The Firewood 001: Party Bear
It's not every day you learn about a bear who drags an entire case of White Claw into the woods and chugs it. It's also not every day that you get to contemplate why you have a Party Bear in your life
Hello, friends.
Thank you for being one of the first people to sign up to receive emails for this project. I don’t quite know where it will go, but I am glad to have you along for the ride.
I came up with the idea for this a while ago, and settled on the name “The Firewood” at some point that I can no longer recall, but what I was thinking about at the time was the fact that every creative flame needs a well-maintained, strategic foundation. (Funny coincidence: if you’re a Calm user, this morning’s Daily Calm used firewood as a metaphor for the exact opposite.)
Then it kind of wound into thinking about how while we tend to think of firewood in the context of campfires and s’mores and cozy cabins and other things that seem like back-to-nature tropes to our 21st-century selves, firewood was the original human technology, the first step in a cascade of innovation that subsequently separated us further and further from the rest of the natural world, wheels to metal to steam power to telegraphs to HotOrNot. (Suffice it to say that right now the human relationship to fire is a fraught and devastating one for many Americans, in large part because of our own poor decision-making over the course of decades and centuries, and I couldn’t not acknowledge that.)
But here I am, claiming to have some degree of insight into how to be a 21st-century human reestablishing a relationship to the wilderness. I hope I’m believable. I’ll get to Party Bear soon. I promise.
Okay, so. Party Bear.
The funny thing is that as I have been cobbling together the launch of this project called The Firewood, I have also been dealing with actual firewood. Photo evidence complete with extreme quarantine hair:
That’s because I have lately had the honor of staying at a friend’s woodland home in the Catskill Mountains a few hours north of NYC. And there is a wood-burning stove. And it’s epic. I have been making liberal use of it. Hence the firewood.
But there’s also Party Bear. Party Bear lives in the woods. I was warned about Party Bear, because a couple of weeks before I arrived, a full case of White Claw hard seltzer disappeared from the porch of the house. When my friend who owns the house posted a photo to Instagram of the cans strewn in the woods behind her house, each can punctured in the side in a manner that any one of us who was ever an American college student can describe as evidence of “shotgunning,” I assumed that some local kids had gotten their hands on them and decided to give Summer 2020 a sendoff to remember.
But, no, the culprit had been a bear, a single black bear who had gotten its paws on the Claws and proceeded to bite into every single can in the case and chug it, even the black cherry ones, and nobody likes black cherry White Claw. My friend said she saw the bear the morning after its alleged exploits, and it seemed fine and not hung over at all. (Rude.)
I have not yet had the privilege of meeting Party Bear. I suppose that if I really wanted to, I could leave some White Claw on the porch and see what happened. But that would not be a gesture in keeping with responsible environmental stewardship. Bears who increasingly encroach upon human civilization, all too frequently, end up getting killed for it. When authorities are trying to trap a bear who's been spending too much time close to where humans live, they frequently bait the trap with donuts, which bears seem to love even more than people do.
It’s an uncomfortable bit of irony: As much as some humans (myself included) try to reestablish our connections to the natural world, there are some non-human species that are more than happy to build a connection to ours. But for us, it’s ostensibly healthy; for them, it’s inevitably toxic. When we hear about human attempts at “rewilding” gone wrong (one famous instance in particular), it frequently takes a turn for the worse due to a lack of adaptation to the natural world, often peppered with a very Homo sapiens hubris about our ability to deal with any situation or bend nature to our will. When a bear or raccoon or other clever mammal encroaches into human territory with tragic ends, it’s often quite the opposite — they were a little too good at it.
What I’m getting to, I guess
One of the things I plan to touch upon a lot as I write here is the self-loathing that we humans can experience over our connection to nature, or even just our existence within human civilization, because sometimes these days it seems like so much we’ve built is straight-up wrecking us. Like digital media, for example. When social media platforms (ahem) try to convince us otherwise, they typically tell us feel-good stories of life-or-death situations (you know, “This woman found an organ donor on Twitter”) or earth-shaking changes to their personal lives (“Twins separated at birth meet again on Facebook” or whatever) and it’s like, okay, but the vast majority of us are just doomscrolling while our eyeballs slowly bleed out of our heads. Right?
I think sometimes we aren’t keeping track of what we can do with our lives because we’re now able to connect in these strange and unprecedented ways, that we couldn’t do before. I would not know about Party Bear, for example, if I hadn’t met my Catskills-dwelling friend at a women’s spirituality retreat that I had learned about from an e-mail newsletter, and we likely wouldn’t have hit it off there if we hadn’t realized we kind of already knew each other from the fabulous community of black cat owners on Instagram. I wouldn’t be spending much of this week driving down winding mountain roads and watching fall colors emerge in the closest thing nature has to a real-time refresh, or experiencing that curious blend of seasons when the chill in the air demands a fire in the wood stove but the open windows still welcome in an orchestra of summer’s katydids and crickets.
So this is my point: As much as my journey lately has been a commitment to rewilding, I’m not giving up on digital media and its ability to serve the greater good, even if the negativity bias of our brains (thanks to millions of years of evolution) is telling us everything’s awful. When stuff really sucks all around, sometimes we do have to dig deep. But I think getting a grip on what digital media has brought us that’s benefited us, and committing to preserve that, is our first step in using it more mindfully and working to improve its role in society. Not pretentious “digital detoxes” that are only available to the people privileged enough to disconnect. (My frustration with that “trend” is going to be a recurring theme here.) The idea that we have to accept there’s no turning back doesn’t (always) need to be a scary one.
Anyway, I hope you liked this rambling first edition of The Firewood. Please let me know what you thought and what you’d like to see here! Looking ahead, I’m excited for this weekend because I’m going to be actually cooking for other humans for the first time since COVID hit. I’m kind of a misanthrope, but while I hate cooking for myself, I love cooking for groups of other people in a social setting. (Somebody psychoanalyze that, I guess.) So maybe that’ll be what I write about next week. Or not.
Stay wild and don’t unsubscribe,
Caro
PS: For your thematic listening pleasure, Railroad Earth’s “Black Bear”
PPS: DID YOU GENUINELY LIKE THIS? I am committed to not auto-adding friends or colleagues or contacts to this mailing list or spamming the hell out of my existing social channels. So, if you’re willing to help me spread the word, I’d love it. HERE IS A BUTTON.
I love this phrase: “a commitment to rewilding” - I’ll be reading.