How to never see a bear - #95

Adventures in low-grade torture.

In the vastness of the wilderness, we reliably look for a few things: rain on the horizon, bears in the trees, and transformations in ourselves. When I heard the sound of compressed liquid releasing in my bag, I knew I was about to find something else.

In mid-July, I packed up the truck to drive the 12 plus hours to Boise, Idaho. I was going to stop by my parents’ house to stay for the night, and then carry on to Montana with my mom in tow the next day — another 9 hours of driving to the Bob Marshall Wilderness for my own personal City Slickers. We were going on a horsepacking trip with a mule train for seven days. 

There were two bags in my car: 

1. A small black bag with car clothes, my work laptop, lip stain, and snacks

2. And a dry bag with jeans, flannels, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, backpacking pillow, bathing suit, long underwear, my dopp kit, a big new book, my morning pages notebook, hiking shoes, riding gloves, two bandanas, all the usual undergarments, and a can of bear spray

My dad’s worn cowboy hat and my unworn cowboy boots sat on the backseat alongside them. 

The Chinese Wall and a poser.

In Montana, my mom and I checked into an old motel with 12 rooms that sat amongst towering pines, coating the parking with a soft bed of aromatic needles. The room was coated with something else. The carpeted floor and faux brocade bed covers reeked of human filth, cigarettes, and time. Mold sat comfortably settled along the edges of the shower and wet grime coated the remote and lightswitches. We opened the two crank windows and positioned an old standing fan in front of the door as we peeled back the comforters from the sides of the beds we would sleep on – on our backs, ankles crossed and hands knitted across our abdomens, resting against our shallow breaths. It would be a brief night before meeting with the packers at dawn. 

I laid out my clothes for the next day and laid myself down, brimming with excitement. 

The morning came quick, and we moved even quicker in the first light of day, whirling in and out of the bathroom and the parking lot to load up, not bothering to touch the greased light switches. That’s when I heard it, like a popped tire inside my dry bag, the quick release of something that should not be releasing so quickly. I undid all the buckles, and reached into the bag, finding my clothes wet, my hand damp. I ran my fingers along the inside of the bag, drawing them to my face to smell the liquid.

That’s when the coughing started. The bear spray canister had malfunctioned and released completely inside my bag. If you’re not familiar with bear spray, it’s a red pepper oil similar to pepper spray, but at a much higher concentration because it is, obviously, meant for large, aggressive bears. As soon as the dry bag was opened, my mom and I became the only bears in sight. I rushed the bag outside, dumping its contents onto the ground so I could get the dry bag into the shower as fast as possible. We were gagging and choking, crying and coughing, wringing clothes out in the shower and washing what we could before we realized the entire room smelled like bear spray. It was inescapable. Not only were my clothes coated in it, stained a kind of murky orange that whispered of food poisoning, but my hands were too. 

We used every old towel in the dingy bathroom, mopping up the orange deterrent as it did its best to deter us, but its pervasiveness only matched our doggedness. We had an adventure to go on! This is not the right kind of adventure! No one would call this auspicious! 

I stuffed what wasn’t completely drenched with pepper oil into my somewhat clean bag, tied the other pieces to the clamps in my truck bed, and started the drive to the trailhead, the oil sinking into my skin. 

—

They were missing a saddle. Or a horse. Or more than one of both. It wasn’t clear because they weren’t talking to us. There were ten of us on this particular pack trip, hailing from Washington, California, Colorado, Idaho, Virginia, New York, Georgia, Minnesota, and New York, with some 200 years of horse experience between us, standing in the hot sun just outside the corral like cows waiting to be wrangled. All our attempts to help were readily refused, so we just stood there. In the blaring sun. In our long sleeves and jeans. In my pepper oil. 

They say the effects of bear spray on the skin last up to an hour, but that’s assuming you had the appropriate time, facilities, and soaps to wash it off of you, which I did not. So all the oil did was sink into my skin, and when concentrated pepper oil sinks into your skin, it burns. It feels like your skin is being seared off. It is akin to the feeling of very sunburnt skin still enduring the heat of the day. It is like touching a hot pan and not being able to stop touching it. It is a circle of Hell and like Hell, I could not escape it. 

