Category: Living

Learning stoicism from the bears

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Michael uses the opportunity for a close up. A minute later, the cub advanced toward him, so he tapped it on the nose with his foot. The bear shook his head and moved back a half step, but didn’t turn and head down the creek to cover as older bears usually do. He was neither aggressive nor cautious. Mainly, he seemed hungry.

The cub was apparently an orphan. He didn’t know how to find food—or even what was food and what wasn’t. In recent days he had dragged out of my garage a 20-pound bag of millet wild bird seed, several bags of potting soil, a bag of peat moss, and a bag of fertilizer. He ripped them apart and spread the contents around the yard, but none of it was edible. I’ve had bears around for years, but mostly they stuck to edible garbage and other treasures, such as dog food. This little guy didn’t know what he was doing.

2014-0525-bear_0854He came out in broad daylight and couldn’t be scared away. He just kept ambling around, sorting through things, trying to get food. Not the sort of guest one can trust in a big yard frequented by dozens of children. Most of our bears are rarely seen in day light, and amble toward the creek when they encounter a person. They aren’t exactly afraid, but they are not aggressive and they prefer to keep some distance from people. Michael and I tried yelling at him (after kicking him in the nose) and rushing toward him swinging arms and making noise. He just moved around us and stayed up in the yard, still looking for something. He even started down the open door into my basement, but Michael chased him away. We were expecting fifteen or so grandchildren for lunch, some of them preschoolers. We couldn’t predict how the bear would interact with tiny people. We couldn’t, to be precise, predict how he was going to interact with us from moment to moment.

I’ve been trying to learn better how to live with bears. That seems better than simply removing them. But sometimes I don’t like the cost. I have eleven young fruit trees I need to replace, after bears broke them late last fall, a couple near ground level, and this was followed by the coldest winter in years–minus 35 degrees at one point. They’re quite dead. Also, I needed to either give up beekeeping or work on a more ambitious fencing system than suited by intents and purposes. Locking up garbage faithfully was simple until bears figured out they could rip off siding and tear down doors. I suppose I’m not through learning.

I couldn’t see what passed for a solution. I wanted to just solve the immediate problem—give him some food. Generally, we don’t need to solve the world’s problems to provide immediate comfort. The trouble was that a full belly doesn’t last long. What happens tomorrow and day after, when he learns that the way to get food is to hang around my place in daylight? There’s no real future for bears accustomed to getting food from people’s houses. They start scratching on doors and crawling through windows, or worse. Bears conditioned to forage in people’s garbage eventually get shot.

The tribal game wardens use a live trap with troublesome bears that haven’t harmed anyone, relocating them farther from town. But I doubted this little guy would fare much better in the world. His mama hadn’t taught him how to find. Bears are high enough in the hierarchy of being that they develop cultures and traditions. Cubs hang out with their mothers for a long time, learning about predators, food choices, and foraging sites. This guy apparently hadn’t learned any of that. We called the warden, and not much longer, he showed up, ready to shoot the bear. While we were walking down the creek attempting to locate him, we heard the unmistakeable banging of a bear in a trap. The trap had been set for several days, just across the creek. Finally, he had overcome his skepticism and walked into it.

I don’t know what the tribe did with him. So I am free to think they probably relocated him to a wilder place, and in that place he figured out how to forage in the wild. Happily ever after.

But I don’t believe it. So I find myself descending into stoicism, imitating those ancients who tried to see things as they are rather than hurling themselves against the cosmos to change what would not change. ‘”Seek not to have things happen as you choose them,” said the slave Epictetus. “Rather choose that they should happen as they do.”

The Stoics sometimes had considerable wisdom, but they tended not to accomplish much, having lost some essential vigor.

Broken eggs

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A nest of mallard eggs along Mission Creek, where no ducks have nested in the twenty years I’ve lived here. Like other forms of hope, they were fragile.

For years I’ve been planting berries and fruit trees, though I rarely harvest much. It’s a simple way to make the world better—the main payoff for me, beyond the elemental joy of fruit blossoms and plants taking root and unfolding into the sky, is that birds love it here. I watched a ruby-throated hummingbird this Sunday afternoon, sitting perched on a branch, grooming itself. It wasn’t hungry. It was at peace, amid bounty.

I get nostalgic for a world I’ve never seen, reading Lewis and Clark’s descriptions of the vast flocks of waterfowl along the Missouri River, or early descriptions of the enormous bison herds on the northern great plains or the salmon runs on the lower Columbia River between Portland and Astoria. I believe that sort of earthly abundance lies in our future as well as our past—it will be ours again as soon as we learn better how to live.

When a pair of mallards nested on Mission Creek where it flows through our place, I felt delight and surprise. My son had built a small dam to create little pool beside the sauna, to make a cooling dip a bit more graceful, and the mallards had begun frequenting the area. I was looking forward to watching the baby ducks make their way into the world, having a chance to observe them closeup. It seemed possible they would return as adults, since this place would also be “their” place in the world.

While I was working in the yard last week, getting caught up from spending a week in San Francisco, three boys came down the driveway and asked if they could walk through my yard to the creek. My policy is to say yes to such requests, glad to be asked, and to mainly ignore other kids who merely trespass, keeping a wary eye on me. It’s not their fault I own the creek, and I don’t think such resources should be walled off. Children in a well-ordered world will have wild places.

I forgot about them, and spent the next few hours on a lawnmower, turning an overgrown pasture into mulch for the garden. That evening, my son told me he came on the boys after they had removed most of the eggs from the nest—some were broken and they were carrying some. He put the three he salvaged back into the next, but the adult ducks didn’t return.

