Pater: blueberries and bears... At right, my dad walking up from an ocean overlook at Garrapata State Park, south of Monterey, California, April 2006.
Blueberries and bears...
One beautiful sunny day in the late summer, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, my dad and I went hiking to a favorite destination: Doubletop Mountain (part of the Katahdin group) in northern Maine. For reasons I can't remember now, it was just the two of us – neither my sister Holly or my brother Scott was with us, though both had been up that peak on other hikes. It was a relatively easy day hike, a 6 or 7 mile round trip and about 2,500' of elevation change. It was also a beautiful hike, with a very varied terrain that included granite outcroppings, streams, talus slopes, meadows, and lots of forest. As I recall, only the very top of the mountain was above timberline.
Doubletop gets its name from the two closely-spaced peaks that form its summit, as you can see in the photo at left. On a clear day you can see a long, long way from the old fire watch tower (now torn down) on one of the peaks.
When we got to the north peak on this day (we hiked in from the south, I believe), my dad looked down at a sort of shelf below us (visible on the map embedded below) – a relatively flat area – and saw a big patch of blueberries. They were high enough, and it was late enough in the season, that there ought to be ripe blueberries there. Obviously we needed to go down and pick some for ourselves.
Looking at the map now, I see that this shelf was 600' or 700' lower than the north peak (in altitude) and about a third of a mile north. There was no clear trail there, though we did see evidence of others having been that way before. Down we went, through shrubs and under some trees, heading in the general direction of that blueberry patch. Finally, after 20 or 30 minutes of bushwhacking, we popped out onto the blueberry patch – which was far more magnificent than anything I'd been imagining. We were hungry after our hike, so we didn't waste any time – we laid directly into that luscious blueberry patch, grabbing handfuls of sweet, juicy berries (the wild ones are smaller and sweeter than any you'll find in a store) and sending them straight down our greedy gullets. It took a while before we were sated, but I completely lost track of how long that actually was.
Finally, gorged with blueberries, my dad decided it was time for him to take his usual afternoon-on-a-hike nap. We had stumbled across a small pond in our meandering, and my dad had spied a flat rock nearby – so we went over there, washed our blueberry-stained hands in the little pond, and then my dad laid down and was snoring in no time at all. I wandered around the edges of the pond, which had a lot of interesting plant life around it. I was sitting on small rock almost across the pond from my dad, perhaps 15 minutes later, when I heard a noise to my left, the sound of something or someone crashing through the brush, over toward where my dad was lying down. I looked up, and there was a bear, headed straight for the pond – it probably wanted a drink.
My family were all quite comfortable in the great outdoors. The presence of a bear wasn't necessarily cause for great alarm, we knew, so long as we didn't do something the bear would find threatening. So I wasn't immediately alarmed. But a few seconds after I first sighted the bear, I saw a second one – a little cub, crashing after its mother. That put an entirely different spin on the matter – mama bears are fiercely protective of their cubs, and not necessarily rational about it. I was suddenly afraid for my dad. Not for me, as the pond was more-or-less between me and the bears. But my dad was just off to the side of the place those bears were heading for.
So I hollered out to my dad, to warn him. The bears weren't on top of him yet, so I thought he'd have time to get over to where I was, and then we could go back up to the peak. My dad woke up, looked at me questioningly, and I pointed toward the bears – which were still headed his way. That got his attention in a hurry, and he jumped up and started moving.
But he didn't move in my direction – instead, he headed straight toward the mama bear, yelling, waving his hands, and throwing anything he could get his hands on. The mama bear, obviously not used to being attacked (for no other interpretation of my dad's actions was possible), looked very confused. I suspect she'd never seen anything so frightening in her life. I was confused, too – that was the last sort of behavior I expected from my dad. This was not the calm, gentle dad I knew so well – this was fearless, aggressive alpha-dad, a species I'd never seen before (nor did I ever see it again). He was terrifying.
The mama bear and her cub took off at high speed to the north. In just a minute or two, they were even out of earshot. My dad came over to make sure I was ok, we laughed together about the terrified bear, and then he went back to his rock – and back to sleep.
It was a surreal experience for me, especially for the few minutes right after my dad continued his cherished nap in the sunshine. He hadn't hesitated, not even for a fraction of a second, to run straight at that bear. One might say “That’s what dads do when their children are threatened”, and I suspect that's true in a general sense. But run straight at a roughly 300 pound mama bear with a cub, armed with nothing but a loud voice and some stones? Would every dad do that? I don't know, but I do know my dad would. To protect me. Adding to the surreality, a minute or so after the event he was laughing about it, and then immediately went back to sleep again. Remembering the incident brings back that unreal feeling again, but also a smile. That was my dad, utterly unintimidated by anything a Maine forest could throw at him...
Years later, my dad and I sat by a mountain pond surrounded by blueberries again, this time in the Sawtooth Mountains of southern Idaho. The scene reminded me strongly of that experience on Doubletop Mountain, so many years before. I asked my dad if he remembered it, and he did, vividly – what he mostly remembered was being angry at that bear for daring to threaten us. He also remembered that on the drive home, he had made me promise not to tell my mom – he didn't want her to forbid us from making these hikes. I don't know if she would have, but my dad told me I'd never said anything to her, which he was grateful for :)
My mom reads this blog, so if she makes it this far in the story, now she knows. Sorry, mom. Dad made me promise!
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