Kathleen Caprario-Ulrich
Instincts...
I’m a girl from Jersey. I know my way around a shopping mall and prefer the Great Outdoors inside, and on a small screen. Sure, I was a Girl Scout—I went on a camping trip in fifth grade and learned how to braid a lanyard. But what’d I know about surviving in the wild?
It was a perfect mid-August morning. Your Garden of Eden—pre-snake and apple, of course—hand-tinted postcard type of day. Shafts of pure sunlight shone though the old growth forest that surrounded the backwoods campsite I shared with my boyfriend, later-to-be husband, just downwind of Goat Mountain’s summit in the Idaho wilderness. A rustic outhouse and cook shed provided amenities.
From the moment my feet wriggled out of our down-filled sleeping bag and hit the pine needle-carpeted dirt my city-bred “spidey-sense” was on high alert. Despite my guy’s assurances to the contrary, something in my gut told me that we were not alone.
***
Under the guise of something outdoorsy — fishing — he ventured off to commune with nature while I opted to catch up on my summer reading and was deep into Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and its imagined tales of young Florentines doing their best to survive the Black Death with lots of sex.
I decided to take a stroll down to a natural cold spot we fondly referred to as the “cooler” where we stored our perishable essentials — butter, cheese, yogurt and beer. Singing a jaunty Broadway showtune from “A Chorus Line,” I approached the spot where a flat slate slab secured our cache and stopped short, puzzled by the mayhem before me. The cooler’s chilled contents had been violently tossed about, half eaten. Cans of “Lucky Lager Beer” caught my eye, mauled and strewn across the path. My first thought was, “Why didn’t he use the pop-top?” and my second — well, there wasn’t one.
A faint sound from the ridgetop escalated with lightning speed to something much bigger that crashed like thunder down and through the woods. I had the advantage — at least for the moment — as I high-tailed it on flat ground, every step turbo charged with adrenalin.
I tumbled into the cook shed, pulled the flimsy curtain that served as a door, closed, and hopped up onto the back of a derelict sofa — a piece of firewood held high like a trusty club. The sound of what I imagined was a team of rampaging Clydesdales galloped past. Out the structure’s unglazed window I spied a smallish black form galumphing past the cook shed and down the dusty backwoods’ road, its gait wobbly. Lucky for me, the bear couldn’t hold his “Lucky” beer.
***
I still remember the moment, all those decades ago, as I spied Ursus Inebriated from my tenuous perch then collapsed in equal parts laughter and relief. I salvaged one of the clawed and punctured beer cans as a souvenir, and a reminder of how lucky I’d been that day. Or, was it instinct? Ask the bear.