WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

By Barbara Ehrenreich

It would be nice to go on a vacation where I didn't have to worry about being ripped limb from limb by some big ursine slob. But there it is, at any trailhead worth carting your trail mix up to--the National Park Service sign saying CAUTION, YOU ARE ENTERING BEAR COUNTRY. Abandon greasy foods and perfumes, all ye who enter here! Or: Bye-bye, rule of law; hello, natural selection!

All right, I know the ecologically correct line: "They won't bother you if you don't bother them." But who knows what bothers a bear? Take that fellow who was innocently jogging in Grand Teton National Park in August 1994 and ended up contributing an entire muscle group, the sartorius, to some grizzly's brunch. Or there was the guy who returned to his rental cabin in Alaska to find a black bear "feeding on" his erstwhile wife, as a newspaper tactfully put it. Not to mention any number of sleeping campers whose sleeping bags were somehow mistaken for hot-dog rolls.

Then there's what I call the macho-existential line, enunciated at the end of Legends of the Fall, when a grizzly gets the Brad Pitt character: "It was a good death," the voice-over intones piously. Well, maybe it would be if bears came equipped with anesthesia. But they don't even offer you a blindfold before they start chowing down on the soft parts--generally hips and tummy first, leaving you a few minutes to realize that there are indeed creatures capable of appreciating cellulite.

So instead of communing with the majestic peaks and flower-studded meadows, I spend my hikes going over all the helpful tips for surviving an Encounter. Look them in the eye? No, that was mountain lions. Bears just hate it when you stare at them, so keep your gaze fixed dreamily on the scenery. Play dead? Let's see, that works for grizzlies but not for black bears. So do you take off the backpack, get out the wildlife guidebook, do a quick taxonomic determination and then play dead?

Then there's the most baffling advice of all: Talk to it, in a calm, firm voice, of course. Supposing I could muster anything more impressive than a hoarse squeak, what exactly would I talk to it about? No one has ever suggested any topics of mutual interest to a middle-aged urban female and a 600-lb. free-ranging ursid. The Endangered Species Act, perhaps, and how the Fish and Wildlife Service arbitrarily erased about 4,000 species from the protected list last February? "Uh, I know I forgot to send in my Sierra Club dues, but, believe me, fella, the minute I get back to my checkbook..."

Inevitably, a few miles up the trail, where the tree trunks are all cunningly disguised as hungry sows with cubs, the thought comes to me--evil, unbidden, seductive--Why not just exterminate the pests? This, after all, is the human way: if you don't like it, rub it out, down to the last molecule of DNA. Like the smallpox virus, which spent a few millenniums cutting down humans by the tens of millions. Now we've got the last little smidgen of smallpox cornered in some test tubes, scheduled for destruction in 1999. Likewise, let a few hunters loose in the national parks with crossbows and Magnums, and it would be hasta la vista, bears.

But then, who wants to hike past a sign saying YOU ARE ENTERING CHIPMUNK COUNTRY? In South Africa people pay to get lowered into the brine in a shark cage, just for the thrill of cringing as the great whites go leering by. Maybe it's character building to be reminded that we aren't the only predators on the planet, that we're pretty puny ones, in fact, compared with those that do their meat-processing without the aid of metal implements. Maybe, if there were no bears to cull the human population, the wilderness would be overrun by AARP tour groups and camcorder-bearing Japanese.

There are sentimental reasons too to keep them around. We go back a long way--bears and humans. The word berserk, for example, means "dressed in a bearskin" and comes from the ancient Scandinavian warrior custom of running around and pretending to be one. Paleolithic Europeans may have worshipped bears; at least a cavern discovered last year in southern France featured a bear skull, "placed on a large rock set in the middle of a gallery against a backdrop of bear paintings." Besides, wouldn't it be kind of sad if the only vestige of Ursus horribilis were some fat little fellows named Teddy?

Not that I can get too wet-eyed about a creature that sees me essentially as a high-protein pick-me-up. If there's any reason to keep bears around, it's because they are, in fact, beaten--reduced to a few thousand representatives of a once mighty race, driven back into some of the loneliest real estate in the land. Glacier National Park, with its few hundred surviving grizzlies, is a lot safer than Central Park. Why, there's even a faction of scientists that wants to keep smallpox around, although one cleverly deployed tube of the stuff could wipe out a city. And no one, to my knowledge, has ever cuddled up to a stuffed microbe.

Maybe being eaten by a bear isn't such a bad death after all. I'll just curl up, play dead and concentrate on recycling myself.