It’s not the first problem I’ve had with visitors. Usually, it’s small acts of vandalism such as throwing the Adirondack Chairs I leave down along the path for birdwatching into the creek. But I can buy another chair.

When we transgress the order of being we lose some of the richness of being. We cannot usually imagine the barrenness and sparseness of the lives we now live, or the earth we now inhabit, compared to what would be if we better controlled our urges to smash some things, or better honored our quite different instincts to make way for living realities that we did not plan, cannot own, and will not control. Much of the damage is invisible to our preferred mode of seeing, because it can only be seen in absences, such as the baby ducks that do not swim in the pool, the experience of which I cannot purchase.

We live in a world full of absences—millions of bison moving across arid, windswept prairies; millions of salmon surging up free-running rivers to spawn; nearly infinite flocks of wild fowl coming north to nest. Our families are small and fragile, our cities vast and fragile, with small gardens at the edges and in the margins.

Absences, too, contribute to our sense of disorder. A world without gardens might be clean and organized, like an army barracks or a workers’ neighborhood in a socialist regime, but organization is not order. I haven’t seen the boys since the event. I’ve been wondering what I could say to them. It would be nice if they could begin to see a way the world could be that they would like even more than the way it is now, and to think a little about how they could live to make that way real.

Tradition: the polar plunge

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Entering Flathead Lake on New Year's first day.

Family traditions help bring the story of family into focus. We are what we do.

It was warm this year–above 30 degrees. A few years ago, it was 4 degrees below zero. I looked at the littlest boys skinny little arms and legs and wondered how long they could be exposed without freezing. They gamely went into the water, then could not stop crying at the pain they didn’t adequately imagine once they came out of the water.

New Year’s Day has always been a little flat, so far as holidays go. Feasts on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve are wonderful, but who needs another one on January 1? I don’t know how we decided the Polar Plunge at Flathead Lake was the right focus for the day. I think it was Michael.

Fun seems not quite the right word, though there’s some of that. Traditions do many things. They commemorate various dates. They give reasons to be together. Inevitably, they reveal and teach to the younger ones the family’s values–even in ways we don’t articulate. Without recurring holidays, what would a year be?

 

Chaos and cosmos

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Grace recedes ever so slightly--less light and warmth--and chaos advances. The work of care includes long winter evenings when no labor can be performed.

Grace recedes ever so slightly–less light and warmth–and chaos advances. The work of care includes long winter evenings when no labor can be performed.

In winter, chaos overpowers our feebler efforts at creating cosmos. What defeats our efforts is cold, which is not itself anything. We have a tiny bit less grace, in the form of light and heat, and the garden fails, revealing the insufficiency of our best plans and our diligent labor.

Of course, winter is mild, as withdrawals of grace go. It’s a slight restraint–maybe no more than necessary to get us to contemplate where we are and how things are. Every day the sun returns, albeit more briefly than in June, low in cloud-covered southern sky. The spruce and fir that can survive -80 degrees are not stressed, so green life persists. The snow melts and recedes a bit in those moments above 32 degrees. A fire of dry larch in the basement stove is enough to keep the furnace from kicking on. Most plants are dormant rather than dead, and the annuals have scattered seeds that are several paradigms afield from being dead. It’s a meager time–less light and a subdued palette of pastels mixed with white and gray–a world turned quiet and clear.

In good years, it is no apocalypse–just a time of restraint and caution and respite from endless labor.  Outdoors is inhospitable, it’s true, and we would not survive naked for very long, so we carry fine chunks of wood we split and hauled in autumn from the shed to the stove, we find ample fresh produce at the market to add to a large Sunday pot of stew, and we start long books with the anticipation that there will be time.

After the equinox, our thoughts increasingly turn to the future–fruit trees we will prune in March, the Laburnum tree that might blossom for the first time this May, the best location to plant new mountain laurel shrubs. The real work of gardening is largely imagining–envisioning a potential order, down to the scents and colors, that would be good, that we choose from a plenitude.

The world tilts and turns and the light changes. We watch and let go and take hold. Creation is collaboration with what endures–a basic vocabulary that includes rocks and stars and music and number. If the universe is a theory of evolution, cosmos is a story of care. Creation is not a thing but a place.

It, in winter

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winter hydrangea

The whiteness of snow simplifies and purifies the landscape, insulating tubers and bulbs from the full force of cold. It is the moisture we need, locked away in a transient beauty, a gorgeous paradox that kills and preserves.

It snows. The hydrangea that was a bouquet of soft pink in spring, stripped to a scraggled thatch of twigs, flocked with ice and snow. Winter returns. We knew it would; the shed is full of split fir,  shelves are stocked with carrots and canned peaches, the freezer with venison and pork. Rest. Reflection.

The driveway needs to be shoveled, the fire stoked–these are immediate needs that yield immediate pleasure. Simple things, easy to understand and do.

Sometimes, It turns brutally cold, reminding of danger. In It, we cannot so much as take a walk without preparation and protection. Our shelter is not merely convenient–it is necessary. We cannot pretend that being free and easy will be enough. Fantasy recedes.

Its days are short, passing quickly. The crab apple tree is heavy with unfallen fruit, drying and freezing, holding a bounty for robins who, gone vegetarian with hunger, will flock here in late winter. Patience. Perseverance.

The evenings are long, perfect for reading.

The stack of books that grew through the summer as I stayed busy–cutting and hammering, digging and planting, pruning and mowing, feasting and swimming–I sit with in silence.  Reality gathers, clouds on the windward front. Plato, Voegelin, Moses, Solzhenitsyn–voices always there that now take form, saying just how It is.