Postcard from the Path
Variation on a bear
I cannot tell if the busy rustling in the high brush and pines to the north of my campsite is a small-to-midsized wildcat,
a fox, or the resident marmot who comes out twice a day to eat the grass. It is not a bear. Bears shake the ground when they step: I would feel a bear’s nearness in my feet.
Once I met a bear. I’ve seen several, but this was more of a meeting, an encounter, nose to nose.
The leaves were tangled and beginning to turn. Flashes of gold and red glinted here and there from the branches that arched above. We'd heard a rustling on the trail ahead; a quiver in the ground rippled up through my feet. I froze. The sense of an animal nearby spread through my body quickly: that is how I know I am an animal myself.
I remember thinking: Large cat. Not housecat, clearly; more of a bobcat, maybe mountain lion sort of size. I thought of the sepia photo I've seen of my great-grandfather with a bobcat slung over his shoulder, walking down a rough slope. My eyes moved, following the wake of the bending brush that rippled as what I took to be a large cat went by. Then the ground shook, like a slight earthquake: a low warning rumble emanating from the earth. I can’t remember if it was actually audible or if my body only felt the sound. I turned my head slowly to look left.
There was a black bear standing perhaps 15 feet away. It was enormous, even on all fours, and it was glorious. Blackish brown, the color of mink, gleaming in the filtering light. We stood watching one another.
The bear’s nose trembled, glistening. Its ears had turned forward, pivoting to better catch the sound of whatever it was, whatever I was, another animal nearby. The ears were lined with softer fur, blurred, the softer fur a brownish black, the color of a wet otter or seal.
I wanted - wildly, desperately - to touch the bear's ears. Breathtakingly I wanted to touch them. I nearly burst with the wanting. Instead, we stood very still, the bear and I, its eyes flickering back and forth over the place where I stood - bears don't see well; I must have emerged from the foliage as sudden and strange to the bear as the bear did to me, a chaos of not-bear, a blur of scent and color against a black rock wall.
This went on forever. It lasted less than an instant, can’t have been a full minute. It did not happen in time at all. It happened so fast I didn't have time to think in words, ask myself what to do if the bear moved toward me, whether to scramble up the cliff or lie down and play dead on the narrow, root-gnarled trail. Those thoughts came later. Maybe they have come just now, in the interminable coda of memory, variation after variation on a theme.
It's only now, sitting here on the bank of a river, hidden from the world by the enveloping dark and the distant wail of night train, that I remember what I thought when I stood face to face with a bear, which was not that I was afraid but that I needed a little more time, that I didn’t want the bear eat my hands before I’d had a chance to turn to the man with whom I was walking that path and touch his face and say something, say, I love you.
Say, I loved you. I did.
Hello, friends! I've been up in your inbox a bunch this week with news of upcoming classes with Caravan Writers Collective and the release of Karen Babine's latest, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo, which is why today’s missive from the road is but brief, and why it’s a postcard from the path. This path - as I mention often, and as I’m never unaware - is one that I walk both in solitude and in community, in the company of strangers and friends.
The interconnectedness of both a writer's life and solo life is on my mind today, partly because of a question someone posed at the spectacular launch event for Allure on Wednesday, and partly because the work we’re doing at the Caravan Writers Collective illustrates the dual nature of the writing life and the writing process. Though writing is a solitary undertaking in many ways, we are always writing toward someone, communicating with someone, reaching for connection with an imagined reader; we are throwing our voices in hopes that someone hears. As another writer said to me recently, we're all just wolves, doing what wolves do - howling for each other in the wild.
At the launch of The Allure of Elsewhere, where Karen read to an ebullient, standing-room-only crowd and I was lucky enough to share an hour's time in conversation with her, someone asked us both whether there was a time that we understood ourselves to be, in some core way, solo people, people who were on solitary path through the world.
In different ways and for different reasons, we both said yes.
And we both said that being solo doesn’t mean we’re lonely, or disconnected, or ultimately alone.
That fundamental connectedness - between thought and word, between the thing itself and the story we tell about it, between image and language, reader and writer, voice and ear, heart and mind - is the current that runs through all forms of communication, all forms of art, all the beauty we see and create, all the understanding we seek and find and share.
The Caravan Writers Collective - and if you haven't yet gotten a look at the classes and events we're offering this summer and beyond, come check those out - is a pretty great illustration of what happens when the solitary path of a writer intersects with that of another writer, and then another and another: the writing gets richer, the load gets lighter, the journey transforms.
A couple weeks back, the Caravan team meeting went a-wandering. One minute we were talking about platforms or content or contracts, and then someone told a story about a bear, and then someone else told a story about a different bear, and pretty soon, the call was well off the well-marked path and way out in the woods, stomping around, hollering and laughing and telling stories about bears.
And that's how we wound up here today, with this postcard from the Going Solo path. In the coming week, you'll have a chance to hear from my fellow Caravaners where this prompt led them - if you aren't yet reading Matt, Holly, and Paul, check out three other ways to a bear. If you’re so inclined or inspired, pick it up where we leave off, and tell us your own story about a bear, or a creature you’ve encountered in the wild.
Better yet - join us for the weekly Caravan Write-In starting Saturday, June 7 (first Saturdays are always free!) and see where a prompt, a comment, an idea, an insight, a conversation, a spark of connection, and the interconnectedness of writing in community lead you.
We can’t wait to write with you.
What an encounter AND damn girl you can construct a sentence! Wow.
I have a bear story to share.... J
You write beautifully.