Donna Howell-Sickles is one of my favorite artists. When I get my RV/trailer, I’m having one of her prints, or a mash-up of her work, repainted on it….She’s my favorite because her visuals send an unexpected, but very effective message - like this one - “Keeping Out The Bears.” More than an artist, Donna is a storyteller. I often think about what the story in this painting is. There are so many.

I was looking at it again this morning and thinking how often we all think putting up a picket fence will “keep out the bears.” On the one hand, if those “bears” are thoughts, or “paper tigers,” the right fence may work. After all, it just becomes a construct we use to deal with scary stuff. On the other hand, if those “bears” are real things like the economy, housing, a job, our health, those flimsy picket fences we put up - fences like our belief that “This bear will never come into my yard,” isn’t going to last long.

So I’m torn, do I write about keeping out the mental bears and paper tigers, or the futility or struggle of trying to fence out the “real” bears - poverty, disease, housing?

The fact is, we all experience BOTH kinds of bears and the real question is, “How are we going to deal with the bears once they want in?” I have some experience with both paper tigers and real bears.

30 years ago I was hiking in Canada with two friends. The three of us were living out of a Volkswagen van, camping and traveling around Canada and the west for the summer. We had found a great trail outside Banff, registered with the park service, then hiked 20+ miles into the back country. It was the second or third morning “in country” when we came upon a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs about 500 yards from timberline. When faced with life-threatening danger, I go for practical and proven every time - in this case, climb a tree.

So, JoAnn and I headed straight up the nearest lodge-pole pine tree - about 40 -feet up, well out of the range of a the 15-20 foot reach of a grizzly intent on dragging down prey and protecting her young.

However, Rose Marie, the third woman in our group, stayed on the ground, believing she could “talk” to the bear and become its “friend” should it approach. We resigned ourselves to watching her be torn limb from limb and chewed into small bloody pieces. It took only seconds for us to reassure each other we would not play hero and try to rescue her. She refused to climb up and sat on a stump, waiting for the bear’s approach.

Meanwhile Joann and I discussed how best to spend the night and the next week living in a lodge-pole pine. Then I heard a noise I couldn’t place. Thunder? A tank? Oh - no, it was the grizzly, standing up and roaring - her jaws open wide enough to swallow a live hog whole. The noise…I can’t even describe the sound or the chill that ran through me as she stood, slinging her head from side-to-side as she bellowed her rage and frustration and warning.

Fortunately bears have lousy eyesight. She could smell us, but not place us. Her cubs wandered down the back of the ridge and out of her sight. So eventually, she left, following them, heading away from us. Eventually we climbed down and decided what to do next. I refused to hike on the next 9 miles to our “above timberline” campsite. I insisted on hiking out instead, arguing that I didn’t want to have to burrow under a boulder when the bear returned at night. JoAnn agreed. So we hiked out, much to Rose Marie’s protests. Good thing. Once off the trail a couple of days later, we signed out of the Canadian hiking permit/camping system, only to discover that the other campers at our campsite had been killed and mauled by bears. It could have been us. Had we proceeded, we would have walked into camp only to find pieces of bodies, a fresh bear kill and no trees to climb.

I remember that trip every time I see this poster - the smiling, friendly, “Oh a picket fence!” bears versus the real grizzlies that had torn two campers (both foresters/scientists studying bear behavior by the way) into hamburger so many years ago. And I remember that Rose Marie saw picket fence bears, and JoAnn and I saw grizzlies. Yet, we all walked away alive. Did Rose Marie’s picket fence keep the bears at bay? Did her sing-song assurances to the bear as she sat on her stump keep the bear away? Or was it the prayers, the strength of my Southern Baptist upbringing, force the hand of God? Or was it the cubs, attention diverted by whatever diverts the young, that drew mama bear away from our group? I’ll never know. Maybe it was all, maybe none of those things. I think though, had they all failed, the tree would have saved me.

We move through life and for the most part, we avoid the bears because we don’t venture into their territory. We don’t linger where they live. And when we do, we plan, whether for picket fences, or lodge pole pines. The songs, the prayers, the picket fences, the totems and gods/God we invoke may keep the bears at bay, but I’ll climb a tree every time.

As I get older, the trees (friends, finances, freedom to chose) are more sparsely placed, harder to find, harder to climb. Maybe it’s time to find a tree and build a tree-house in it. And then hang Donna’s print on the wall. It’s a thought.

How about you? How do you keep the bears out?