The Dinner Guest

Bruce and I were two of the four bachelors who lived in a four story townhouse next to a large lake in a bedroom community of Washington, D.C. Each guy had their own floor and private balcony. Delightfully chaotic insanity hung ten atop a four-year tsunami of music, girls, beer and ganja, baked up in a bachelor paradise.

It was with that kind of mentality that Bruce and I decided it would be a good idea for us to go camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about an hour from our place. Although both of us were in our mid-twenties, we had zero camping experience between us, but we knew the Blue Ridge mountains were reputed to be quite tame. No big deal. Real mountains, like the Rockies, were a different story. After all, ours was to be little more than an overnight drink-a-thon out in the woods. At least that was the plan.

Bruce worked at USGS, The United States Geological Survey, giving him access to wonderful topographic maps many years before the internet provided such things with a few clicks of a mouse. So with the best maps available anywhere, we plotted out a route from a parking space in the woods, just off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, to what looked like a perfect clearing next to a stream only a few miles away…as the crow flies.

I bought a new backpack, tent, and sleeping bag. Bruce already had those things.

The night before we left, I made Chicken Cordon Bleu, carefully pounding breasts out flat while drinking wine, rolling them up to stuff into backpacks with the other supplies. We had gourmet cheeses, home-made trail mix, beer, and two one-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. For some reason, my Grandfather’s passion for Burgundy had gotten me on a wine kick that summer. Oh, and I also rolled twenty joints for the road.

Early the next morning, maps and supplies packed efficiently into our backpacks, we took off for the Blue Ridge. We were well-prepared manly-men headed out on a beautiful, breezy morning, perfect for a short, refreshing hike to our designated campsite.

We started walking with the map in hand, disgusted with the little people who weren’t smart enough to get their hands on such maps and plot their course. Superior beings, savvy and resourceful…for at least ten minutes anyway. That’s when both of us realized that people hike on marked, cleared trails for a reason. Bruce and I had drawn a straight line on our map, with no consideration for steep hillsides, almost impenetrable valley undergrowth or impassible drop-offs. We hit them all. Two absolute idiots, blindly following a line on a map that made zero sense. Crawling up one steep incline, skinning hands and knees, then skidding almost out of control down the other side. Another rocket scientist move on my part: lugging two gallons of Gallo Hearty Burgundy in glass bottles and a 12 pack of beer. Every time exhaustion forced us to pause, we lightened the load of those bottles of Burgundy, by transferring wine from the bottle to our stomachs. Naturally we needed a smoke with that.

Had we taken the recommended trail, the hike would have been about a half hour walk. Instead, we fought through an up and down mess of tangled thorns and brush for more than three hours before we got to our campsite, bloodied, and stumbling.

But even as tired and hungry as we were, at least we were finally there. The ordeal was over. Quickly setting our two tents up, opening to opening, we started in on the beer while we shared a joint, delighted to not have to walk another step. The wine and smoke made hiking through that jungle hell twice as difficult as it should have been.

Sundown afforded us just enough light to carefully lay out the chicken, salad ingredients, several ripe avocados, a small plastic bottle of dressing, and a bunch of brownies I had made. Yes, that kind of brownies. I knew we would sleep well that night.

Bruce took all the other food, including eggs, a fat cylinder of Taylor's Pork Roll, coffee, and sticky buns for breakfast, and put them in a canvas bag along with 10 or 15 Tootsie Roll Pops for the hike back. Then he strung the bag up high in a tree where bears and varmints couldn’t get to any of it.

Done! Let’s party!

Both of us were only wearing shorts and shoes, letting the sweat from our hike dry off in the welcome breeze. Still passing the last of our joint, we heard a loud grunt immediately behind us.

There he was, a huge black bear, waddling in like he owned the place. Fearless. We stumbled backward and retreated about 30 feet as he casually strolled over to the chicken, salad, and two open beers, and started eating. He just sat back on his fat ass and went through one item after another, oblivious to us as we jumped and yelled from the sidelines.

He thought we were dinner cheerleaders.

Bruce and I assured each other that he was a semi-tame park bear, used to raiding campsites. We told ourselves that he would be easy to run off.

So we puffed ourselves up, got all manly, and approached him menacingly, yelling profanities about his mother, his family, and his obvious lack of character. I picked up a rock and threw it at him. No reaction as it fell short. I picked up another baseball-sized piece of granite, smooth from the stream-bed, and wound up with a pitcher’s stance, hitting that bear squarely between the eyes. That ought to do it!

