🎶 If I could talk to the animals, just imagine it… 🎵
🎶…I’d confer with our furry friends and animals
Think of the amazing repartee!… 🎵~Bricusse, from “Talk To The Animals”, a song composed for the film ‘Dr. Doolittle’
Perhaps the biggest challenges here in this Great Land are all summarized and contained in one simple question: just what exactly are you willing to accept as normal? Stuff that seems so odd, sometimes laughed off, waved away, or simply met with that vacuous look combining dismay and you-poor-lump-of-simpleton. Trust this one, however, even coming from a cornfield hillbilly like me: Talk to the bears.
Walking in thick brush means I’m singing very loudly and annoyingly – my favorite Robert Earl Keen songs work well – wooded switchback trails means endless voice impersonations – Gilbert Gottfried or maybe a right-and-proper, falsetto Queen of England.
In yet another haplessly daring demonstration of dumbassery and exactly what not to do though, there we were – this particular bear and I – having a discussion about my Swiss Miss hot chocolate at 3:38 a.m. It was raining firmly and a cool 50°’ish out in the woods, standing there clad in ugly green crocs and my bvd’s, balancing a blue tote box full of food on my shoulder with one hand and shaking a pointing finger on my other hand toward the ripe berries just over yonder and telling him how he really needs to go over there and try them. But he was ignoring me, being rude, his butt planted square-middle of my table, the torn open can of chocolate was now stuck on the end of his nose, he was grumbling, complaining, slurping and lapping his tongue around inside of it trying to extract the chocolate, making growling num-num sounds, Swiss Miss powder blowing out the sides and around his face, to where he now had a chocolate mask surrounding two batting eyes, torn with a visible confusion of do I stay or do I go?
Living almost exclusively by his nose, he doesn’t see real well and definitely does not like surprises, so it’s all about letting him know where you are. Deciding, he finally went. And joined the other one that I didn’t see behind the trees, both of them wandering quietly away from our amazing repartee.
Me? Well, I suddenly had to pee real bad.
Now, all of this discourse may seem confusing or, at a minimum, not a very normal thing to be doing, the blaring stupidity of standing next to a bear with a box of food in particular. None of it is normal if you don’t acknowledge that Alaska is not one bit like anything you now know, maybe just a shred of an image in your mind of what it might be – some quasi-mythical place, magic for many. Meeting on its terms is the only way, love it, truly gather it to you as you would your family, get it under your fingernails, bleed it on your torn up blue jeans, soak it into your pores in a glacial river, howl with it in a reach of land stretching beyond the curve of the vaulted sky, pick a tree within the cathedral forests and restfully, deeply, sleep beneath, with only centuries of summers and falls of cones and needles beneath you, endure enduring winter and giggle like a child in its summer, repeat, repeat often.
When you do, just keep your food tucked, your ‘britches on, and have an interesting topic or two at the ready. You will meet him too.