The outfitter’s plan was to have us meet at dawn so we could get to our campsite before the worst of the midday heat. We did not begin riding until 1pm, enough time for me to become well aware of every part of my body the oil had found its way into: under my fingernails, in my ears, every part of my eye, my nose, my lips, my hands, my forearms. I thought about how I would use the restroom, squatting with my hands raised in fear, relying on the gods of drip dry. Once on the horse though, I could simply focus on the trail in front of me and when it would near itself enough to a river for me to throw myself into it. 

This worked out both better and much worse than I thought.

I should have known, by the way he pranced hurriedly through, or occasionally leapt over, small creeks. But this was an outfitter trail horse. They are the bus drivers of the trail, unfazed by passengers, simply going from point A to point B on schedule. The outfitters themselves hadn’t even bothered to ask what our riding experience was. They simply sized us up and told us who we were riding. Not that this can’t be an effective pairing method — once people are in a corral with horses, posture and way of being will tell a story, albeit one easily edited by ego. I was trying to project more “I like horses but it’s been a minute” than “I am covered in death oil.” 

Whatever I was projecting, they put me on a 4-year-old palomino gelding named Yukon. Yukon is a very good horse. He is also just a little bit of a baby. And when I was having visions of submerging myself in water, the human-horse connection proved a little stronger than I remembered because upon our first real river crossing, Yukon reared. 

Now, if you’ve never ridden a horse, I can understand why this would be threatening. But for me this was mostly just surprising. You don’t like water? This is a wilderness pack trip. We are going to be crossing the river many times! While I tried to wrangle Yukon and remind him that water is fun and no matter how he feels, we do actually have to cross this river, my phone dislodged from the saddle bag amidst the bucking and fell in the river.

I could see it, sitting about a foot deep on the river rocks, grateful for the advances in technology that have made these phones more or less water proof. They are, however, not horse proof. And Yukon in his dancing panic stepped directly on it, smashing it against the rocks below as river water weaved through my photo albums. I slid off him, elbowed him out of the way, and reached into the water with my burning hand to retrieve the device, screen flickering in its final goodbye. 

At this moment, I think Yukon sensed a shift in my patience. I swung myself back onto him and drove him directly into the river, submerging my boots and his belly as resignation and fury battled for top spot in my headspace. Yukon did not break pace once for the rest of the ride, merely turning one ear back at a time to see if I was still sitting on him or if I had simply left my body behind as a reminder of what he’d done.

I was never going to have reception in the backcountry, but my phone’s purpose on this trip was still threefold: it was going to serve as my timepiece, my mirror, and of course, my ultimate memory capturing device. Now of course you could be like, “why didn’t you bring a watch, a compact mirror, and a camera?” Because I was born in the 80s and your good advice isn’t very helpful now, is it?

Anyway I took my sour little attitude straight to my notebook at camp to furiously scribble on the bear spray soaked pages as I coughed all over it, unable to escape the somehow mandatory jokes in camp: “you know you spray it at the bear, not yourself right?” “Maybe you should sleep on the edge of camp to keep the bears way” “At least the bears won’t eat you.” I even thought some of these were funny, which made me even angrier. My mom watched wearily from several feet away at all times, coughing every time she entered the pepper scented tent she was forced to share with her daughter, the bear spray leper.

When humans venture out on trips that are novel or challenging or “hardy” or whatever, they have this tendency to expect more than memories from it. There is often this presumption that we’ll come back changed, better somehow than when we left — more worldly, more aware of ourselves, more connected to nature, our surroundings, and each other. We are very good at picturing the van door opening to a sunrise over the mountains. We are less good at imagining the van smelling like shit because we haven’t found somewhere to empty the holding tank.

I am guilty of this, thinking such vain things as “the essay I write after this trip is gonna be so fucking moving.” I (however embarrassingly) thought this because this was my first true wilderness trip! I’ve gone camping a lot, I’ve gone bikepacking, and I’ve had myriad physical adventures in what many people would consider challenging locations, but almost all of them have included access to things — in and out of towns, in and out of reception. This time we’d truly be out there. I’d be camping with my mom every night after riding horses through the wilderness, a trip evocative of the old West and her own past leading pack strings. I was gonna come out of that wilderness so fucking transformed you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between me and the horse I was riding.

