Where Will the Bears Go...

when they close all the parks?

The spring semester of my junior year in college was spent living in the Delaware Water Gap National Park, in a multi college art program. We lived in a big old house in the middle of the park (in northwestern New Jersey) overlooking an oxbow bend in the Delaware River.

Students came from (the now defunct) Philadelphia College of Art, Maryland Institute, Cleveland Institute, and maybe Kansas City Art Institute. We were there in the deep winter. There were frequent heavy snowfalls in the first weeks of the term. We rarely left the park. We stood out in the snow and painted till our fingers froze. The house had no heat upstairs and a very crude etching studio downstairs, along with a big fireplace and a cook named Petey. Our main excursions consisted of the nine students piling into the two cars owned by the students and driving dark, curving mountain roads to a New Jersey dive bar, where we drank beer and whiskey, played pool and watched the first season of Saturday Night Live. Here comes Mr. Bill’s dog!

In addition to visits from New York artists who had a deep commitment to plein air landscape paintings, we also had artists in residence, Joe Fiore and Lois Dodd, who shared favorite painting spots along with their love of landscape painting.

Living in the park, we had regular visits from and activities with the park rangers. We hiked up the New Jersey side of the Water Gap, that place in the hills the river cut through after millions of years of wearing away the hard slate. We took a trip to a slate quarry, riding in a bucket deep below the surface of the ground where they mined the slate. We took a memorable canoe trip in the spring, down the river, where I received an award for falling in during a rather hairy passage through some rapids, not once, but twice.

I have always felt like it was the most pivotal semester of my seven years of art education. It gave me an abiding devotion to the outdoors and our National Parks in particular. I’ve stood watching wild ponies on Chincoteague Island, clambered over rocky outcroppings in Maine’s Acadia National Park, Stood on the rim of The Grand Canyon gazing in wonder, and many other parks besides.

My personal bears, Frank and Mikey, who have become regular cast and crew on the Panda Chronicles, have their beginnings in the video they show at the Yosemite Park offices, about the damage bears can do to your car if you leave so much as a flavored toothpick, let alone a box of donuts on your car seat or trunk. They play the video on an endless loop. Seriously. Bears can do some damage!

My debt to the men and women who chose to work in and for the parks can never be repaid. So it hit me like a bag of doorknobs to the side of my head when I heard that, thanks to the evil sidekick to F45 and his gang of malcontents, that more than 1000 park rangers and support personnel had been fired. The folks that work in the parks don’t make 6 figure salaries. They make near subsistence wages, are pretty much always on call, some spend whole isolated summer and fall seasons in a lookout tower watching for signs of fire. They do the work because they believe in the importance of rushing rivers, tall trees, bears, bison, and big skies.

They do the work because they know that the open spaces we have left are finite and once they are destroyed cannot be replaced.

They do the work for love of nature, for love of wild places, for love of the wild creatures that roam the hills. They know that these remaining wild places belong to ALL of us and that if we learn to love those wild places, maybe we will learn to love ourselves a bit better.

The broligarchs only see resources to be plundered, profit to be made stepping wild lands down and selling off the parts, just like they see the rest of the resources and people of this country.

My time in the park might go a long way to explain why I am friendly to bears. And the broligarchy needs to learn the hard way why you should never get between a bear and her cubs.

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