A few minutes after “Real Housewives of Atlanta” began and my wife and I settled into our usual positions on the sofa with our laptops, we heard a loud thud from outside.
“I think that was our trash can,” she said, jumping up with wide eyes, knowing that black bears have been raiding the garbage of our mountainside neighbors for a few weeks as they fatten up before hibernation.
Until that moment, the carport hangar under which we stored our bins had served as a wooden barrier between the bears and us. I had seen a cub darting into the brush a quarter-mile down the hill a few nights earlier. And about twenty-four hours earlier, our neighbor text-messaged my wife to point out that a cub was snacking on the Hefty bag from her garbage can in the corner of our backyard down by their driveway.
It all ended with that thud, and as we crept toward the enormous floor-to-ceiling window that defines the front of our house, looking out toward the carport, I saw her. It was Mama. It had to be Mama, all five hundred pounds of her, or so. She had pried herself between my car and the far carport wall, turned over the can and pulled out the goodies, which were already strewn over the driveway. She was walking toward our front door when my wife and I ran back into the family room. My wife sent a one-up text back to the neighbor and listened for more noises that never came.
We blazed through the internet. We found bear-proof cans for less than two hundred bucks and emailed the city to see if they were aware of this bargain price. I clicked on an article about a Colorado village where black bears were breaking into houses. I didn’t tell my wife about that one.
My wife let the world know about the encounter via Facebook and read a local newspaper article that reported sightings of a mother and her two cubs all over town these days, most likely because of how poor a summer it had been for wild berries. About an hour later, we turned “Real Housewives” back on.
The next night, we didn’t hear anything from outside while catching up on “Survivor: Nicaragua,” “Top Chef: Just Desserts,” and five episodes of “Property Virgins.” But at about 11:30, as my wife snored and I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I swore I heard a light tapping on the front door. I tiptoed out to look.
The mother bear was there again, in full view outside the front door, as if waiting to be let in. She looked peaceful, sticking her tan snout up next to the doorknob, probably trying to smell her way past the lock, and before I could run away or dive out of sight, she raised a paw and clicked against the glass gently with her claws. The fear in me disappeared. I opened the door and she walked in.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s starting to get cold out there.”
She knelt down on the rug, crumpling perfectly in a manicured structure of fur and muscle. She asked me to pull up a chair. She told me that she knew we had seen her in the driveway the previous night and that she wasn’t meaning to be a nuisance.
“I’m just trying to take care of my cubs,” she said. “We’re all hungry.”
I told her to wait a minute and went into the kitchen. I came back out with a tube of honey and a massive hunk of frozen salmon I had caught over the summer. I put it down next to her. She thanked me again before I asked her why she had come.
“I’ve been watching you … listening to you,” she said, recalling in my mind the many conversations my wife and I had spread out over the fifteen months since buying our house about needing blinds or shades or tinted film for the many single-pane windows. “You have a lot to be happy about, but you’re not. Why is that?”
I thought about it for a moment. We both have well-paying jobs that allow us to work from home and handle our bills and mortgage with minimal concern. Our son is three years old and he’s healthy and happy. We drive cars that work and have a flat-screen television and all the movie channels on cable and go out to eat two or three times a week. We drink artisan coffee.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think that being as busy as we are with work and with our son, we’re tired a lot and we get frustrated and we don’t have a lot of family or friends around here so we just end up taking out a lot of that frustration on each other.”
She nodded and put her paws together, clasping them. “I understand,” she said. “But you have to remember that you’re all you have. Try to remember that happiness is something you have to work at. It doesn’t just appear.”
I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d heard all of that before and it always ended up sounding like Hallmark drivel. And who was she to tell me these things, anyway? She didn’t have to deal with the half-hour drive each way to pre-school, the annoying way the cleaning lady always rearranges the pots and pans in the wrong drawer, or gay couple behind us who built a garden shed with an overhanging roof that technically is on our property line.
Shit, I thought. I would love to be in her world. All the sleep you could ever want. Fishing trips every day. People running away from you every chance they get. What’s wrong with that?
But her eyes were honest. I knew she meant no harm.
“You’re right,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s tough sometimes, that’s all.”
She got up, grabbed her fish and her honey, and motioned back toward the door.
“I’m going to go now,” she said. “Just be good to each other, OK?”
I said I would and I opened the door and let her out.
The next morning, my wife went outside to grab the package from Nordstrom that she’d been waiting for. She came back in with a quizzical look in her eyes, pointing to a muddy mark on the floor.
“What is this?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Don’t worry about it.”
I hugged her hard, harder than I have in a while.
***
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