The story began, as so many do these days, with a little game that 6-year-olds like to play: “Daddy, guess what I saw today!”
My daughter’s eyes were wider than usual on this occasion; she didn’t wait for me to guess.
“A bear! A black bear, Daddy! Just down the road! It was as close as I am to that chair,” she said, pointing to a Hitchcock reproduction not five feet away. “Tell him, Mommy. Tell him about the bear!”
My wife nodded to corroborate the story, which was all the affirmation Charlotte needed. “It wasn’t very big, Daddy. But it wasn’t a cub. It was about this high,” she said, gasping for breath and holding her hand flat at her waist. “We thought it was a dog at first. We pulled over and it just stayed there by the side of the road. It didn’t run. It just looked at us and then it walked into the woods.”
Seizing on a half-second pause, I demanded to know the exact location of this close encounter. Charlotte began fashioning a map on the floor, using forks and knives from the supper table to denote significant landmarks along the last mile of her daily commute from school to home. Growing frustrated with her crude mapping tools and her father’s dubious sense of direction, she rushed into the living room.
“Come on, Dad. We can get a map on the computer,” she said.
Bear, deer, bobcat, coyote, beaver, rabbit: my daughter has already seen them all in the wild. She’s seen eagles soaring over Cranberry Pond in Sunderland, heron fishing in West Brook, red tail hawks and turkey vultures riding thermals and hunting rodents over the big fields up in back of the house. At a tender age, she’s already seen a greater variety of wildlife than I’d seen until midway through my fourth decade. I dare say that if Betsy and I hadn’t moved to the Valley in 1995—a return for me, after decades of city living—I’d never have seen as much wildlife as I have.
As a father, I am thoughtful of the various advantages and disadvantages of raising children in the country—though in New England, you’re never so far from urban places that distance becomes a credible excuse for not exposing your kids to the richness of city life. For me, nothing justifies our decision to raise a family in Western Massachusetts more than the benefits of living close to nature.
Frequent bear sightings may strike some people as small recompense for souls deprived of the hustle and bustle of the big city, but I suspect those are people who’ve never seen a bear outside of a zoo.
I have seen so many bears in the last 10 years that you’d think I’d lose count. Not so. I remember every encounter vividly. In every case, the sightings have been startling, arousing in me some primal response that literally makes the hair on the back of my neck bristle. Invariably, I am struck by the size of these animals, by the brilliance of their black coats, by how fast they move when they want to. On a bike ride through Hatfield a few years back, I nearly collided with a huge male bear as it began to cross the road two feet in front of my wheel. I turned abruptly left; the bear went right, darted across someone’s front lawn to the edge of a wood and stood on its hind legs for several moments, looking at me. My heart still pounds when I recall the event.
I know Charlotte gets the same thrill I do seeing wild animals up close.
After pulling up a Google satellite map the other night, we located the exact spot where the bear she’d seen entered the woods. Charlotte asked me to show her some video of black bears, so we checked out the ample offerings at youtube.com. Then she began peppering me with questions: Are black bears vicious? How about grizzly bears? Are grizzly bears and brown bears the same thing? Do we have grizzlies around here? For each question, I was able to pull up an image or video clip on the Internet to illustrate my answer.
“Dad,” Charlotte said, her attention wandering from a video clip of an enormous bruin in Alaska, “I don’t want to see pictures. I want to see the real thing.”
Me, too, Charlotte. Me, too.
