Photo Op

A thousand bears. It sounds like the title of a movie or a broadway musical. Nathan Lane would make a great comic bear. A thousand bears is actually the estimated number of bears in Yellowstone National Park. They warn you at the ranger station. The bears are awake. They’re hungry. A mama was spotted the other day, park ranger says. Do they just say this to get your attention? If so, it works. They ask: Got bear spray? Make noise when you walk. A few years ago a guy at a hotel in Butte told us don’t worry about bears, just wave your arms and they run away. It’s the moose you need to worry about. Mother moose—I wish there was a real plural—mother mooses (meese?) will get in your face. Or more accurately, ON your face. And in point of fact, the three days we were in Yellowstone, an 80-year-old man in Alaska was killed by a mother moose. He just wanted to take her picture–with her two calves.

Yes, we have bear spray. We keep it in the car. Even when we’re on the trail, it’s safe in the car. Because I forget. And because anyway we try to stay on the very populated trails, the noisy ones, like the one down to the lower falls observation deck which is a main thoroughfare for 3-4 school busloads of noisy children. You can imagine serious bears (I guess I should say bear for plural) rolling their eyes and backtracking to the wilderness.) But we deviate now and then, Tizi and I. Let’s go down there—somewhere nobody is. And once we’re down there, we are by ourselves. Just us and nature. In the canyon area of the park, we start down a trail toward Inspiration Point. We see a few hikers, two old guys—I mean older than us—who share a pair of hiking poles. The taller, slightly more decrepit one holds up his pole and shrugs. I got this, he says. As if that’s protection. I tell Tizi, all this reminds me of one of our grandsons talking about sharks, a scary predator on par with bears, and what he would do if he encountered one. I tell him about my friend Dan Leman, who said, when we were 9 or 10, that if a shark comes after you, just punch him in the nose. Grandson likes this advice, though I think he also recognizes it lunacy.

There are degrees of lunacy. Leaving your spray in the car.

The day we were in the canyons, the day before we were going to transition to Grand Teton park, a hiker was mauled by a grizzly over there. Along the trail he encountered two of them, and one of them acted out. If it happens once, it can happen twice. What are they odds?

You think about risk. If you really think about it, you ask, What are the odds? One of the rangers tells us the park is 2.2 million square miles. Really, what are the odds of running into a bear? A thousand bears, all that room for them.

We see a grizzly by the side of the road, with two cubs that must be a year old. She has them on a long leash. They’re doing their thing. She’s far enough way, all of us are out our cars, shooting shooting shooting. She is oblivious. Maybe she likes the attention from the paparazzi. Same day, cars are stopped again. (This stoppage is a Yellowstone thing.) You know it’s something, probably more bison who hog the road, lumber past your car and act like you’re not there. This time it’s a black bear and a cub, way far away, way way way far, and all of us are out our cars, shooting shooting shooting. Same day, in the north edge of the park, we happen upon a moose. It’s a he. A small male, with his antlers coming in. They’re furry. He’s so close I would reach out and touch the velvet on those antlers. I put my window down and take pictures. I question the window-down decision. He ignores us, as a good beast should.

I find our bear spray and put it where I can see it. It comes in a little holster you hang on your belt. I should practice drawing in our hotel room, fix my city-slicker hiking hat at a menacing angle on my head, look in the mirror and draw, baby, draw. You’re only going to get one shot (or bite, as it were) so you better make it count. The bottle has a clip on it, which complicates the draw. So bring it, quit fantasizing about unlikely violent death.

In June of 1971 Steve Eaton and I drove out the Breckenridge, Colorado, in his snazzy new Ford Mustang. Bob Webster, Dan Leman, and Ron Fritz were there waiting for us. We drove straight through, taking turns in the driver’s seat, listening on headsets (why, I don’t know) to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer cranked high, smoking joints on regular intervals, waiting to see the mountains. It must have been along I-76, speeding toward Denver, that they came into view. It was daybreak. We were bleary and no longer high, dulled and sleepless, but seeing the mountains in the distance, we probably drove a little faster, through Denver and over Loveland Pass, cruising down into the valley and taking a left at Frisco. “Frisco,” the name smacked of the West. We had arrived.

Over the next 2-3 weeks I took pictures with a Kodak Instamatic camera, 24 exposure per roll, 3 rolls total. I had never seen a mountain. Back in Michigan I had been to the Porcupine Mountains, which seemed more like hills than mountains. Yes, there was rock visible in places, but not peaks. In Breckenridge we were at around 9500 feet. One Saturday for kicks the lot of us climbed one of the 14,000 peaks (there are 58 of them), Mt. Quandary. I may have shot some pictures. If I did they are lost. If I did, it probably didn’t occur to me to photograph my friends, smiling, gasping for breath, higher than we had ever been. I took pictures of the mountains.

When I got home and had the film developed, the images were a letdown. There was a mountain, there was another mountain, and another and another and another, looking all more or less alike. The pictures didn’t capture the grandeur.

Today we are back in Michigan, home from Yellowstone. We took a lot of pictures. In the digital age, because the cost of developing them is no longer an issue, we take pictures with abandon. We took multiples shots, sometimes three, four, or five pictures of the same cliff, the same waterfall. Typically when we travel, my morning-after routine involves deleting photos from my phone. Someone said one time, back in the age of cameras with film in them, shoot three rolls of film and maybe you’ll find one really good one. That one image is precious. From 1974 I have a photograph of the bridge in Big Sur, enlarged, framed. And a photo of small waterwheel and mill in Canterbury, England, also in 1974, also enlarged and framed. Photos taken with that Instamatic.

Back from Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon, here’s a few images (we don’t say pictures much anymore). It was really beautiful. Really. Beautiful.