Fugue State: Assert Your Dominance (Bears)

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an American Avalon, a Tennessee paradise. The outskirts of the park, however, are a flailing, tacky Southern waiting room. There is a highway stretch filled with chapels, theme parks, chain restaurants. Dollywood spans a zip code and shoddy amateur revues cleave beside it. In short, it's the unholy miniature combination of the Vegas Strip, Times Square, and Blue Collar Comedy.

It is strange feeling when, quite suddenly, through the ocean of commercialism, the berth of the park appears in verdure from a turn off the highway. One winds beneath a canopy of trees, buttons the windows down, opens the sunroof, listens to the water cutting beside the car.

I arrive at twilight there, the park office is closed. I find an open site set up my tent in the forest in the company of fireflies amid the distant yawp of children collecting firewood and sticks for smores, the Arcadian hum of crickets....we’ve all been in this kind of place or can capably imagine it, why bother describing it more?

I set a fire and drink some beer I’ve kept with my dinner in a styrofoam cooler. I forget the road and feel entirely pleased with the solitude. I relax and sweat and get drowsy.

***

At six in the morning, I pack up. I decide, since having driven 1000 miles over the past two days, to take on a long hike. The park office is closed until 8 so I'm not able to ask a ranger to suggest a trail. I move ahead before the heat. I leave the camping area and drive toward the hiking trails. At the first listed trail, I map out a ten-mile loop. The circuit will shepherd me through a pass once used by both cowboys and Indians to navigate the Smokies to reach the town of Maryville. Then I will cut across a mountain path and pass Abrams Falls, a scenic waterfall on the way back.

***

I’ve been hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park for six hours now and haven’t seen another person or sign of life. The Tennessee sun is beating down, it’s just past high noon. In lieu of a proper hiking backpack, I’ve got a laptop case where I stored an apple and a banana (both eaten at this point), a camera, and a liter of water (of which I have a quarter left).

I approach the third leg of my trail, the one that will lead me the remaining two miles of my journey before I drive on to Virginia. It’s the peak season for hiking and while I set out early in the morning, to have not seen another person by now, means that something must be wrong. Until about an hour before, when I started the second leg of the trail, I’d enjoy the hike despite the failings of my combination sunscreen/insect repellent.

I had stopped at good spots to rest. I sat with my feet in a stream, echoed all kinds of mating calls into the expanse of the forest, and taken suggestive pictures of fallen trees.

But now, I was anxious.

I reach the Abrams Falls, the waterfall that marks the forking of two trails. I amble close to the waterfall’s terminus, intent on jumping in and letting my sweat-soaked shirt dry in the sun. But as I draw near, I see two park rangers by the water. They are both in green uniforms and faces that designate each as in their early 20s. Beside them sit tackle boxes for fishing, footlong Subway sandwiches, and camouflage-barreled shotguns. Casually picking up their weapons, they stand up as I approach.

Baker: What are you doing here?

(Baker is blonde and [actually] red-necked.)

I let this question sit in the air for a minute.

Me: Hiking.

Starks: Have you noticed there is nobody else out on the trails today?

(Starks has black hair, neatly shorn. Earnest looking.)

Me: I did notice that. I was going to ask about that.

Starks: Well...all the trails in the park have actually been closed for the past two days.
There’s an aggressive bear on the loose.

My jaw drops.

Baker: Where didya come in?

Me: An off-shoot before the Cooper Road Trail.

I make moves for my map, but they acknowledge my story with a nod. I explain that it wasn’t the main entrance to the trail, but I didn’t see anything that led to me think the trail was closed.

Baker: Yeah Coop’s not a popular trail. Duddn’t go anywhere really.

Starks: It’s pretty far from where we saw the bear. I guess nobody marked it off.

Baker: Didchu bring a laptop out here? (Motioning to my bag).

Me: No, my backpack was soaked. (A nervous lie.) So what should I do?

Starks: Well, best thing you can do is head on back the way you came.

Me: And if I don’t want to hike back 8 miles?

Starks: Well...we can’t tell you to take this trail.

Baker: That’s where the bear is.

