The Shape of the Story

Night after night growing up, my siblings and I would beg my dad for his “Adventure Stories”—and night after night, he obliged. He always began the same way, and every story he told became a path. I’ve carried them with me all my life.

~

A long, long time ago…

Back in the days before “bear boxes,” smart backpackers hung their food between two trees. The measurements vary depending on the expert, but your food bag should be about fifteen feet off the ground and ten feet away from any tree or branch a bear could climb. During a backpacking trip through Yosemite with Dave, Rich, John, and me, our attempts at this simple method of protecting our food from bears, never looked anything like what the experts described. No matter how hard we tried, if our food bag was ten feet away from every tree, then it hung three feet off the ground. If we could raise it fifteen feet in the air, then it rested on the trunk of a tree. At least we never had a problem with bears…

“Help! Bear!”

And there was Rich, twenty feet up a tree, some distance from our campsite. He climbed the tree to secure some rope to hang our food bag, and the bear came up after him. Dave and John started yelling and whistling while banging pots together. I grabbed SOG—my trusty staff of adventure tales—and ran for the tree, yelling and waving SOG in the air. The bear thought this was a lot of fuss over a skinny hiker, and dropping to the ground, she sauntered off.

Rethinking our choice of trees, Rich climbed a tree next to our campsite and hung the food bag, ten feet in the air and right against the trunk. As night fell, we sat around our campfire and talked of the bear that almost ate our food. We fell silent, and I heard the snapping of a small twig, faintly audible above the crackling of the campfire…

“Help! Bear!”

And that bear was twenty feet up the tree; in our camp; right next to our food bag. We yelled; We banged pots and pans; I shook SOG in the air like Thor’s hammer, but the bear had returned hungry and wasn’t playing with us. With one swipe of her massive paw, she snapped the paracord holding our food bag like it a thread. As our food hit the ground, the bear followed it down the tree and began rummaging through what food we had left. We could do nothing about it, so we crawled into our sleeping bags, closed our eyes, and tried to forget about our new companion eating her—our—dinner.

Events quieted, and in the middle of the night, Dave could hold it no longer and went out to pee. As he unzipped his sleeping bag, he looked around and hesitantly thought, “I don’t remember that big boulder in the middle of our camp.” Then the “boulder” stood. The bear; she was in our camp! Dave forgot all about going to pee after that and climbed back into his sleeping bag.

We awoke with the sun and salvaged what we could find of our remaining food and packed up to start the day’s hike. As we returned to the trail, there, on a small rise, was the bear. She was lying on her back in the morning sun, scratching her full belly.

~

“That’s it?” I asked after he finished.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Then I need one, too—an Adventure Story of my own.”

“Easy.” He said. “You just need to start the same way.”

Then he began his next story, the same way he always did: “A long, long time ago…”