Doing The Bear Dance In Yellowstone National Park
Doing The Bear Dance In Yellowstone National Park
In the summer of 2009, my wife and I migrated out West to the state of Wyoming to spend three months working at slave labor wages in Yellowstone at one of the concessions. We moved into a dormitory with an unusual assortment of characters who had no idea what they were getting into. Most were students from various countries who had come to the US and Yellowstone for the first time. But there was one man I met there who had been coming to this place for over 30 years. He brought his children for many years, but by the time I met him, it was only he. I wondered often why he would work there for such little pay and what seemed like boring work in this remote place. But every day either before work or after or in between shifts, he donned his fishing shirt and dragged his waders off to some remote meadow or wooded area where he waltzed into the water to do one thing and one thing only. Fly fish for trout.
I started talking to him one day about this obsession he had with fishing every waking moment of his life. And at the same time, I began to wonder about the obsession everybody else in Yellowstone had when they walked anywhere during the day or ventured out at night to their tents, cabins, dorms, or bathrooms. I am talking about bears. No one can live or work or leisure in Yellowstone without thinking about bears.
So I asked him if he had ever run into a Grizzly. He said that he had fished in Yellowstone almost every day he had been there for well over 30 years and never once had a run in with a bear. Until one day. He was out in the middle of a river angling away when he happened to turn around. There, before his terror-stricken face was a 1500 pound Grizzly splashing through the water and bounding for him in an all out sprint with its mouth wide open. He said he nearly passed out.
Now if you just casually stroll through any concession in Yellowstone, you will shortly happen upon a variety of means that the Park provides to enable you to save yourself from being ripped to shreds by one of these carnivores. The defense falls into two categories. One is a SOUND, and the other is a WEAPON, albeit only a spray. The sound is a BELL. A BELL, I said. The Park urges people to carry something that sounds like a sleigh bell or a little leather ring of bells that jangle as you walk along the paths in the wild woods of Yellowstone. Apparently the bears have a high sense of hearing and will detect encroachment by humans at the sound of bells and will lead their young and themselves off and deeper into the rugged terrain. Now I got to thinking about this. Why wouldn't the bell also be the sound of dinner being served as if a cook took an iron bar and began to vigorously round it inside a huge triangle like he did in the Western movies and belted out a sing-song, "Coooommmme annnnnd geeeeeeeet iiittttttt?" As far as I am concerned, carrying a bell in Grizzly country would be about the same thing as arming yourself with a pencil. So I won't be one who sets off on a hike outfitted with a bell in the midst of Grizzly bears.
The other means of saving yourself is akin to the human equivalent of mace. You can buy yourself a can of what is called "Bear Spray," which is supposed to be 10x more powerful than pepper spray. You can even buy a nice little holster for it and wear it on your belt like a gun. One of these cans costs about $50. I have seen people load up with these things and head off into the woods with a couple cans, just in case. I think it says on the can that you have about 15 seconds of material in the can if you hold down the spray nozzle and make the really big and unfortunate mistake of unloading it all in one shot.
Okay, so the way this works is that you are stalking around Yellowstone and suddenly look up. You behold barreling down the path at about 35 miles per hour 1500 pounds of fur and teeth and claws like the kind found on Freddie Krueger in Nightmare On Elm Street, except that with one swipe a bear can disembowel you and tear your head off. Hopefully you have already read the directions on the can several times and are not given to panic and total memory loss in a stressful situation because at this moment you are supposed to be able to think straight, remain calm, take the can out of the holster attached your soaking wet pants, aim it with a steady hand, and - now get this part - WAIT! Yes, WAIT till the bear is about 15 feet away. A 1500 pound Grizzly going at 35 miles per hour with his mouth wide open is going to look like the entrance to a two car garage. With your wits about you and having mentally marked off where the 15 foot line would be in a split second, you deliver about a 5 second, red cloud blast of bear spray. Now stop...if you have done this correctly, you should be able to hear the brake pads of the bear's paws being applied to the dirt path and pine needles as he skids to a tire-screeching halt just in front of the puddle in which you will be standing. This red cloud is supposedly the same thing as a reinforced brick wall. If the bear begins another charge, then you lay out another five second cloud for him to think about. This next part is not in the directions, but right about then is when I would think that having two guns in two holsters is better than one, and I would be withdrawing the next can and flicking off the lid with my thumb right about then. In any case, according to the Park rangers and environmentalists who are going to haul you off to jail if you shoot a Grizzly, the bear spray will do the trick.
But after 30 years of seeing no bears, this guy I was telling you about that was fishing in the river and saw his casket coming toward him on four legs had no bear spray. So what did he do? Somewhere along the line, someone had passed down to him a tried and true method that in a dire emergency was supposed to be as effective as the Berlin Wall. It is called "The Bear Dance", and at that very moment he dropped everything he owned and employed it like he was Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly hand in hand going to town as if they were tap dancing on hot, molten lava. Now a normal person who would look up and see the world's largest bear boring down on him would think that racing through the woods at lightning, world record speed would be preferable to a very fast version of The Pony and The Mashed Potatoes right then. But that person would be wrong. No, what you must do - and you had better be dropping the fishing pole and be about doing it real fast - is the Bear Dance.
Now here is how the Bear Dance goes, as he described it to me. He said that there were effectively, logically, and logistically Two Parts to it. In the FIRST PART, you start jumping up and down as high and as fast as you can go and waving your arms and legs wildly and maniacally about like your hair is on fire. The idea here is to make yourself look as wide and as fierce as you can. Now this may be something that in some way you would probably do anyway to some extent as you lose complete control of yourself while trying to lighten your load and get the hell out of there. In the SECOND PART, you start screaming bloody murder at the top of your lungs. Again, it is probably unnecessary to even mention this point because you would probably be doing this too. You can yell and say whatever you want like, "Stop, you mangy %$#@", or growl and huff and puff, but one thing you want to make sure you do you is continue cursing and using the foul language you started with till you are hoarse. I hate to keep repeating myself, but that seems to me to be a rather needless admonition too, as that will probably be another thing that comes pretty naturally about then. My guess is that you would be spewing a wall of curse words that you suddenly remembered from high school or from what you heard other people saying at work. But for most people, it will more likely come from what they have practiced for many years.
In any case, those are the only two parts of the Bear Dance when done with all your might that are actually required to stop the bear. But most people also notice a THIRD PART that seems to involuntarily accompany the other two parts. This is not something you SHOULD do or would even WANT to do. In fact, if you had to call it up on command, you probably would not be ABLE to do it. But it just seems to be part of the whole experience. That is, you are likely to notice very strong and obnoxious bathroom odors emanating up around you. I don't know if these fresh, offensive scents will give the bear pause and be a part of the process that stops him like a train, but it certainly doesn't hurt. It has been effective in other situations.
If the bear should mount another charge, repeat all the above with even more intensity and determination. In the case of the man above, he said he felt like he was on American Bandstand. He had to do the Bear Dance about five times that day to get the bear to turn back completely. He would do a really fast and unrehearsed version of the Watusi like he was on Dancing With the Stars, and the bear would pause. Then the bear charged again, and the man resumed with a spectacular and somewhat abridged impression of the Charleston. Again the bear paused and then started in again. This time the man heard Alice Bridges singing "I love the nightlife, I love to boogie...", and he went totally berserk with a rendition of the Jitterbug, the Chicken Dance, and Stayin' Alive as if he were in a dance contest on Soul Train (try to picture this while he is screaming at the top of his lungs and using every four letter word he has ever heard) a third time and stopped the bear cold fifteen feet out. The bear then turned and walked away. He told me he could not talk for two days after that.
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