I had one of those stream-of-consciousness experiences the other day, when one thing reminds me of another thing, which reminds me of something else, and then something else, like dominoes. Before I know it, I’m down a rabbit hole of old memories. Does that happen to you?
I was driving through town and spotted a pop-up fruit stand by the side of the road. There were flats of bright-red fresh strawberries, so I pulled over and purchased a half-flat. The warm-from-the-sun berries filled the car with a rich sweet perfume, and I couldn’t resist munching several while driving home.
Between the aroma and the flavor, I was immediately transported back to a previous life. My family lived in Ventura, home to many of California’s strawberry fields, thirty years ago when my son, Dean, was little. In the spring, he and I would often stop at one of the many roadside farmstands to buy a flat of strawberries, then immediately begin eating the berries in the car on the way home.
That delicious memory reminded me of one of Dean’s favorite picture books from that same time period, The Big Hungry Bear by Audrey and Don Wood. In the story, the narrator warns a little mouse, who has just found a giant red ripe strawberry, that bears like berries, too, and can smell them from a mile away. The mouse’s eyes grow big, and he tries to hide the berry from the would-be bear berry thief.
Believe it or not, that’s actually true! Bears have the best sense of smell of any animal. Your pet dog's sense of smell is 100 times more sensitive than a human’s. A blood hound's is 300 times better than that. A bear’s sense of smell is 7 times more powerful than a blood hound’s or 2,100 times better than yours or mine!
That bear story triggered another memory leap, which took me even further back in time to my very first real-life bear-encounter involving a pair of bears following their noses to “people food” in the back country.
I was fourteen and had backpacked into the Yosemite back country with a group of ten boys and girls, my age and younger, all members of the Chatsworth Athletic Club’s Swim Team. We were led by two fathers, one who’d been a National Park Service Ranger in Yosemite in his youth, so was intimately familiar with that wilderness. We hiked and camped for a week in the high country around Tuolumne Meadows. Heading out Lyell Canyon, we followed a loop that took us to Volgelsang, Sunrise Lake, and May Lake High Sierra Camps. It would have been August of 1969, or there abouts.
Backpacking was a lot different back then. We carried rented aluminum and canvas backpacks and walked in heavy leather boots. We used aluminum Sierra cups to drink directly from the lakes and streams, no water filters. I remember just dipping that shiny silver cup into the clear water of a running stream and how sweet that water tasted. We built fires to cook our meals, no compact stoves.
One evening, my assignment was to collect fallen wood for our cooking fire. Then I watched as our leader chopped one branch into kindling with a small hatchet before he started the fire in a circle of stones.
We ate the most god-awful food ever created. Pork-n-beans, still in the cans, the best offering on the menu, were cooked directly in the fire, then served half-burned, half-cold on aluminum plates. Freeze-dried food was in its infancy. Was it a spinoff from the NASA space program, like the Tang we drank? The cooking process was far from perfect and results were nearly inedible. The pale-yellow “scrambled eggs” were rubbery and tasted like chalk. Powdery chunks floated like curds in the chocolate milk we drank.
Clean-up may have been worse than eating. I remember being given the chore of cleaning the remains of the eggs out of the cast iron frying pan. Our leader showed me how to scrub the dried egg that clung to the inside of the pan with sand until it was clean. Then I buried the resulting slimy mess in a hole, before rinsing the pan with fresh water right in the stream. I look back on that now with disgusted wonder.
The craziest event from that long ago adventure revolved around food—food and bears. Camped near us one evening was a young couple on their honeymoon. They had set up their tent in the early evening, but before they could properly hoist their food supplies into the branches of a tree, which was considered best-practice back then, they became amorously distracted with one another inside the tent. Unfortunately, a mother black bear and her cub, out foraging at dusk, happened along at that exact moment, drawn by the aroma of food.
Following their noses, the bear pair attempted to join the couple and their food bags inside the tent. Thinking quickly, the groom used his pocketknife to slice a hole in the thick canvas wall of the tent, allowing he and his bride to escape, terrified, but otherwise unharmed. They took refuge with us and spent the last days of their honeymoon camping and traveling in the company of ten children and teenagers. They even shared our meals, as the bears had eaten everything they’d carried in their packs, right down to ripping open cans of tuna to lick them clean. Can you imagine how frightened the newlyweds must have been to choose to spend their honeymoon with a bunch of strangers, kids at that?
There have been remarkable, high-tech improvements to backpacking food and equipment. Yes, filtering water might be inconvenient, but modern freeze-dried foods are savory and easy to cook. There are no icky dishes or pans to clean, no slimy food mess to get rid of, no heavy pots or cans to tote, little trash to carry out, and no firewood to gather or chop.
These days, food is stowed safely away inside bear-proof containers, not hanging about in a tree like smelly piñatas luring bears into camp. Suspending food in trees was considered best-practice back in the day, but no more.
Back-country etiquette is a thing. There are established guidelines for how to behave when out camping or hiking, whether in the back-country or in the “front-country.” It’s no longer “the Wild West,” and everyone is expected to follow the Leave No Trace philosophy of “Take only photographs. Leave only footprints.”
Surprise, surprise! May 20 is National Pick a Strawberry Day!
So no dilly-dallying! There’s no time to waste! I’m off to grab some more red ripe California strawberries and eat them before the hungry bears get a whiff of them!
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For more information on bear’s sense of smell https://sectionhiker.com/bears_sense_of_smell/
For more information on “Leave No Trace” guidelines https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/leave-no-trace.html https://www.nps.gov/grsm/planyourvisit/bc-lnt.htm
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I've never had an encounter with a bear, but could relate to so many other aspects of this post, like backpacking food back in the day. Yuck! My boys loved Quick As a Cricket by the same authors of the children's book you mentioned, but I wasn't aware of the strawberry book. Another one to add to my collection!
We were on a houseboat in Shasta Lake and just beyond where we were, a father was walking up the mud flats with a rope obviously ready to tie his boat to a tree. A bear walked out of the trees, his family on his boat are yelling, we are yelling, Dad turned and looked at us. The bear looked at Dad then ambled off into the trees. He turned around and there was nothing behind him. Loved your story - far closer then I ever want to be to a bear.