Three days now into our great cross-country-and-back adventure in my little red VW Golf, with our dog Billie. We had planned to save money by camping out along the way, but after ten hours of putting everything we’d need for the next five weeks into bags and three hours of strategizing the packing of the Golf, it was clear that the camping stuff would not fit. The air mattress, the tent and stakes, the camp stove, the propane, the hatchet, the minus-30-degree sleeping bags, the bear-proof box and ropes and all the rest are in piles in our loft. “We’ll camp some other time,” Marty promised, as we schlepped it all back upstairs. “Or maybe we’ll just keep it for our earthquake kit.”
I had waked the morning before the morning before we were supposed to leave with nightmares about Billie hearing the bears outside the tent and barking and the bears tearing through the walls of the tent, and all of us getting eaten. It was all my friend Babette’s fault: When I came up with the camping scheme, I didn’t think about bears.
Why would I? I’m a Jew from New York, raised in Southern California. Marty’s a Jew from Detroit. We don’t worry about bears until someone tells us there are bears, and now all we think about is bears.
That’s not entirely true. When I was living n New York, I would come to LA occasionally to work so I would cut these articles out of the New York Times about mountain lions and bears attacking people while they were out biking or jogging and they would have useful advice about all the things you’re supposed to do. For example, if you run into one of them you’re supposed to hold your jacket over your head, make yourself really big and look them right in the eyes, so they see you’re bigger and stronger than they are. For the other, you make yourself as little as possible and avoid their gaze, in order to appear submissive. The only problem is I can’t remember which you do for which.
My friend Amelia and I hiked Will Rogers State Park a few weeks ago. We went up about three and a half miles, turned around to walk back and came upon a rattlesnake sunning itself on the path we had crossed maybe five minutes earlier. We literally threw our arms around one another like in the movies and screamed. “It’s a snake! It’s a snake!” There was a man approaching from below and we screamed, “There’s a snake! There’s a snake! What do we do?” He was not from New York or Montreal like us, so he knew something about snakes. Yes, he confirmed, it is a rattlesnake. He threw big rocks at it so it woud move from the path, but it didn’t so much as flinch. So he went off to find a stick to what? maybe pick it up? As soon as he turned away, it slithered off into the grass by the side of the trail.
Sticks and stones. Fangs and venom.
Now the question was did it retreat straight into the grass, or was it coiled up, just out of sight, ready to pounce as we continued our trek down the hill? We didn’t know, so we leapt as high as we could over the place where it had been, and continued to run down the path as fast as we could, making as much ruckus as we could, telling the snakes to stay away.
At some point, we relaxed—I guess the path got wider and it seemed less likely that some snake would dart out of the overgrown grass and strike our naked ankles as we passed. We warned everyone we met on their way up the hill about the rattlesnake. One guy on a dirt bike said, yeah, he sees them all the time. And, he said, he didn’t want to scare us, but the day before, he had run into a mountain lion.
We had spent the entire hike up breathing in the beauty of nature and green and the trees and the wide sky above us, as we climbed to summit after summit. We should live up here, in remote places like these beautiful hills, away from civilization. On the way down, fleeing our snake, Downtown LA started looking really good to me.
Hotel Colorado, in Glenwood Springs is old-school: Across the way from the railway station, big old healing hot-springs pools still simmer across the street. There’s a huge lobby with sofas and fireplaces and wireless internet (slow as molasses, but wireless). Ann at the desk gave us an upgrade when we came in last night to a suite on the fifth floor (penthouse) and we slept til nearly noon and decided to stay an extra day. We walked Two Rivers Park, got caught in the rain and came back in to warm up in front of the fire.
This is our kind of place: Low-key, dog-friendly. Billie rules the lobby off-leash, letting any other dog who enters the place know who is queen, and then coming back to curl up at our feet in front of the fire.
We are set up in cozy armchairs with scotch and water from the Coleman flask Marty bought at Target when we were shopping for the camping stuff, before Babette offered to loan us hers. We have laptops and iPhones and a video camera.
Civilized. No snakes. No bears.
Billie and me by the fire, May 21, 2010
