The Last Word On Nothing

I have some new neighbors who many people would consider a nuisance. They show up at random times. They occasionally kick the rocks that line my driveway, and once they knocked off my downspout. They also eat garbage and leave a real mess. 

These neighbors are mostly loners. They watch me, unblinking, and do not approach or say hello. Sometimes they run away at the sight of me, but usually they just look in my direction, make eye contact, sniff the air and then move along. I don’t view this as unfriendly, because I don’t want to meet them face to face, either. 

You can tell from the photo that these neighbors are bears. But I still feel compelled to write about them as if you don’t know this, because I myself am still shocked by the fact of their existence. I have neighbor bears, at least seven of them, plus five cubs. They were here first. This is their home. I am the intruder here, and yet they watch me and tolerate me so patiently. They are teaching me so many things.

Early this year, right after the calendar turned to 2020, I moved with my family back home to Colorado, where I grew up. I now live on a mountain slope, and my backyard is the wildland-urban interface. The whole neighborhood is in this zone, technically, but my backyard really is the actual interface, that liminal place where the montane forest and human development meet, and mix, and merge. 

Our property line is just a few hundred yards from the Pike National Forest boundary, and the animals who live in that forest use my yard as a corridor. They have trampled a game trail through my own boundary, and they all use it: Black bears, mule deer, bobcats, coyote, raccoons, and turkeys. There is at least one young mountain lion up here, too, but I’ve never seen her in the flesh, not yet, though once I found the remains of her kill, and two neighbors have spotted her on their security cameras. 

One bobcat visits my patio every couple days; last week, she used my doormat as a kitty scratch pad. The deer are unpredictable, but as the mornings grow cooler I see them more frequently. The turkeys come by every morning and every afternoon. The bears, ever since March, ever since the world shut down, are a daily fixture. They appear in the dawn and in the gloaming. They come and go to my liminal woods during the liminal times, on the edge between night and day.

“Rarely seen in the wild, American black bears once roamed the Rocky Mountains in large numbers,” read a postcard I bought for my daughter this spring, at a gift shop outside Rocky Mountain National Park. Rarely seen. Pftt. We see them every day. They cross my driveway like commuters. A young one even opened my car door once. It’s a healthy forest now, I tell my family.

One night this summer, I sat outside on my raised deck with my dog, who planted herself under my chair. Then suddenly she freaked out, tried to stand but couldn’t get her paws under herself fast enough, and frantically whined. I rose and saw three black bear cubs and their mother gathered 20 feet below where I stood. They were at the foot of my pine tree. My pine, this giant glorious thing. As if I could own something so wild. And yet it sits on land that I now own, or at least occupy. So do the bears. 

I stared down at them. The mother was talking to her cubs. The sound was purr-like, almost bird-like, too-whit, too-whit and glmmn glmmn, so motherly, so animal. Two of the cubs had climbed my pine—the pine—and I think she was worried because she saw me, and I was almost at their eye level. They heard her purrs and climbed down, and then the four of them crashed through the oaks beneath my house. They were back a few days later, undaunted.

Their daily visitations have been among the most (only) comforting features of my 2020. And very soon, though I don’t know when, their year will come to an end. One morning to come, I will see them for the last time—until next spring—but I will only realize this later, only after I don’t see them for several days on end. This final visit could have been today, or maybe it will be next week. I can’t know. Until I know. 

Learning to live with uncertainty is one of my greatest struggles, I’ve realized, but the bears are teaching me that uncertainty is itself a sure thing, and that this is okay. In the wildland-urban interface, unresolved boundaries are the only sure thing. The indeterminate is a way of life. The space between the wild-eyed beasts and me is full of unknowns.