He was instantly startled, forced to pay attention to us, probably hurting a bit, and mad as hell to have his dinner interrupted. He did that thing I had seen on the Davy Crockett show where the bear stands on his hind legs and growls with an open mouth just to show off his denture work. You know, right before he charges, pins you to the ground, and eats the scalp off the back of your head.

I thought he was way too fat to be able to run with any speed, but I was very wrong. Seven feet tall, 400 pounds, and he could run like Jesse Owens. Bruce and I levitated backward, turning toward the stream and flying across it on adrenaline fueled wings. We scrambled up onto a boulder on the other side of the water and the bear stopped on the camp side. He immediately lost interest in us. Turning back toward the camp, he knew there was a lot more picnicking to be done.

In our rush to exit the campsite, Bruce had managed to grab one of the gallon bottles of wine and I had a couple of joints in my pocket. So at least there was that. The later and darker it got though, the colder it became. We both started to shiver uncontrollably. Shirtless, exhausted, and now half freezing to death, we could see the bear in the flickering light of our Coleman lantern sitting next to our dinner as the he slowly ate everything we had sitting out. Our lantern mood lighting for his dining pleasure.

By 2AM, our wine was gone, teeth chattering, we decided that we had to risk a tip-toe back into camp with a plan to slip unobserved into our tents and the warmth of our sleeping bags we were both lusting for. If the bear saw what we were doing, he didn’t care. He had found the Tootsie Roll Pops and was delicately eating each one while making a neat little pile of the sticks and wrappers to one side. He knew his way around a Tootsie Roll Pop, all 15 or so.

I didn’t care anymore. The warmth of my sleeping bag was everything and I immediately fell into a coma sometime around 2:30.

In my dream, someone was trying to wake me up with a ripping sound. It was the back wall of my new tent, torn open with a huge black bear head coming through the new back door. He was looking for more food, his nose twitching like a pig’s snout, hovering over my knees. I yelled to Bruce as I shot out the front and ran. Bruce did too. Back to our rock on the other side of the stream. Cold, shivering.

The bear occupation lasted for another hour.

Then, without fanfare, he wandered off unceremoniously, just as the sun started to light the sky.

Cold and tired, Bruce and I went back into camp and quickly found shirts and jackets to slip into. Hungry as hell, we thought the big breakfast we had planned would be our life saver.

No such luck. The bear had climbed our tree, retrieved the bag from the bear-proof place we had strung it up, and eaten or destroyed everything in it. Eggs, Taylor ham, sticky buns, coffee…he was a non-discriminatory eater. The few things that he didn’t eat, he tasted. The avocados were dripping with bear slobber and puncture marks. Even our water was gone, stored in plastic canteens, the bear had punctured them. What water hadn’t drained out was frothy with bear saliva.

No food, no water, my new tent destroyed… there was nothing to do but leave.

So we packed everything up and put it all in what was left of the bear-proof bag. While we were packing, three adult deer wandered into our campsite. We just stood and looked at each other. It was as if they had heard there was food to be had and some incredibly stupid campers to take it from. I was incredulous that they were fearless, ten feet away, as my concerns grew that they were some undiscovered breed of killer deer.

We did not want to go back to our rock.

We got the hell out of there. Jogging down the well-marked path, back to our car.

Driving home, neither of us had any cash in those pre-credit card days, so we couldn’t even stop at the diner we had passed on the way in. Shit!

All of this was made worse in the weeks to follow when the one picture that Bruce took of our bear didn’t turn out. It seems Bruce had snapped a quick shot when we had gone back into camp to get some sleep. No one believed our bear story or how damn big that guy was. “Black bears don’t get very big.” They said. “They’re basically harmless.” They told us. Everyone thought brown bears were cuddly and friendly and that Bruce and I were pussy's. We were, but that wasn't the point.

It had been too dark for Bruce’s camera to capture the shot we needed to back up our story.

But Bruce’s USGS connection pulled through. Apparently they had a special lab that could work miracles with film and Bruce had a buddy with access.

I was home in our kitchen about a week later when Bruce came home from work smiling like the Cheshire Cat. “Guess what I’ve got?” he asked as he opened a large manila envelope.

That’s when Bruce pulled out a crystal clear 8X10 photograph of a huge black bear, standing upright and grinning with menacing delight at two fools who had served him a very memorable dinner.

Two fools who never, ever, went camping again.