First some photos- spent summer 2005 in Alaska doing humpback whale research with a small non-profit called Eye of the Whale. We worked in Prince William Sound (camping on a small island and taking the sailboat out by day) and during the off periods I lived in a school bus on Olga's property in Homer, AK. Raising the mast on the sailboat. View from camp. Humpback whale (and breath) and Sea Otters Predators and Statistics 7/21/2005 They say, I think, that you have a greater chance of getting struck by lightening than being eaten by a shark.  But I wonder who made up those statistics and what population they were using. If they calculated the risk based on the entire population of, let’s say the United States, then all the people who have never seen the ocean, and all the people who have seen Jaws and now refuse to enter said ocean, are severely biasing the results. I bet those statistics weren’t created using only the population of people who enter the ocean nearly every day. I bet those odds would increase then.  Likewise, the chances of getting slaughtered by a brown bear are probably pretty low for someone living in Nebraska, or better yet, Hawaii.  But if you’re in Alaska walking up a road that has fresh tracks from a bear who took down a moose calf a month ago, a bear who’s paws were larger than the size of horses hooves, I’d bet your odds would be significantly higher. That was the jackpot I was seriously hoping not to win as I stomped home after a walk this evening. I found a miraculous penchant for singing and even haphazardly composed a new song for the occasion. It went something like this: “I’m walkin’ home, walkin’ home, walkin’ home, please don’t eat me, please don’t eat me, please don’t eat me.” I’d just spent two days cooped up inside because of rain and fog and when the sun rose this morning (well, the sun probably rose at about 4 am, so more accurately at 10 am this morning) I promised myself that today I would take a walk and look around. I’d asked Olga where the best place to walk was and she’d directed me to the old homestead down the road a bit. My friend Beth, the one who’d originally invited me to Alaska, was leaving in three days so I called her up and asked if she was in the mood for a walk. Thankfully for me she was, my backup plan was to strike out on my own. I made it successfully down to the meadows, amazed again at the beauty of this place. There’s so much….bigness here. Everything is grand. Sweeping views, deceptively stable looking mountains, snow, blue sky, glaciers, red berries and blue flowers. A squirrel took issue with my passing under his tree. I stopped to investigate the noise because thus far the most common birds I’d heard were bald eagles. I moved on and eventually met up with Beth. She recited the history of the land we were walking on as we slowly made our way down to her husband’s cabin. A two-year old filly came charging out of the bushes- her name was Fresca and she was lonely. It seems that most of the people around here own horses. For our return trip Beth wanted to take an old logging road; it would be a bit of a shortcut. We encountered another group of horses and on taking leave of them I noticed an odd looking hoof print on the ground. I decided not to mention it and convinced myself that sliding in the mud a hoofprint could take on four semi-distinct grooves near the front. As we climbed further Beth said that I should avoid coming down this way in the evenings, especially if I was alone. There’d been a brown bear sighting a month ago. One of the local guys was driving his truck down a nearby road and a moose emerged backwards out of the woods looking panicked. Right after her came a brown bear with the calf in its mouth. I was shocked. I’d been told that there were black bears on the island we camped on in the Sound, and that a brown bear had recently killed two people sleeping in a tent (can’t remember where in Alaska that happened) but hadn’t really thought that they would be a close as, oh, about two hundred yards from the bus where I lived. At about that moment Beth looked down and saw the tracks that had initially looked like slightly odd hoof prints. They weren’t hoof prints. They were brown bear tracks. And they were very, very big. We began talking louder and whistling occasionally. The tracks followed the road we were on and even through the barbed wire fence. We debated whether the bear had gone over or under the fence; both seemed possible. A truck and four-wheeler passed us and it felt a bit safer. It had been raining the past three days and the tracks were fresh. My guess would be that they were made the previous day. My friend Molly had asked if I needed a bear bell and I had declined, thinking I wouldn’t be in such remote country that I would need such a thing. I guess “remote’ is relative. we took another shortcut because the fourwheeler had just driven along it- that would scare or at least alert a bear right? More tracks appeared as we rounded a corner into a more densely vegetated area. We talked louder. On making it back to Beth’s she set me off on the main, wider road assuring me that it wasn’t far to our friend Ted’s house and that a more open road should be fine. I struck out on my own, and began humming a little to myself. I looked down at the left shoulder and there were the tracks again. I switched to singing. I have found myself from time to time walking alone in cities at night. I’ve usually planned ahead for such occasions by not wearing a skirt and dressing as androgenously as possible, and then adopt a different gait. I’m still not a huge person, but I try to appear as least “victim-like” as possible. There is a certain way that guys-who-think-they’re-studs walk, and there’s a reason for it. Being a decent mimic comes in handy and makes me feel a little safer. In this instance I didn’t think that acting a role was going to come in handy- brown bears probably aren’t tuned in to the subtleties of human culture. But I decided to adopt a rather militaristic approach to walking anyway, hoping that a little stomping would advantageously add to my singing, seeing that I didn’t have the bear bell. I made it home without mishap, and like any good X-generation kid, I went straight to the internet to investigate more about brown bears. What I found out both comforted and alarmed me. The largest of all the brown bears live….. about exactly where I’m living. Coastal areas of Alaska. And they’re everywhere. There were the usual warnings about not having food out in the open etc. If you encounter a brown bear you are supposed to stay calm and wait. They say that usually a brown bear will “do the right thing” which supposedly is go the opposite way. You are supposed to let the bear know you are human and make human noises, or use a noise maker or bang pots and pans. Under no circumstances should you try to make bear noises. Check. They say that if the bear makes contact there are two options: play dead, or fight back. Playing dead works usually if the bear perceives you as a threat, so if you’ve surprised it, gotten in between a mom and cub or disturbed a feeding event, it’s best to lie down or curl in a ball and put your hands on the back of your neck. If the bear has entered your tent, or house, yes, your house, you are supposed to fight. And you’re supposed to fight black bears in all contact occasions. Fight? Fight?  