The generic, everyday name is “bear can.” The original model of the bear-resistant food container, pioneered by Garcia Machine Inc., is a black cylinder with countersunk lid, unsmashable, too large to be carried off in a bear’s mouth, with a blank surface that offers no purchase for paws or claws. It guards mankind’s proper role in the economy of nature, which is not to be a service provider in the nonprofit catering sector. I call it the Monolith.
Our pioneer forefathers, free to discourage misbehaving animals by shooting them, needed no such help. But times change and it is no longer acceptable to defend beef jerky with deadly force. U.S. military doctrine—as gleaned from remaindered Army survival manuals—has not been well adapted to these restricted rules of engagement. The manuals suggest securing food by dangling it from a rope looped over a branch. I trust that they have been updated, since the bears in our national parks long ago acquired logical and literal grasp of the connection between the two ends of a rope when one is attached to goodies and the other stares them in the face.
Published maladvice on protecting your food is usually accompanied by suggestions about what to do after a bear, inevitably, gets hold of it. These tend toward performance art: shooing it away by banging on pots and pans, yelling, making yourself “look big,” and other forms of suasion. You might as well ask Jimmy Carter to negotiate on your behalf. This can only delay the process of reaching closure by maturely accepting the bear’s good fortune. The bear will be cool. It will not be doing its endzone dance but will be patiently sifting through debris to lick up every edible smear. Best to admire the rippling of its flanks and remind yourself that you’re looking at muscle, not fat.
The root of the problem is not bears but people, people being people—slobs and fools, and known as such throughout the major woodlands. We are easy pickings, and that has changed the bears’ ecology.
There are ideas for changing it back. The Park Service has tried nonlethal harassment, but bears soon learned to distinguish rangers (especially in Smokey hats) from civilians legally obliged to submit to mugging as usual.
The alternative to reforming bears is outwitting them—child’s play, one might suppose, for a sapiens sort of species. Welcome to the world of Sun Tzu, of move and countermove in irregular warfare.
Our side introduced counterbalancing: Put both ends of the rope out of reach by connecting two equally heavy food bags with a short rope and dangling this assemblage from a high branch too small to support a bear’s weight. Getting it up there is a production. But don’t bother. A bear who has encountered a few of these will learn to rip the branch out of the tree or to nudge a cub along it: All bear children steal and vandalize at grade level. (Many products of the American school system are similarly capable, and fall down only on less congenial tasks like grade-level reading and writing.)
Our side, the sapiens side, responded with “bear wires.” Eliminate that pesky branch! String a rope (the metaphorical wire) between two trees at a height of 10 or 15 feet and hang the counterbalanced bags from that. This presents two problems: stringing the wire (inconvenient if you’re not carrying a ladder or driving a cherry-picker) and finding trees (impossible by definition above the tree line, where there might be fewer bears if they didn’t know that people would be providing meal service, with excellent views, above 10,000 feet).
At campsites within a few days’ walk of some popular trailheads, the Park Service installed permanent bear wires made of steel cable. Bears learned to climb the supporting trees and shake the food bags off by bouncing on the cables. Our side, you’ll be glad to know, did not give up. We sheathed the support trees with unclimbable metal siding and added pulley systems to raise and lower the cables. This apparatus, available only in wilderness prepared by government advance men, will obsolesce when bears acquire acetylene torches and/or opposable thumbs.
The Monolith has changed the game. With food, toothpaste, and other smellables locked inside, a Monolith can be left on the ground at a safe distance from your sleeping self. A bear that attacks it will fail, lose interest, and eventually learn to ignore any Monolith it encounters. We, to whom God through Adam gave dominion over the earth and all creatures on it, can only hope to bore them.
The Monolith is bulky and heavy, adding nearly three pounds to six days’ worth of food. It also raises moral questions. Are we doing emotional damage to (technically) innocent forest creatures? Animals approach my Monolith to plunder but stay, I believe, to worship. And then I abscond with their God. What does it say about me that I dread to be parted from it? Would an ancient Israelite dump the Ark of the Covenant by the wayside when he left the trail to relieve himself?
Phileas Fogg journeyed around the world on an hour’s notice with a carpet bag, two shirts, and three pairs of socks. We don’t leave home without—for starters—Gore-Tex, polypro, Prima-Loft, Therm-a-rest, and fleece; freeze-dried food; free-standing tent; water filter or SteriPEN (which purifies water with UV radiation); white gas stove and heat exchanger; GPS. If we feel alienated by technology should we eschew the Monolith and authenticate ourselves by returning to the ancient ways—i.e., to security theater? Of course, Phileas Fogg traveled light thanks to high-tech gear in its purest form: 20,000 pounds sterling.
In cash. David Guaspari is a writer in Ithaca, New York.
