Bikes and Bears

We are back home from a three-week-long road trip. Totally relaxed. I haven’t thought about work since we left. Not a second. That is because I had so many other things to worry about. After two weeks, I was so tired of my own worries that I surrendered to fate. From then on, everything went uphill.

During the first week, I was worried about the bikes that we attached to our car. Our car is a Toyota Yaris with three doors. Every time we needed something from the trunk, we were too lazy to get the bikes off the car; we left the bikes on the car and tried to pry whatever it was we were looking for through a tiny wedge.

(Venice, Los Angeles)

One beautiful morning in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, someone forgot to tie the bikes to the rack and when I made a left (not a turn on two wheels or so but a pretty mellow maneuver), my bike flew off the car onto the street. It came to a stop with a nasty screeching sound. From then on, I double and triple-checked the bikes each time before we started driving. But I kept imagining awful scenarios. What if the bike-rack was unreliable and the bikes fell off because we had tied them too tightly now and what if the bikes were blown into the windshield of the car behind us? Who would be liable? The manufacturer - who had posted a big disclaimer on the rack - or we? I just could not let go of my inner lawyer. It was horrible.

(Idahoans are cool people. They are pretty low-key and very proud of their potatoes.)

Then, when we got to Yellowstone, I fretted about the bears. The week before we arrived, a mother bear had attacked two hikers because she perceived them as a threat to her cubs. One of the hikers, a man from California, was killed because he tried to run away. Such attacks are extremely rare; you are much more likely to be killed by someone’s bike-rack flying through your windshield - and the likelihood of that is pretty much nil as well. But still, I had found something new to focus on.

I read all the safety recommendations I could find: when hiking, announce your presence to a bear by clapping your hands or yelling or speaking loudly and never run away from a charging bear because bears instinctively would see you as their prey if you do. I applied all of the above advice. I clapped my hands, I had loud conversations with Annelien until her ears were ringing, I yelled “hey bear” when we approached a curve in the path. I felt like a madwoman.

(Yellowstone, bison crossing our path in the morning fog.)

(Me, clapping my hands)

After the Elephant Back hike, I came home to our tent with a husky voice, completely exhausted. The good thing about that was that I just did not have any energy left to worry about bears at night. On our last morning at Yellowstone, we heard from the park ranger that a grizzly had been seen at our campground. And not just anywhere! The bear had visited our very own campsite!

(Figueroa, Downtown LA)

(To be continued in the next episode “Lesbians Worldwide, Unite!”)