Life, as many wise people have observed, is unpredictable, and the trick to it seems to be that there really is no trick to it. The best things come when you least expect them to, as do the best adventures. I’d like to live a life full of adventures, and anyone who has ever heard my being-“lost”-in-foreign-countries stories can attest to that fact. Adventures, unlike drama, which too many people mistake for adventure and continually perpetuate so that can have something to do, give you a rush – they make you feel alive. You don’t have to go sky diving or base jumping or wrestle an alligator to have a proper adventure, either, which is good, because I’m really not dumb enough to jump out of a perfectly good plane or off of a building that’s not *on fire*, and while I did have a major crush on the alligator man from the circus when I was five, it’s not something I can’t live my life without having tried myself. But I’ll never say never, because I’ve learned that it’s the quickest way to get yourself in trouble. Whether God has a wicked sense of humor, I don’t know, but I do know that I have lived to eat the words “I’ll never…” on several occasions. So, I’ve learned not to say it….most of the time.
Memorial Day – a day for remembering and honoring the brave individuals who have fought, and fallen, for our freedoms, generally celebrated by outdoor food preparation followed by a libation or two…or three…or four. A day for being off work and enjoying it. A day, I figured, that would be good for furniture shopping because I am pretty tired of looking at furniture that, while serviceable, screams, “Poor college student!” So I decided to hunt up some furniture, and enlisted the companionship of a friend so that I would be less likely to fall prey to the grasping machinations of desperate sales people. “Bring your camera,” he texted, and told me not to ask questions. When I arrived, he informed me that he had just learned an amazing new method for taking high quality pictures using varying exposures and that after we shopped for furniture we were going to drive down to Sicily Island Hills to take pictures of the falls. We discussed (argued) whether or not the dog would come, and after a very disappointing stint at the furniture store we set to packing up the necessities for such a trek. An hour and a half later found us cruising through Winnsboro, dog in tow, munching on fried chicken, Cutie Pies (where have these delicious little pastries been all my life?!), and the most disgusting steak-flavored chips imaginable.
Sicily Island Hills is an expansive wildlife management area, home to the beautiful St. Mary’s Falls. We hiked down the trail, tied the dog to a tree, and climbed down to photograph the falls.
When we finished, the light was getting to that almost perfect time of day for picture takin’, so we struck out for Windsor Ruins.
After snapping some good shots, we called it a day and headed back to Monroe. We got to Vicksburg without incident – the fun started between Tallulah and Waverly, between mile markers 158 and 159.
It was the time of day that can generally be considered “gloaming” – the sun had been officially “set” for probably a good half an hour, and the world was bathed in that bluish-gray that is too light to be night, but too dark to be considered twilight. This particular stretch of I-20 has a wide, grassy median, and the ground slopes off rather steeply on either side of the interstate. I was finishing up singing along to “I Am a Rock” with Simon & Garfunkel when I saw something ahead that didn’t seem to make sense – it was large and round, and from a distance seemed to be made of darkness. My brain set to churning, trying out all of the probable possibilities. We were approaching it rather rapidly (I will admit to doing somewhere close to, if not over, 80 at this point, but it turned out to be a good thing), and by the time I was able to connect my brain’s hypothesis with the evidence of sight we were practically even with the Thing, and I was so shocked that all I could do was stammer, “B…b….b….bear! ****ing bear!” and start pounding the steering wheel. Yes, there staring at me from the bottom of the embankment to the right of I-20 was the largest Louisiana Black bear I have ever seen in my life, and the first one I had ever seen in the wild. I tried to apply the brakes, but there was no way to safely stop the car before the bear was out of sight. I looked up into the rearview mirror to see if anyone else had seen it, too, and watched as a single headlight went careening toward the median. The bear was in the road.
We raced to the next exit to turn around while phoning the highway patrol to alert them to the fact that there was a bear playing in traffic. I’m sure there are many places where bears, and even bears in the road, are fairly commonplace, but this is Louisiana, and we don’t have many bears. This was a big deal, to us anyway.
By the time we were back on the interstate heading the opposite direction, and level with where the car had run off the road we could see that the bear was in the middle of the interstate, and the SUV that had apparently hit it was carefully pulling out of the median. It was another quarter of a mile before we got to one of those “Emergency Vehicles Only” crossovers and screeched through it like something out of an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard. By the time I pulled the car in behind a stopped 18-wheeler, the bear had been drug off the road and was on the shoulder. It made me sad to see such a beautiful animal having been killed, but apparently it had run out in the road so I guess it took it’s chances and lost. I thought about how I would have liked to have seen it moving (it must have been running extraordinarily fast to have gotten to the middle of the road so soon after we passed it), and wished I had been driving the speed limit. Within minutes the rearview mirror flashed blue and announced the arrival of the authorities. We got out and walked back to meet them and explain the situation to the deputies. As they surveyed the bear and listened to what we could tell of the story, one deputy shook his head and said, “You ain’t gonna believe this s***, but it’s been the night for wildlife. I’ve got a six-foot ‘gater in the backseat of my car.”
Dead? we asked.
“Nah, alive. We managed to hook him.”
We’d left the cameras in the car, but this was too good to pass up. “Can we take a picture?!” we begged, practically salivating.
He agreed and we scrambled back to get our cameras. After we snapped several shots of the bear (poor bear) he took us back to the squad car to proudly display his prize. Unbelievable. Only in Louisiana…
Serious gore cropped out to protect your delicate sensibilities...
I wonder if he was read his rights...
After shaking hands with the officers, we got back on the road, but decided to see if we could track down the folks in the SUV. A little deductive reasoning led us straight to a little diner at the next exit where, sure enough, there was a gray SUV that looked like it had hit something big. Like a bear. We found one of the owners, and after making sure she was okay, got permission to take pictures of the car.
We decided to stop for dinner, and ended up visiting with the couple who hit the bear (they were able to satisfy my curiosity as to the bear’s speed – he was, indeed, “booking” it) and a family from the area. After showing the couple pictures of the bear (and the alligator) we began discussing the logistics of hitting a *bear* with your vehicle, and it suddenly became very clear to me why it was okay that I had been handily exceeding the speed limit. The woman was still shaken, but thankful they had been in such a big vehicle. “If we’d been in my car,” she said, trembling, “we’d be dead.”
She was right – that bear was big enough that it would have crushed a car on impact. It was then that I realized that if I had been driving the speed limit we would have gotten to the bear about the point when it started to cross the road and *we* would have been dead. I’ll try not to justify speeding, but for once, just this once, it possibly saved my life.
After the initial shock and excitement about the bear began to wear off, conversation turned to more mundane topics. We’d found out early on in the proceedings that this couple was on their way to Denver from Alabama, so we asked what took them to Denver. Family?
Business, actually.
It turns out that they were headed to Denver to open a bottling plant for their beverage business. What do they bottle, you might ask? Medical marijuana is the surprising answer.
Yep. Two hippies ran over a bear.
File this day under “You can’t make this shit up.”