But the reality was the deepest that connection went was the unconquerable heat rash that covered my entire ass. My mom rides horses. I ride mountain bikes. I am used to the cool breeze aerating my existence as my touchnpoints to the bike are relegated to only my hands, the balls of my feet, and occasionally my seat bones. Knowing how to work with a horse does not change 20 years of barely riding them. My back ached as I practically belly danced on the horse to move with his motions, my knees felt like bottle caps being twisted off my legs, and my ass, my poor, poor ass was whiplashed to long gone eras of diaper rash from being pressed against hot leather in hot weather for hours on end. I winced in pain as I would straighten one leg at a time and then cross it over my saddle horn, trying to get my knees to remember the positions they started in. 

Every evening, when respite would come, I would put up our tent and unfurl our sleeping bags, letting the waves of bear spray wash over me yet again, wafting up from materials we couldn’t properly wash, and I would cough into the ground as I laid on my stomach, letting the mountain air wash over me as I bent and unbent my knees. 

I have never been more present in my entire life.

For all my low grade agony, there was nothing to do but sit with it and enjoy the wilderness and my horse. Every morning, the packers took until at least 11am to repack camp, leaving the ten of us tourists to just sit there, for some five hours, doing nothing but commenting on who was looking efficient this morning and who wasn’t, like sending the diners into the kitchen with every one of them saying they know how to cook. 

We’d mount our horses to follow the lead packer in silence for an undetermined amount of time. My mother prodded him. “Are you gonna tell us what river this is?” “Sun River.” “Do you know what fire this was?” “No.” “How long is the ride today?” “Long.” “Is that lookout manned?” “Sometimes.” It felt like for as much as he saddled the horse, he was also somehow saddled with us. I found this entirely enchanting and hilarious, as if someone at the outfitter had decided that yahoos like us loved a grumpy cowboy. Don’t we, though? 

Then, in the midst of a clearing, he would get off his horse and tie him up. 

“Are we getting off too?” someone would invariably ask and he would say, “yeah.” Incredible.

And that’s how we’d find out where we were camping for the night before the woman who did the vet care set up the kitchen because the cook was the one they sacrificed at the trailhead when they didn’t either have enough horses or saddles. I would slide off Yukon and he would nuzzle into me, knowing the better part of our agreement was coming. My friend Claire teased me that I would come back from this trip with some lifelong bond with a four-hooved animal, but Yukon and I simply had a good working relationship. He behaved impeccably, and in return, I gave him snacks when he was tethered to the highline in camp, something the other horses quickly noticed. The only transformation may be his ability to cross a river without losing his shit. 

Me and Yuk.

In years prior, I think I may have expected bravery from this trip. I would have been looking to leave the wilderness with some deep connection to nature, with the courage to finally make some changes — leave the life of a key card captive and change how I lived. But I’d… already done that. I arguably feel more connected to nature than I do anything else. Even without any way to tell the time, even without any idea what I looked like, even without that sci-fi mind control device we still weirdly insist on just calling a phone, I felt as pleasantly connected to nature as I do just being at home. 

No transformation, no big revelations, just an ass-ruining, mother-daughter bonding trip through the Montana Wilderness as she listened to me enumerate all the ways eating meat for every single meal was compounding the heat rash problem. She got to see the Chinese Wall, and I got to find out my Apple Care ran out last month. So really, we both got to experience astonishment. 

My knees, rear, and back have all recovered, and with enough Colace and kale, I’m sure my gut will return to normal functionality soon. I am untransformed, unchanged, and unlikely to do that again. Though I will say I did find some awe: in that my nearing-70-year-old mom with her very bad knees and her proclivity for easy, beachy vacations was willing to sleep on the ground every night in a bear spray filled nightmare with her venomous daughter on a chef-less pack trip with one-word cowboys just so she could ride a horse to the Chinese Wall. 

Who needs transformation when you wouldn’t change a thing.

Mama.