I Cried for the Bears

It was kinda chilly that March afternoon in Sevier County. The cold red sun was just about two fingers above the horizon opposite the mountains. We were heading back to Knoxville after a wonderful day trip to the Smokies. We had passed that cheesy ol' tourist trap of a gift shop millions of times, since we were kids. "The 3 Bears Gifts and Souvenirs" had sat on the North side of the Parkway for as long as we could remember. There was always that big sign on top of the building, proclaiming "See and Feed Live Bears".

"Ooooh," Luchrisa said with tone of childlike wonder, "Let's go see the bears! I ain't never been!"

"Alright", I replied, "Neither have I".

We entered the gift shop, past the tacky hillbilly T-shirts and stuffed black bear dolls and several gifts and souvenirs that were quite demeaning to our East Tennessee culture, if you ask me. Why anyone would want to buy a corncob with an electric cord and plug sticking out of one end in a box labeled "Electric Redneck Toilet Paper" is freakin' beyond me!

We followed the signs to the back of the building, promising to lead us to "See Live Bears"; a refrain that repeated itself almost every other yard! At the rear of the store was a glass desk with two signs. One sign read "Free Bibles", with a stack of paperback New Testament books on the glass counter immediately above it. The other read "See the Bears: $3.00 - Feed the Bears: $5.00", with a half dozen small white Styrofoam bowls filled with hunks of bread and apple slices on the glass counter above it.

"Oooh! Let's buy some food! I wanna feed the bears!! Can we???", my darling asked in a tone I couldn't possible refuse.

"Why not?", I replied, trying to act indifferent about the situation, but clearly wanting to see the bears myself. After all, with springtime slow in coming that year, we didn't see any in the mountains that day. Furthermore, it seems with the rampant development of formerly bucolic mountain wilderness, it's not as easy to see black bears in the wild as it was just 10 short years ago. Used to be, one could drive through Cade's Cove, and see about 5 or 6 on any given day, lounging around together high up in the trees. How ironic that the greedy land developers use these magnificent creatures to lure more tourists to the Smokies, yet the demand for more lodging, highways, restaurants, and entertainment venues that increased tourism creates is causing the black bear's habitat to disappear. Hell, skinny and in search of food, they have even ambled all the way into downtown Knoxville on several occasions!

We paid our $5.00 and got our little bowl of fruit and bread, and the older bearded man at the desk opened the glass doors leading out to a patio. It was pretty well maintained, the concrete floor painted a kind of burnt umber, with forest green steps and catwalks sprawling underneath the transparent white roof of corrugated fiberglass panels like a giaint game of Chutes and Ladders. As we walked up the steps, we looked through the square iron bars, thick with years of dark brown paint, on either side of us, looking for the bears.

"Look! There's one, baby!" I said to my wife, who cooed at the big, beautiful beast, it's thick black mane surrounding it's brown, doglike snout.

As she started to take pictures of the animals, a feeling of sadness and pathos started to come over my soul that I neither expected nor was prepared for at all.

Have you ever known the feeling of true heartbreak? The kind where your heart litterally aches with a feeling that can only be describe as somewhere between tearing and crushing; kind of like torn knee ligaments in your chest! The feeling came over me out of the blue, all of the sudden, when I looked into the largest male's eyes. There was a vacant, almost spiritless void in them. So very different from the ones I've seen in the wild; the ones with spirit, and I dare say, even a sense of purpose. Seeing this huge, powerful animal sitting in its own shit, staring up at me with pleading eyes, waiting for an apple slice to fall, broke me down to a level I hadn't been to in a long time.

My wife was concerned about me, knowing I was fighting back tears. I didn't want to ruin her child-like encounter with these bears, so I just kept it all in until she was through, until the last morsel of food from the bowl hit the hard cement floor of their prison. These bears don't belong here, I thought, remembering the pride and prowess with which their wild cousins roamed the slopes of Appalacia with total and unmitigated FREEDOM. Soon, my sadness was turning to anger; a very dangerous emotional flip for me. That's when I knew it was time to get the hell out of there before I said or did something that might get me arrested!

Now, get something straight right here and now; I'm not some airy-fairy extreme animal rights sissy. I occasionaly go hunting myself, and support the rights of hunters voraciously. Some say hunting is cruel, but is shooting an animal to death really anywhere near as cruel as keeping it cooped up in a prison? No, sir; TRUE animal cruelty is taking a proud, wild beast like a black bear who hunts its own food and lives its life on its terms, and reducing it to a lazy, soulless beggar that sits around waiting for another handout! Personally, I'd rather be die free than live in captivity!

The ride home was quieter than normal. Finally, when almost to Chapman Highway, I told her what was eatin' me. At first, she thought I was being a little mellodramatic about this (this from the woman who cried for almost two hours after rescuing our black cat Mo from the shelter), but started to understand where I was coming from. She, too, knows the sparkle in a free bear's eyes, the confidence in its stride, and the pride in its stance.

Just when I was feeling as bad as I could feel about pouring a big bucket of depression on her little-girl day, she said to me that we're never going back to that place again. At that moment, I felt a lot better about the day as we left the big red sunset and the mountains behind us. She understood that I understood the bears.

As we approached the lights of Seymour at the Knox/Sevier line, I remembered something I had heard on Mancow's Morning Madhouse on the way to work a couple months back. He was talking about how, in America, there is no freedom; only the ILLUSION of freedom. He spoke of a lion in a cage at the zoo, a cage where three of the walls were painted to look like the savannahs of Africa, complete with Acacia trees and sawgrass, even a herd of zebras. Even though it LOOKED like Africa, the lion had no place to go and nothing to do but sit there, waiting for the meat.

It has forgotten how to hunt, how to defend itself, its instincts faded away a long time ago. Just like that bear, sitting in its cage with its artificial concrete pond fed from a PVC pipe, the yellow wrought iron gate over its "den", the back wall painted with mountains it can never climb, trees it cannot touch, a crystal mountain stream it cannot drink from. Is THAT where we're ALL headed?, I thought.