the bear dance in Yellowstone national park
In the summer of 2009, Linda and I migrated to Wyoming to spend three months working in Canyon Village in Yellowstone N.P. at one of the concessions. We moved into a dormitory with an unusual assortment of characters both U.S. and foreign 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 in their lives. One man I met was about 75 years old and had spent many years there. I wondered often why he would work there for such little pay and for 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 secluded 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. At the same time, I began to wonder about this nervous obsession everybody 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.
Except once.
He was out in the middle of the Yellowstone River waving his pole around when he happened to turn around. There, before his ashen-white face was a full-grown male 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 dual means that Yellowstone provides to enable you to save yourself from being ripped to shreds. The defense strategy falls into two categories. One is a SOUND; the other is a REPELLANT. Let’s take the sound first. Maybe you are thinking Yellowstone provides a device that sounds like the diesel blast from an ocean liner, a freight train, a semi-truck, or a gas horn that will make you deaf. You are wrong. The sound is the tiny tinkling of a BELL like the one in the movie “The Polar Express.” Yes, I said a bell. A bell about 1.5 inches in diameter. The Park urges people to carry something that sounds like a sleigh bell or a little leather ring of balls that jangle as you walk along the paths in the wild woods of Yellowstone. According to these people, bears have an acute sense of hearing and will detect encroachment by humans at the sound of a Christmas bell and will merrily lead their young and themselves off and deeper into the rugged terrain.
However, think about this. Why wouldn’t the bell also be the sound of dinner being catered into the woods as if a cook took an iron bar and began to vigorously round it inside a huge triangle like they did in the Western movies and belted out a sing-song, “Coooommmme annnnnd geeeeeeeet iiittttttt?” As far as I am concerned, carrying a bell into grizzly country would be about the same thing as arming yourself with a pencil. So I am marking that counsel off the list.
The other means of saving yourself is akin to the human equivalent of mace. From the park stores, 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 at least TWO cans, just in case. However, were I to appropriate this option, I see a wise man traipsing into bear country strapped into belts of cans criss-crossing his chest.
The directions on the can say that you have about 15 seconds of material in your possession if you hold down the spray nozzle and make the really big and unfortunate mistake of unloading the entire can in one shot, which, as you shall hear, most people would probably do if they were ever confronted by a grizzly.
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 40 miles per hour, or 50 yards in 3 seconds, nearly a ton of fur, teeth, and claws like the kind found on Freddie Krueger that can disembowel you and tear your head off. Hopefully you have already read and memorized like Bible verses 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, remove the can from the holster attached to your soaking wet pants at the speed of DOC HOLIDAY, aim it with a steady hand, and - now get this part - WAIT! Yes, WAIT! I kid you not. The can says WAIT till the bear is 15 feet away. Now this piece of sage advice is essentially telling you to go stand out on the track at Churchill Downs during a trifecta as 1,000 lb thoroughbreds are coming down the track in full gallop at about 37 mph. Mud and dirt are flying up off the track as the jockeys on their backs lay into them with whips. When you see that the lead horse who is breathing like Secretariat is just 5 yards on a football field away from you, that is when you act.
But focus on this fact: a full-grown male grizzly weighs about 1,700 lbs and... is faster than a thoroughbred at Santa Anita in a 50-yard sprint. Put another way, with everything else there is to do, it is as if you are standing on the Santa Ana Freeway and a car is coming straight for you at exactly one-half the posted speed limit for the freeways in the state of Idaho. Now you have to look down and mentally mark off an invisible red line on the forest floor that is exactly 15 feet from where you are holding in your convulsive, Barney Fife right hand, not a machine gun, but a CAN. Calmly keeping both that line and the object that is about to end your life in perfect relation to one another, you have a split second of air left to breathe out the fastest petition you have ever made to the Lord that you hope this works. Because a 1700 pound Grizzly going at that speed with his mouth wide open is going to look like the entrance to a two car garage and will mow over you like a combine. Believe it or not, they want you to pucker up as tight as you can (I am not talking about your lips) and when the grizzly sets his toenails precisely on the 5-yard mark from your jugular vein, you are to deliver unto him, again, not a sub-machine gun load of 50 caliber hot lead, but about a 5 second, red cloud, blast of bear spray MIST.
Now stop…according to the incredible statements on the can - by people who probably have never actually used it - if you have done this correctly, even if he is coming at you like a charging bull less than a second away, 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 lake of urine in which you will be standing. This red cloud is supposedly the same thing as a rebar-reinforced 6 foot thick castle walll. If the bear begins another charge, then you calmly 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 while shouting out a string of inspirational phrases. 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 obviously had no bear spray. So what did he do? Somewhere along the line, someone had passed down to him some mountain man lore that in a dire emergency was supposed to be as effective as if you were encased within a battleship.
It is called “The Bear Dance”, and at that very moment he dropped everything he owned and employed it like he was Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Michael Jackson all rolled into one and started going to town as if he were tap dancing bare-footed 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 Olympic Gold Medal, blue ribbon, world record speed would be preferable to an exceedingly fast version of The Peppermint Twist 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 going about it really 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 and logically 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 as if your hair is on fire. The idea here is to make yourself look as large and 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 recall the exact words to the Latin version of the Catholic mass the last time you went to Confession, plus the words to “Why Me, Lord” and “Now I lay me down to sleep…” that you used to recite like the world’s fastest talking man before you leapt into bed completely naked.
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 anyway. You can yell and say whatever you want, but one thing you want to make sure you do is to continue cursing and using the foul language you started with until you are hoarse. I think that is the correct way to say it because most people that I have ever met who were confronted with real danger instantly and unconsciously recalled with marvelous fluency nearly every word listed in the alternative dictionary as if it were their native tongue. 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 laying down 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 many other people will 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 and 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.
Now should the bear mount another charge, repeat all the above with accelerated and additional 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 opened with a really fast and unrehearsed version of the Watusi like he was on Dancing With the Stars, and the bear, confused, paused. Then the bear charged a second time, and the man got down again with a spectacular and somewhat abridged impression of the Charleston with all the motions to Y-M-C-A and the Hokey Pokey at the same time. Again the bear let up to watch the show and then started after him again. This time the man heard Alicia Bridges singing “I love the nightlife, I got to boogie...”, and he went totally berserk with a rendition and amalgamation 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).
On his fifth audition, if it had been night time and a suspended, illuminated, mirrored ball had twirled above him and twinkled magically on the flowing waters below, he would have been a headline event on a Las Vegas center stage. His River Dance legs churned the translucent stream to a boil like the blades in a Vitamix blender as he discoed on the rocky bed of the Yellowstone River and bleated out primordial profanity at the top of his lungs. The bear finally stopped cold fifteen feet out, turned and walked away. He told me he could not speak for two days after that.