Bears are a big deal in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
A really big deal.
Teaching people about bears is a really big deal, too.
And vice versa.
In fact, rangers spend a huge amount of time urging both people and bears not to love each other to death. They are engaged in an endless, and apparently futile, struggle to put across two main points:
(1) Do not cause a bear to die by your suicidal or sloppy food handling habits. Bears who learn to associate people with snacks have a very short lifespan.
As they say, “A fed bear is a dead bear.”
(2) Do not get killed or maimed by a bear because you were doing something incredibly stupid. Bears who hurt people have an even shorter lifespan than the bears in Lesson 1.
Stuffed Bears
For training purposes, the Park Service employs a wide variety of taxidermied bears. This aspect of working at GSMA is sort of weird, but our halls are stuffed with stuffed bears. Some of the stuffed animals are polyester toy bears on their way to our stores, but a lot of them used to be real bears.
You got your stuffed cubs and your stuffed adults. Some are stuffed walking on four legs, some are sitting, and some are mounted in poses of climbing trees. Some are just skinned and left flatter than roadkill.
The rangers use the various dead bears to teach with. Endless experience tells the Park Service that there is a desperate need to tell people things like this: Do not try to “pet” bears. Do not try to introduce your family pet to bears. Do not rub honey on your children and try to photograph bears licking the honey off. Do not try to feed bears marshmallows by holding them in your mouth and leaning forward.
Or stuff like that.
A side note here, in case you think only real bears exert a magnetic attraction on people who should know better, we sell a huge toy the same size as a full-grown bear ($175), which is nearly impossible to pass by without playing with. I have often seen people at work at GSMA grab the big bear, dance with it like a kid, and then set it down and go on about their business. It’s especially funny to catch people who didn’t seem like the type doing this when they thought no one was looking. Russell at Sugarlands doesn’t care who’s looking.
Stark Terror at the Mailbox
Every single person in my office, but me, has at least one scary bear story from their own personal experience. When I took this job I had no idea it was so easy to encounter a bear in the park. At first the tales of man versus bear were thrilling and I sought them out, but now I try to avoid hearing any more. The sheer number of such stories eventually had the effect of causing me to write myself a mental note that said: “Do not go into the woods.”
Kelli, who is our human resources department, had a particularly memorable encounter.
“I was nine months pregnant and waddled out to the mailbox.
“I pulled an armload of mail out and was closing the box when I got a glimpse of something big and black out of the corner of my eye. It was a bear standing at the base of a tree about ten feet away.
“It scared me to death. My brain was screaming, RUN!! RUN!!!
But I knew from being told so many times, THE ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER DO IS RUN!!
So I there I stood, paralyzed.
“I was so pregnant and so loaded down with mail I wasn’t sure I could outrun the bear even for the few yards to the front door.
“I didn’t dare move and I didn’t dare look at the bear, for fear of making it charge. I stood there for so long I started getting tired. And sort of dizzy.
“I waited and waited for the thing to leave, but it wouldn’t! Finally after a few minutes, one of the teaching rangers came around the corner and said, ‘Hey Kelli, how’s it goin?’
“I started to warn him about the bear, but before I could say anything, he walked right up to it and grabbed hold of it! And picked it up!
“I was totally in shock. It’s a wonder I didn’t go into labor right then.”
Wow, I knew the rangers were all braver than me, but this was really impressive. A ranger who would give his own life to save a pregnant woman. How heroic. I nearly swooned in awe at his courage.
Then Kelli said, “I turned and that’s when I really saw the bear for the first time. It was a full-size black plastic bear the rangers use for outdoor demonstrations to large groups. He’d left it propped against the tree while he went to get something from his office.
“I’d been given the scare of my life by a plastic bear!”
At first I was relieved, and then amused, and then sort of irritated to hear the bear was fake. So the ranger hadn’t been brave or sacrificing himself, had he? He hadn’t been killed or mauled or even scared. In fact it was his fault this whole thing had happened in the first place.
You’d think a ranger would have more sense than to leave his fake bear standing around in the woods where it could scare people.
And even though this bear attack wasn’t really an attack and wasn’t even really a bear, I made another mental note. This note said: “Stay away from the mailbox.”