Excerpts From The Life Of A Logging Camp Kid

Episode Ten: The Sunday Bear

Please forgive the sad little bear silhouette sketch, I had no pictures of our bears in windows encounters, so a five minute marker rendering had to do.

Some things just occur on a schedule. The deterioration of one's joints, the stepping on a Lego when one has children between the ages of 3 and 14, the spring exodus of people who realize just how much snow that we really get in our North Idaho micro-climate. You know, predictable stuff.

An event that we could always count on in our logging camp existence was the Sunday social visit by one very punctual black bear, the Sunday Bear. We probably weren't going to win any originality awards for that moniker, but sometimes applying the most obvious label will do the situation just fine.

Sunday bear, though thoughtfully punctual, was a bit of a male equine of the donkey family in behavior. We could always count on him to be very helpful in the area of cardiovascular health. Whomever he came across always experienced a spike in their non-resting heart rate. Apparently that was how he got his kicks on the supposed day of rest; to wander into the lone human establishment for a few thousand miles in all directions and scare the scat out of any homo sapiens that crossed his path.

A few examples:

My brother and I were "down south"[1] visiting our grandparents one July, and as it was my parent's anniversary; they were going to go for a romantic four-wheeler ride on the beach climaxing in a prime rib dinner at the cookhouse. That was top of the line as far as entertainment goes at the logging camp. Dad pulled out all of the stops in the debonair department with those anniversary plans. He was out collecting the anniversary chariot while my mother was taking a shower. As she stepped out of the shower, the entire trailer shook with an amount of force that surely registered on the Richter scale.

"Ron!" she yelled, "Quit messing around!"

The house reverberated again, and mom began to wonder if perhaps it wasn't dad being his customary irritating self after all. She, bedecked in bath towels, crept down the hallway and into the living room. Older single wide trailers have colored glass strip windows on the front door. Ours was a late 70's golden shade complete with psychedelic swirls. Through those swirls mom beheld the silhouette of a bear weaving back and forth. Mom was always one to verify any pertinent information in a scenario, and walked up to the living room window to have a peek at her visitor. Sunday Bear looked back at her, paws splayed on the front door, and gave his a teeth clack and offered a grunt as a greeting.

Mom, knowing that Dad was coming back with the ATV love chariot, ran to the kitchen window to let him know that there was a bear at the front door, as the whole right side of our trailer was enveloped by an addition known as a "Wannigan" [2]. Dad had just pulled up on the other side of the crew bus, and was as all people who drive motor vehicles do, testing the integrity of the engine's inner workings by revving the throttle. Profusely. Just for fun.

"Ron! There is a bear on the porch!" My mother screeched out the kitchen window.

"No there isn't." my dad replied with a smirk.

"YES THERE IS!" she yelled in return.

"Nope." Dad replied smugly, "There is a bear right below you."

Sunday Bear, with the comedic timing that would unfortunately be his undoing later in the year, had slunk down the porch steps and was skulking below the kitchen window, right beneath my mother. One must appreciate the humor of such a creature.

The problem with bears that get used to humans is one that plagues a lot of wildlife, especially predators. They eventually get desensitized to us, and as a result tend to lose their lives. The downward spiral of Sunday Bear's timeline began with the massacre of the neighbor's little Dachshund, Buster. He was a cute little blue merle Dachshund, and he became Sunday Bear's amuse-bouche one Sunday afternoon.

My most memorable interaction with living Sunday Bear was psyche impacting on a grand scale. There was an old mining cabin about 100 yards from camp, and all of us teenagers liked to hang out there. It was cool to dangle our feet off of one of the bunks and talk about Kurt Cobain, because angst and stuff. One time, a Sunday, I was walking back from the cabin alone, and I heard a grunt behind me. Of course this was the one time I had left the shotgun at home. As I turned around, I recognized Sunday Bear behind me, as he had a little bit of gold on his chest. He was standing on two legs, about fifty feet behind me on the gravel trail. I started talking to him in a low tone as I slowly backed down the trail. He responded with some teeth clacking and grunts, as was his custom. Bears are fast runners, and as it was about one hundred feet or so to our neighbor's front door; I knew that I was going to have to really hoof it to survive. This became more apparent as Sunday Bear dropped to his front feet and began slashing his front legs back and forth in the "I'm going to charge and maul your butt" dance. Luckily, I had a piece of granite in my hand, and before I thought about my imminent death much further, shouted; "Hutcher!" and chucked that bit of igneous rock at the jerk of a creature. I didn't stick around to see if I had hit him, as I was running like an Olympian towards the nearest trailer. One of the scariest sounds in the world is a predator running after you with that instinctual goal of dinner in their mind. You can hear it with every hot expelled breath as they try to gain on you. I obviously survived, but that along with a couple of other close encounters with camp inhabitants sealed Sunday Bear's death warrant.