A mature brown bear male can weight up to 900 lbs.! Fight?!?!? It’s legal to kill a brown bear in self-defense, but only if you haven’t left out food, scraps, general garbage or pet food to attract the bear. I like that caveat. The Alaskan Department of Fish and Game strongly recommends against carrying firearms for defense against bears because if you are not used to using them in emergency situations you are more likely to get injured by the gun than by the bear. The next paragraph then listed the two guns they recommend. Soooooo……  idiots are screwed either way and the gun savvy have a fighting chance. Apparently the couple recently attacked in their tent had guns with them and hadn’t even had a chance to reach for them. Their food was also stored away from the tent. That’s comforting. I grew up taking regular trips to our cabin. It’s a rustic place with no running water, located in the middle of quite a bit of forest. I don’t think there are bears, but there were rattlesnakes and then lots of annoying but not lethal entities like ticks and poison ivy. I learned to be comfortable in the woods and not to fear nature. I even managed solo trips to the outhouse when it had gotten dark. I was fond of telling a story that illustrated where my fears lay. My family had always only brought out a small radio with us. We tried to keep the cabin as un-technical as possible. My dad chopped the wood for the woodstove and we pumped the water from a well a short drive away. One evening I was out on the back deck brushing my teeth and I heard two mens’ voices talking. My heart stopped. Who was there? Were they under the deck? What did they want? Were they thieves? Were they going to hurt us? Would I have enough time to alert my parents? Would they be able to come to my rescue? It took me a minute to realize that the voices were coming from upstairs, and that my parents had for the first time brought a television set. I was hearing whatever program was currently on. But I realized that that was the most frightened I had ever been at my cabin, and it was a human threat, not a wilderness one, that alarmed me most. I was always rather proud of that, and viewed it as evidence of my comfort in nature and wisdom at recognizing where true danger lies. And then I saw the bear tracks. And everything changed. When I walking the last bit of road alone I was tempted to stop for a few seconds to take a picture of the tracks, but was too afraid. Would I seem like more of a prey item then? Now I wish I had the picture, with a size reference like my own shoe. Fear is a funny thing. I think it’s great to have fear- it keeps us from doing ridiculous things. Now that I’ve read that bears really want to avoid humans I almost think I could go back to that road and just talk loudly and take that picture. But I doubt I will. I might have weird bear luck. Just like I have bad borrowed-car karma. Almost every time someone lends me their car something bad happens. Never my fault, just bad things happen. Similarly I was in Kodiak last year. We’d had dinner with some Kodiak natives who said they’d never seen a bear without going on one of the special bear-viewing tours. We were driving down a main road the next day and stopped at a bridge where our friend’s car had also stopped. There crossing the river was a Kodiak bear. For some people it takes a lifetime, for me it took about two days.  People pay lots of money to see bears in the wild, and there I was walking alone down a dirt road hoping like hell that I wasn’t going to have the luck to see one for free. I guess bears are just something to get used to. People in California live with earthquakes. People in Hawaii live with tiger sharks. People in large cities all over the world now live with the threat of terrorism, and that is still the scariest. With most natural things there are warning signs. Or at least certain things you can avoid if you want to. Don’t surf at dusk or dawn. Don’t live on a fault line. Wear a noise-making device when hiking in bear territory. But human threats are still the least predictable (barring the odd brown bear attack on the couple, I’m going to have nightmares tonight about this bear knocking over my bus). I’m just not used to living so close to such a powerful predator. the bus I lived in while in Homer Fear Just as the sun began to rise... I woke up. I didn't know why at first that I'd woken up, but was quite awake, at 3:45 in the morning. And then I heard the crash. Again, and again. It was metal. Metal being crunched, punched and was changing shape. I sat in my metal bus and thought, "bear!". "There's a bear getting into someone's garbage." That ramrod stiffness that comes with great fear gripped me. From my prone position I thought the sound was coming from down the road, and was fearful of even raising my head lest the bear see me. Who left food out? I'd brushed my teeth outside the bus last night. Why had I done that!? Why!? There was even some food _in_ the bus. Why!? My parents had urged me to start staying the house, yet I still chose the bus. Why!? Then more crunching and a frenzied neighing of the horses. Was the bear after the horses? There’s a little bigger than moose calves. I dared to raise my head, and realized that the sounds were coming from the barn. The bear was in the barn! There was cat food in the barn! In the office! With all the computers! _My_ computer! Why!? I hadn’t backed up my thesis recently! Why!? I debated between putting my glasses on to try and detect the bear leaving the barn (and logically coming after me in the bus) or hiding under the covers. I kept my head down, and waited, mentally going through what weapons I had at hand- settling on the cast iron frying-pan-type thing I'd seen on the stove. You were supposed to hit bears on the nose. So I had a plan, and a weapon. Soon I heard footsteps leaving the barn. I held my breath. But they weren't bear footsteps, they were horse's. I listened harder. Could a bear sound like a horse? What were the horses doing "out"? Were the bear and horses in cahoots? I sneaked a peak and definitely saw a palmino back. Naia. The horse I'd ridden a couple of weeks ago. What was she doing?? My heart was still racing. The horses had been getting out recently. I'd learned that the morning before. So it made sense. There was no bear. And as my pulse returned to normal I sat and thought of what a shit-ass-poor Alaskan I would make. There are two abandoned cars between the bus and the barn. When I went to sleep I dreamt that the bear/horse had managed to tip them over in the adjoining field. If they could do that, what would they do to the bus??