Camping Sunday morning, soon after I’d taken a foto of a Black Bear Crossing sign nailed to a tree in front of our in-laws’ western Pennsylvania cabin, Miles the dog jerked his head up and stared at the woods across the lane. My sister-in-law noticed and said “There’s a bear.”
She went into the cabin for her camerafone, then headed for the lawn across the lane. I asked why she thought the bear would come out of the woods into the yard and she explained the folk there fed them in a bear trough when they were camping and the bears usually checked it out.
Sure enough, out comes the bear, slow, lumbering, smaller than I’d expected but still big enough to get his way.
My first foto looked like a big black bag so I considered bear danger versus foto and started around the forest edge to get closer. But as I crept up, it started off. Got two more bearblob fotos, then I made clucking noises and it stopped, looked back over its shoulder at me, waited as I explained I just wanted a good foto, then took off even faster, and that was that.
Not bad.
The bear statues below were at the campsite store, were carved with chainsaws.
The Smith plaques were in the cabin because my in-laws on my sister-in-law’s side are also named Smith. Go figure. The fruit farm bag is from near my in-laws’ Ohio farm. So Idaho/Washington/Cleveland meSmith drives to Pennsylvania Smithplace to eat apples from Ohio FruitSmiths which is near the Ohio FarmSmiths.
Today I help found-neon-argon sculptor Jeff Chiplis install a piece for this year’s Ingenuity Festival; poet Kevin Eberhardt will be helping as well, so I’m going from black bears to neon and poet.
Life do be interesting.
black bears and Smiths, real and imaged – fotosmith