Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear

Abstract

The sound of splintering glass, the mesh, metal screen being torn from the window, shakes me. Instinctively I awake shouting, without thinking, still half-dreaming of something mundane and pleasant. The rotting wooden frame that holds the pane falls onto the foot of my bed, pushed in by the black bear outside my cabin. It feels heavy and oppressive on my feet. Sitting up with a sigh, I feel around for the switch on the lamp. Faint red numbers on the alarm clock read 2:13. I’ve barely fallen asleep, and already they’ve begun, the intrusions, as they have every night for the last month. Bits of glass shimmer in a reflection of light on the multicolor cotton blanket a friend brought from his last visit to Tijuana.

“I am afraid of bears up here, ” one sturdily insisted.

I felt it wasn’t bears, but the idea of bears that he feared:

the unseen, dark forces that lurk in the forest of our mind.

— Gary Snyder