ok, so i went hiking over the weekend and didn’t encounter any bears.
maybe i’m an idiot(ok, keep your opinions to yourself, thank you…), but i’m disappointed that i didn’t meet any bears in the woods.
a friend of mine told me that he had seen bears in the woods near where i went hiking, and that’s kind of why i went hiking over the weekend.
but i saw no bears.
a friend of mine in florida saw a manattee, which is kind of like a bear except that they live in the water and don’t have claws and have probably never hurt anything other than a watercress plant in the entire history of mammalian life.
i don’t think that manattee’s have fur, either. and they’re probably not very good at climbing trees.
i did see some eagles and hawks.
and some bugs.
but it’s still winter(even though it was hot and sunny)in the woods where i went hiking, so most of the animals were probably still sleeping.
or groggily looking at the alarm clock.
or avoiding the stupid noisy human making 100 times more noise than anything that actually lives in the woods.
the woods are great. i especially like the fact that they don’t really care if you’re there or not.
most of the things in the human world(car washes, malls, political parties, tv shows, etc) would disappear without human patronage and attention.
the woods(and, well, nature)are seemingly disinterested in whether we’re paying attention or not. and that’s why the woods(and, well, nature)are so calming.
cos unlike 99.9% of the things in our lives(ads, tv, websites, annoying musicians writing about the woods, etc)the woods don’t loudly ask us to pay attention to them.
they just sort of, for better or worse, ignore us.
and, in hindsight, i’m probably better off for the fact that the bears ignored me, too.
if for some reason i ever die in a bear attack please know that i died in a lot of pain.
and i was probably terrified, too.
-moby