I should add that this part of the park is all hills and rugged terrains, there are no roads or vehicle patrols. There will be no savior riding through in a white jeep. I wait for a second to see if they will offer to take me back. The offer doesn’t come. Baker spits onto a rock.

Me: Well let’s say I do take this trail...

Starks: I think you’ll be fine. We haven’t seen the bear in two days and...

Baker: You don’t got any food on-ya, do-ya?

Me: No I don’t but...

Starks: Yup, should be fine. The bear got aggressive cause some guy brought baby food along and it attracted the bear.

Me: A man brought baby food on a hike?

Starks: He had a baby with him. The bear actually came within a couple feet of them because the baby had spit up. That’s why we closed the trails.

I wait to see if they will now offer to walk back with me. They don’t.

Me: Well, what should I do if I see a bear?

Starks: Come and get us.

Baker: You can watch us trap it. (taps shotgun) Trapping a bear is the coolest thing you’ll ever see.

Me: No, but what do I do if I actually encounter a bear??

This question also hangs.

Baker: Well how fast can you run?

Me: That’s very funny but...

Starks: Keep walkin’. Let the bear know that you see it. Acknowledge him and don’t run.

Baker: Yeah and if he takes interest in you then whip some rocks at ‘em!

Me: You want me to throw rocks at a bear?

Starks: Yup. That’s how you assert your dominance.

***

The rangers walk me to the trail and let me know (as if it would comfort) that there will be rangers waiting on the other end to make sure I got through. When the rangers mosey out of site, I pick up a number of rocks of all sizes and find one I unscientifically gauge to be the easiest to throw with some distance and accuracy.

For the first twenty minutes of the walk, every sound: a twig snapping, the flutter of a bird diving from a branch, a rustle into bushes around me, sounds a silent alarm. My hand grows tense from gripping the rock. I turn a bend and see a tree stump sitting on the trail thirty yards away. Except I don’t know it’s a tree stump right away. It’s dark and looks like something in repose. Instances like this continue to happen and I jerk back until I realize it’s nothing.

Along the walk, I think back to Grizzly Man, a heartwarming Werner Herzog documentary about a guy who thinks he is friends with Alaskan bears and ends up being mauled and eaten by one. I curse myself now for having laughed through much of it. I picture Starks standing over my corpse and Baker telling future hikers about the time some asshole with a laptop bag got eaten on this trail.

I think back to New York where I used to stand on a fire escape smoking cigarettes with my friend Jorge. I never really smoked unless I had a drink or two so the act of balancing on the narrow metal escape always had an essence of peril to it. I remember one night Jorge and I were standing in a silence induced by some alcoholic excess and his mind looked hard at work. When I asked him what he was thinking about it, he told me that he was imagining what he would do if he fell off the fire escape. He gesticulated some wire-grabbing motions, pointed to what he would grasp onto to save himself. I confided that I had often thought about what would happen if I fell off of the fire escape, but I never had a survival strategy in place, only the editorials of gossip-starved acquaintances: college graduate falls to passé drunken death, wasted potential (get it? he was wasted), another slightly amusing West Village tragedy.

I allow these editorials to run their cycle in bear form, but eventually, I ease into the trail and become confident that I am going to survive the ordeal. For the six hours prior, I had been wondering what defining effusive moment would carry this trip through the Tennessee mountains and into my memory bank. So far, it had not been the trees or the brook or any notable thoughts I had. Six hours is a long time to spend alone in a landscape, there had to be a view that would rev the rotors of nostalgia when I look back on the summer of my 28th year. Until then, there had been nothing.

When I reach the end of the trail safely, I notice the pink tape and a posted sign about the danger of bears and the closed trail. I knew I had my moment. I walk to the parking area and place my good luck stone in the glove compartment. I ask a passerby for a cigarette. Two passersby later, I bum a Virginia Slim 100 and smoke it to its filter.

On the way out of the park, I finally see a bear. A mother and her cubs. Their photogenic gait causes a hold up in traffic that adds another 30 minutes to my escape. When I finally pass the bears, I consider chucking the rock at ‘em.