The other day I told the story of doing everything wrong when meeting a wild bear. I got a second chance. Above on video, or transcribed below, is that story.
In between the first time I saw a bear and the second time I saw a bear, a lot happened.
I basically wrote a book and I also went through devastation.
Like I had ... my body went to hell. I was basically disabled for a while and then I slowly got better until one beautiful morning I was going for a run in these wooded hills on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and it was sunrise and you could see the light hitting a million treetops.
It was just gorgeous and I'm just feeling so appreciative of the fact that I can move and I kind of swoop up this little rise and then down and we're in an open field surrounded by trees and I'm running down and I'm aware that I'm not alone.
I have a feeling and I kind of look up and sure enough in the shadows across the bottom of the field walks ... a bear.
This one's even taller, bigger arguably than the first one I'd seen. They can get up to 600 pounds. It's something like that.
And I'm running at this corner of the field and he's walking to the same exact spot.
Which seems like: oopsie.
My first hope is that he simply won't notice me. He's looking the direction he's going. Maybe that's that. And as I'm kind of thinking, oh, maybe he'll just move along, he turns his giant bear head.
His eyes laser into my eyes and go straight into my stomach and boil my innards. And the first thought that hits me is he probably knows how I would taste.
And now I'm out of the fiction that he's not going to notice me and into the ...
I have to do the thing you're supposed to do. I have to act big, like I own the joint.
And now that I've gone through it once before and done it all wrong, I'm determined to do it right. And so I'm still running.
This has all happened so fast. I haven't even stopped running yet.
And so I just act like I won the local 5k. I'm just like, “YEAH.” And, you know, act big. I don't know if I yelled, but big expressions. I'm doing everything I can to act like I own the joint.
And I sort of send that message off into the air. And I'm proud of myself on the one hand that I did what I was supposed to do. But then as the message is making its way through the airspace, it also hits me: I don't have anything else to say to the bear.
If this message isn't received as intended, then... I'm just running at a bear.
We're all alone. No one will hear my screams.
And also people are like, oh, you know, bears tend not to hurt people, which is true. Black bears tend not to hurt people. But on the other hand, I looked this up: Jack Russells send people to the hospital all the time and are a hundredth the size. It just seems inarguable that this is dangerous.
Anyway, so the bear, he's looking at me. He receives my message. And he turns back in the direction he was going and ... breaks into a run.
The bear, the wild bear in the wild, ran away from me, which gave me this, like, I had a really deep and profound appreciation of the power of biomechanics from how it prevents injuries and had healed my own injuries.
But now I had this other X factor, which is it seems to express something. This being big and proud and upright and biomechanically sound seemed to send a nonverbal message across species in a way that mattered. And that's pretty cool.
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