Bearly Out of the Woods

It was about 2:30 a.m. when my wife jostled me awake. “I hear something in the kitchen,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

That’s my reaction whenever my wife calls something to my attention in the middle of the night. Except for that one time when she went into labor, I’ve been right. So I saw no reason to change that policy the first night of our vacation last August in a cabin near the shore of Silver Lake in the eastern Sierra.

But half an hour later, at 3 a.m., she woke me up again. “It sounds like someone’s in the kitchen,” she said. Miffed, I got up, stepped around our baby’s crib and opened the door that separated our tiny bedroom from the tiny kitchen in this cabin that couldn’t have been any bigger than the Unabomber’s.

People always ask how I reacted when I saw the bear and how the bear reacted when it saw me.

Our reactions were the same, really. We looked at each other blankly, our synapses struggling to identify the silhouetted figure staring back across 5 feet of kitchen floor. I’m not sure, but I think we both blinked.

Then I slammed the kitchen door and told my wife to grab the baby and lock themselves in the bathroom off the bedroom while I hatched a plan to save our hides. Writer’s note: My wife’s recollection of these events varies slightly. She claims I was the first one into the bathroom and practically slammed the door on her and the baby. If that is true--and I’m not saying it is--it was only to make sure the room was secure enough to protect my loved ones.

In any case, my wife and baby ended up in the bathroom, standing in a narrow shower stall. Meanwhile, I knelt on the center of the bed, staring wide-eyed at a flimsy white door, the only thing separating us from the bear. This was not how we’d planned to spend a quiet fishing vacation on one of the more picturesque small lakes of the eastern Sierra.

My mind was struggling to gain traction on the surface of this problem. What are you supposed to do when you come face to face with a bear? Are you supposed to make a ruckus, shout, pound the walls and hope that scares the beast away? Or would that just tick him off? Maybe you’re supposed to lie still and wait for the bear to wander off to someone else’s cabin.

I probably would have opted for the possum ploy if it weren’t for Kate, our 11-month-old. Asking her to stay quiet would be like asking her to start changing her own diapers. Speaking of which, who knew what scents that creature was picking up from our little bundle of bear bait?

We had to get help. But the bear was blocking the only exit from this Kaczynski cabin. We didn’t have a gun. And there wasn’t a phone, a Luddite touch that had been a selling point in the resort brochures. In fact, that sort of rusticity was exactly why we had chosen this place.

The only option seemed to be escaping through a bedroom window. I popped out the screen and let myself down as quietly as I could. I looked over my shoulder, pleading with the spirit of Grizzly Adams that the bear hadn’t sneaked up behind me.

Once down, I peeked around the corner of the cabin. A security light illuminated the driveway to a general store and office at the bottom of the hill. Barefoot and dressed only in a pair of shorts, I sprinted the 50 yards down the dirt road. The store and office were locked. But there was a pay phone in front of the building. I called 911.

“There’s a bear in our cabin,” I blurted. “My wife and baby are still inside.”

The woman on the other end of the line seemed alarmed. But we were miles from town, and it would be at least 15 minutes before a game warden or sheriff’s deputy could get there. She tried to engage me in chitchat. I told her I needed to go back to the cabin tosee whether Kerri and Kate were safe. She urged me not to, saying I might scare the bear farther into the cabin.

As I stood under another security light that illuminated the front of the store, I began to feel like bear bait myself. To a hungry bear, the phone booth I was standing in might as well have been a glass counter at See’s Candies.

I kept looking back up the hill, but it was too dark and too far to see our cabin. Then I saw the beast, a fully grown black bear. It lumbered across the driveway and behind one of the other dozen or so cabins that dotted this densely forested hillside.

The sheriff’s deputy arrived at this precise moment. I ran in front of his headlights and pointed to our cabin. As I climbed into the passenger seat of his Ford Explorer, he asked me to grab a box of slugs--shotgun shells packed with solid chunks of lead instead of tiny BBs--from his glove compartment. He was nervous and fumbled as he loaded his gun, dropping a shell on the ground.

We drove up to the cabin as his spotlight scanned the surrounding area. All the lights were on in our cabin, and one of the neighbors was stepping through the front door.

I realized at that moment that I’d neglected a minor detail in the execution of my otherwise daring plan: I had forgotten to tell Kerri I was going out the window. Kerri, certain that the bear had dragged me off, had been shouting for help. Writer’s note: My wife has cited this oversight ever since as evidence of our “communication problem.”

After the sheriff drove away, I sat with Kerri on the bed. We were trembling. Kate, who had vomited moments earlier while sensing her mother’s fear, was now smiling and playing with blocks on the cabin floor.

The bear was gone, but going back to bed in this cabin didn’t seem like an option. We loaded up the car and left at 4 a.m., driving back out the windy road we’d driven in on just 12 hours earlier. When we got back to Highway 395, we decided to salvage our vacation by heading north to my parents’ house about four hours away in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. We ended up also spending a few days at a beach resort at Lake Tahoe.

In the coming weeks we would read news stories about several black bears in the Sierra that had to be killed because they were making a habit of searching for food in human dwellings.

We had left only a few carrot peelings in the trash, which must have attracted that bear. Aside from leaving paw prints all over the cupboards, the bear did no damage. It hadn’t even broken the door down.

My wife and I had checked the door that night to make sure it was locked. We have since wondered whether it was completely latched. Apparently the bear leaned on the door and it popped open.

The owner of the Silver Lake Resort was nice about everything and refunded our money for what was supposed to be a weeklong stay.

The bear was a regular in the area, he said, but had never broken into a cabin. I asked why he didn’t warn renters about the problem. He said he usually put in each cabin a picture of a bear along with instructions to keep the cabin clean and locked. Someone, he said, must have forgotten to leave us that note.

I could sense what he was thinking: These city slickers from L.A. get sentimental about the great outdoors but panic at the first sign of real wildlife. He didn’t say it, but I felt compelled to tell him it wasn’t true. Kerri and I both grew up in the Sierra. We had seen bears before. We just weren’t prepared to share a cabin with one.