Dennis, the camp's log scaler [3] liked to hunt, and really wanted to be the one that dealt with Sunday Bear. He had taken on the fatal label, a nuisance bear, so with a bounty of non-existence on his head, it was only a matter of time until he was executed.

Strangely enough, that wily bear didn't show up for the next three Sundays. Life became peaceful again. By this I meant there were only the usual bouts of drunkenness, illicit affairs continued on their schedules, and trees were felled and moved about. One night, it was about two A.M. on a Sunday morning; I was dangling off our polyester and blue rose bedecked couch in upside down pose. My yogaesque-looking dosing was suddenly interrupted by what sounded like thunder ripping off of the top of our trailer. I rolled onto the carpet like a drowsy ninja as my parents and brother burst from their rooms.

"What in the Hades was that!" my father barked as he stomped through the trailer with a shotgun in his hands.

We all bunched behind dad like a pack of Pajama-bedecked Spartans heading into battle. Our curiosity formation was comical and precise in nature. I quickly noticed that it was copied and repeated by every family in camp, as they all congregated by our front porch and shipping container[4].

"What in the wide world of sports was that, Ron?" asked our neighbor Billy, his blood shot eyes wide with wonderment.

Before dad could answer, we peered down the dark three foot wide alley way between our wannigan and our shipping container. At the end of every trailer a wall of twenty foot tall spruce trees formed a privet-like hedge of black doom. No light reached the forest floor beneath the trees, and the ground was thus carpeted with an unbroken rug of green moss. I have no idea how big this mystical patch of forest actually was. It reminded me of Shelob's lair out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a young person, and I was one of the few kids brave enough to explore it. The scar on my upper left bicep is a testament of just how dangerous that enchanted forest was. Trying to orient yourself in a place with no light and full of all manner of death was how I spent many an afternoon. Yet I digress, back to the Sunday Bear. At the edge of our trailer, and on our front entrance to the forest lay a great steaming form. We all hesitated to approach it as there was a light flickering, weaving and bobbing all around the black mass.

"Helloooo there Dennis!" my father called out.

"I got the SOB Ron!" the light blurted, "Took him right next to your wood pile!"

"That we are aware of." my mother said softly as she clutched the front of her teal bathrobe to her chest.

One adult went to grab the biggest four wheeler we had in order to haul the carcass to the tire shop for processing. As we all crept closer for a look at the expired Sunday Bear, two things occurred simultaneously:

First: My father, being a class clown, extroverted personality type, came up with a plan to further tend to our general cardiovascular fitness.

Second: I saw where the bear was lying and went cold with panic. Right where the Sunday Bear's life force was draining back into the earth was a chunk of moss. Under this chunk of moss was a prophylactic of the pregnancy prevention kind. My friends and I had been messing around with it, for reasons only known to the minds of thirteen year old's. I'm pretty sure we were going to put it on the garbage lady's front door knob (she hated us children), but instead wimped out. Instead of throwing it in the garbage; someone had got the bright idea to stick it under a patch of moss behind MY trailer. What the moss needed pregnancy and STD protection from is kind of a mystery to me, but we were bored a lot and did a lot of moronic things. I caught Crissy and Mary's eyes and we all wore the look of a panicked colt! We instantly started formulating stories for the inquisition that was to come once that bit of latex was unearthed by Sunday Bear's removal. How cruel of him to throw one last insult at us with his demise.

With dad out in front of the group, which at this point had grown to every kid in camp, we all crept toward the steaming form. Dad had a long stick in his hand, and as he reached the bear, he stealthily stuck it underneath its paw. We all didn't see that maneuver, and as soon as we got close he flicked the stick and threw the bear's paw up into the air.

"It's alive!" he yelled in his best Dr. Frankenstein voice impression.

To this day, I am forever grateful for my father's goofy nature. Everyone screamed and scattered, and the men proceeded to load Sunday Bear onto the racks of the four-wheeler. So distracted were they by their amusement that they didn't notice the lonely condom that lay across the moss. That bit of latex promptly found itself a new home in the garbage bin the very next morning.

I can't say that Sunday Bear was missed, but like everything in this life, he mattered. He is remembered by people, his story has been told, and his carcass yielded some really impressive sausage and bear grease.

Somewhat Explanatory Footnote Section:

[1] Down South. This term is used by most Alaskan's to describe a geographical location in the lower 48 of the Continental U.S.A.

[2] Wannigan An addition to one's home. Usually built out of rough cut cedar, and "rustic" in appearance. I'm being generous with the rustic adjective.

[3] Log Scaler A person who is to track the volume and quality of the timber their company is buying or selling.

[4] Shipping Container Due to the exotic local of our many moves, my parents purchased a cargo container. This 8x20' box rode many a barge through the Pacific Ocean. I still have nightmares about the time that mom made us paint it hunter green. Most families move with moving vans or pickups; we just had a barge container. We should have built a house out of that thing!

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