June means it’s time to carry a bell when I hike. The bell lets mother bears know that I am passing through. If they hear you coming, they (usually) will get out of the way. Why June? Because their cubs have gotten big enough to start getting into trouble and because the blackberries that line many of the trails and logging roads ripen. Bears love blackberries.
Last year I forgot to carry the bell and I got into trouble because of it (see my account of that here and a more genaral post about bears, here ).
When carrying (and ringing) a bell, you don’t see the bears, so you really don’t know if they were ever there. The whole point is to have them leave or make way for you before you ever pass by.
Once, many years ago, I was coming home from a long hike, tired and late. I was walking on a old unused logging road that had thigh-high grass growing on it and thick underbrush on both sides. Right in front of me, in the center of the road, this little bitty bear cub suddenly stood up and looked at me. It was incredibly small, fuzzy, and all-around cute. After a good thirty seconds, it ran off the left side of the road. I couldn’t tell if it went up a tree, the bushes were so thick. (I did not have a dog with me. This was before I got the Jack Russell Terriers.)
I stood there in the road for a long, long time, alternatively yelling and clapping my hands, then stopping and listening carefully. Cardinal rule when dealing with bears is (aside from avoiding them altogether) don’t ever go between a mother and her cub. This baby had been exactly in the middle of the road. It had run off to the left. If the mother was also on the left, all was well and I could continue down the road. If the mother was on the right, I should, on no account continue on the road.
Finally, because it was late and I was tired and the other ways out were long and hard — and because I thought surely the mother would have reacted by now if she were on the right side apart from her cub … I tip-toed very fast onward down the road. I have no idea why I thought tip-toeing would help.
If I had had a bell or if the mother bear would have made some noise to tell me where she was, both of us would have been happier.
The big trouble that I had last year with a mother bear was certainly because she didn’t hear me coming. Yesterday, while walking through the woods making more noise than some deranged Santa Claus, because I couldn’t think of much of anything else for all the noise, I started thinking about whether there is any ingredient of photography that would be like my warning bell.
While I can’t think of any purely “warning off” photography (after all, you always want someone to look at them) I do think that there is frequently a degree of bell-ringing or claxon-sounding in many pictures. The photographer saying, “this matters to me,” “I am here, like me or not,” a claiming of space, or a right of passage. An element in the pictures that is not aesthetic, not moral, not revelatory but simply and purely a “get back!” and claim to exist — that is for those who you suspect or know will disagree, dislike, or actively oppose what or where or why you made the pictures.
The same as me ringing the bell. I don’t want to see the bears. I don’t want the bears to see me. I don’t want to interact with them at all beyond asserting my presence and my right to be there . I am claiming space from a hostile audience. People who don’t care about my land, don’t care about my people, don’t care about what I care about. Even if they don’t look at my pictures, the pictures claim those subjects as mine. I’m here. Get back!
I do see a degree of this in many photographs and it’s something I had not realized before.
-Julie
