Today’s accompanying tune: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones
It was only natural. She’d abided by laws of her own, laws of nature. Laws that dictated her life; laws whose consequences carry finality at their core, a debt unable to be rectified at a later date. Laws made not in courthouses or city halls, but in the vast canopies above and the molten centers below. Even as humans had tried to supplant the laws of nature with the laws of people, the fact remained. What she had done had been as natural as her existence. People were the ones who’d done her wrong.
She’d found an easy meal, one without threats from other predators. It was nearly always at the ready, a steady stream of hearty calories from half-finished meals and produce left to rot in the fridge before moving to the bin. She didn’t have to forage, didn’t have to accept the meager calories of an early spring following her long winter hibernation. She just had to lift the lid, grab the bag of goodies, and head into the tree line to feast. She’d stolen garbage, chicken feed, bird seed, and pet food from many of the 50 houses tucked up on the hillside along the Skagit River, many of which had learned to live alongside bears like her, though few had done anything to ensure a bear like her never appeared. She grew emboldened, waltzing up to back porches, prying open car doors, and ripping through fences to refill her stores. The humans rolled their eyes, posted footage from security and trail cameras to the neighborhood groups, and shrugged. What can you do?
Bears will be bears, they say. It is only natural.
Other neighbors are less resigned, typing out threats to the bear who will never read them. They talk of arming themselves and standing their ground, of self-defense and threats to property. They talk of emotional and financial damage caused by the all-you-can-eat patron swiping chicken eggs and waking the house with a shudder as they tear into yet another unprotected trash bin. They speak of restitution and retribution, as if the bear, a creature of nature, abided by the laws of humans. As if they had not chosen to live in the forest, among the trees, under the expanse of sky. As if they had not abandoned the laws of humans for the laws of nature when they carted their belongings to the home at the end of the dirt road, one with neighbors and residents claiming territory long before their own arrival. As if they hadn’t preferred the solitude, the quiet, the raucous birdsong to the mundanity of a life in town, regardless of how small.
They’d brought their humanity into the forest, into an ecosystem more adept to measure in tree rings than decades. They’d tried to control the uncontrollable, to force order and predictability into the unruliness of natural spaces. They planted lawns, poured concrete, erected buildings. They sprayed chemicals on the trees and ripped out plants deemed unsightly. Trees and bushes bloomed in unnatural shades of pink, purple, and white, domesticated plants rooted in place of the natives that hadn’t fit, hadn’t pleased the eye quite enough. They left chickens unattended and were distraught when birds of prey swooped in. They left trash out in the open, and were surprised when the bear took advantage. They’d moved to be closer to nature; now they were frightened at what they perceived to be its unpredictability, its inability to be tamed, its laws. This wasn’t what they’d imagined when they moved out into the forest, they said. This wasn’t what they’d signed up for.
When the state fish and wildlife official came to investigate whether our bear had become a problem, he joked that changing the bear’s behavior would be much easier than getting the humans to lock up their trash. The bear had more to lose, he said, and she probably knows it. Though she’d become habituated to humans, there was still time to correct her thinking, to relocate her to a forest with fewer humans and less temptation. She was young; it was likely she could have a full, uninterrupted life feasting on berries and roots instead of leftover french fries and soggy spinach. The humans were likely set in their ways, he’d said. They’d been habituated as well, habituated to lives of control and comfort, to ease and predictability. They wouldn’t want to latch their bins, or build an enclosure to keep prying paws out. They wanted the bear removed, the risk neutralized. They refused to acknowledge their role in inviting the natural world into their humanized one, their missteps among the laws of nature though they remained firmly in bounds of the laws of humans. Bears didn’t recognize property lines, couldn’t investigate the dizzying array of easements scattered throughout the hillside for legal rights of passage. It was only natural to forge a path of least resistance among the dense understory, to follow the ravine between homes ready and willing to supply a feast for the ages. They trespassed willingly, so foreign was the concept of private property. It was only natural.
Like an easy meal, the promise of controlled serenity is tempting. It appeals to some, and is required by others. The illusion of peace, of solitude, of a life lived outside the bounds of traditional society shatters often once confronted with reality. With the acceptance that, with society come certain protections, certain adjustments. Certain elements of predictability and control that easily fade from memory the further out humans go. It is not possible to live outside the bounds of nature; the world we inhabit is an unavoidable clause to which we’ve all eternally agreed. To erase what makes it natural, to erase its messiness and inconvenience, is to habituate that which should be left wild, that which is bound only to the laws of the natural world and little else. We are all, humans and bears alike, products of the environments in which we live. We breathe atoms of oxygen expelled by trees centuries older than we; we tilt towards the warmth of rays traveling lightyears to land on our skin.
To remove the natural world is to remove magic. To trade it for complacency is a tragedy. One dwarfed only by the tragedy of lives lost due to the carelessness of neighbors, of humans too steeped in stubbornness and comfort to acknowledge the affect they have on those around them, human or not. Nature is not something we conquer, nor is it something we tame. It is fundamentally part of us, no matter how hard we try to ignore it and no matter how many laws we pass to supersede it.
It is only natural.
Here’s to keeping bears alive and unfed.
- Megan