my daughter’s third vivid memory comes in. She remembers holding onto the metal railing and looking over her shoulder to the bottom of the fall. Way down, so small they could be ants, was a family gamboling on the grass beside the river. She remembers wishing she could be that family down there, the sane one having fun, instead of being in peril next to her family of crazed lunatics.) Well, you can guess how well our plan worked. Once the bear noticed we were all on the other side of the fence, it decided to join us. Just like a circus bear, it gracefully sailed through the top and bottom railing, then turned to see what all the fun was about. One of the other hikers had an apple, G-d Bless him. He tossed it as far away as he could and Old Smokey gracefully sailed after it, giving the rest of us time to scramble back over the fence and head for the nearest exit, which was a path through some woods leading to the stone steps. Just then two burly men with fishing gear stepped out of the wooded path, saw the bear, looked us straight in the eyes and said, “Run!” While we obeyed, they strode forward to deal with the enemy. Running for our lives meant a little bit of an uphill climb. The other mother had no legs left so she yelled to HBF “Push me! Push me!” This he gladly did, pushing her right up to the stone steps but not over. He let us go first so he could protect the rear. As we reached the trail and began our descent, we heard the sounds of battle. The fishermen were clashing their rods and tackle boxes and roaring at the tops of their lungs to scare off the bear. Then it turned deadly silent. I figured either the bear decided to retreat or was busy eating the fishermen. If that was the case, if it continued to follow us, there was no hope. The stairs were not wide enough for two humans and a bear. We were all going to die, either by getting knocked off like bowling pins or hauled back for dinner. As we met upward climbing hikers during our descent, we shouted to them in passing, “Don’t go up there! There’s a bear at the top!” Do you know, not one of them turned around and ran down with us. They just smiled and kept climbing. Well, if they wanted to be dessert, that was fine by me. I was too busy trying to haul my daughter down each tall step in a hurry and not slip off the edge in the process. That would have been too ironic; flees bear successfully, dies tripping on a tree root. It took us two plus hours to climb up that trail. Forty minutes was all it took to make the downhill trip. Forty minutes. My blood pressure went up 10 points with every 100 feet of descent. By the time we got to the parking lot my face was as red as it is right now, typing this story. Exhausted, we staggered toward our car. Up ahead was a park bench and on that bench sat my husband, the backpack off, our son playing on the grass. He looked up as we approached and said, “What took you so long? I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes.” I’ll just let that sink in for a while.