- I never used to think much about the environment.
Don't get me wrong.
I liked nature,
but from a distance and out of my way.
And then twelve years ago,
as I pushed my two children in their stroller,
a mother bear lumbered out from the woods.
She came from my right
and crossed the road not ten feet away,
the soft pads of her feet the size of dinner plates.
I stopped behind my stroller,
my two children, ages three and three weeks, sleeping inside.
Then again from my right,
two cubs tumbled out into view, sensed my presence,
then plunged back into the foliage.
The mother bear from the side of the road,
turned, sniffed,
and rose on hind legs to her full height.
The sight of her magnificence sent me sinking to my knees.
Not three days earlier,
I had called the DNR and asked them what to do
about the bears plundering our bird feeder.
"Black bears are nothing to worry about," he said.
"The only time they're dangerous
is if you get between a mother and her cubs."
"You don't want to do that."
We were all in a fairly straight line:
the mother bear to my left, the cubs to my right,
and me with my sleeping children in the middle.
I had given birth only twenty days prior
and this bear had also just given birth.
The moment sharpest in my mind is when we made eye contact.
It was like finding a stranger across a room
who shared your experience and your reaction.
So the connection was instant.
She wasn't just a bear.
She was a mother who knew I had my young with me,
just as I knew about hers.
And she didn't like the situation
one bit more than I did.
Instead of a complete freak-out,
a sane and tempered reasonableness rose through me.
What I am sometimes capable of when at my best.
I saw that our stillness was our only way of communicating.
And so it seemed to me, that we agreed as mothers, not to move.
We kept vigil.
That bear stood at the edge of the road
and I crouched behind my baby stroller.
Over and over, the cubs came out,
squeaked and high-tailed it back into the brush.
Finally a car came along and the mother bear ducked away.
I saw my chance.
Using the car like a shield,
I sprinted home with my stroller.
I never saw those bears again.
Our encounter could have ended any number of ways
had that mother bear and I not struck an agreement that day.
One that, for my part, I'm still trying to uphold.
I no longer assume that what the beaver,
the bat or even an ant is doing
isn't just as important as what I am doing.
I feel a deep sense of loyalty to my environment.
Not just because I want to save it,
but because I think it just might save me.
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