Most people who live with and around bears know that they have a huge affinity for garbage. Like, I always imagine them saying the word garbage with a posh French accent. Refuse to bears is like the finest Waygu beef steak dinner to us humans. The dig it quite literally and figuratively.
I remember one time when I lived on Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska that a cargo container of frozen food partially thawed and they threw the entire thing out at the dump. Townsfolk actually got into a feud with the bears over the contents of that container because only the top twelve inches had thawed, so most of the food was still beyond good. That Battle Of The Craig Dump passed into legend. And really, the bears would have wanted the frozen pizza slushy rather than the actualyl good pizza anyways. Someone should have assigned a mediator.
But I digress, when my family was in residence in the logging camp in the Alaskan Wilderness our lives had a bit different flavor than most people's existences. For instance, we had an incinerator a few miles from camp that our garbage was disposed in. Well, the incinerator also had a mascot. Hmm, maybe a bodyguard is a better descriptor.
Samson was the garbage dump bear's name, and he was a massive specimen of a black bear. He also had a nice ombre hair-do thanks to rooting around in the tasty food flavored ashes all of the time. Think fifty shades of grey with a hotdog smell. Yum.
Anyway, Samson was a pretty laid back guy. My crazy Uncle Buck loved to tap Samson on the head while was eating and snap Polaroid photos of him when he popped his giant bear noggin up in annoyance. Uncle Buck did a lot of things that could be considered crazy, I mean there was the The Green Flamer Bacon Grease Incident. Don't worry, I will tell that tale eventually.
Well, one fine day one of our neighbors burst into the house and said,
Yes, there was that little context, and honestly, we were so bored most of the time in camp that any sort of excitement in one's tone got us motivated and moving.
Before you could say Snoop Foggy Log we were crowded into our neighbor's trailer and watching a video that has truly stuck with me. One of the men that inhabited our camp was videotaping himself feeding Samson Chips Ahoy cookies. Samson looked super Disney movie cute as he nibbled on the bleached flour composition of American baked good delight. Well, the man didn't plan well enough or was caught up in the rapture of feeding garbage scented wildlife baked goods and ran out of chocolate chip cookies. He offered carrot sticks to the beast instead.
Samson didn't take kindly to this comestible slight.
With a sudden swiftness that I didn't know the big guy possessed, Samson left the camera's view and all of a sudden the pickup the camp guy was in started bouncing. What happened next reminded me a of scene from Cops, the camp guy bounced out of the truck and started hollering,
"NO! YOU CAN'T HAVE MY BOOT!"
Samson, deprived of non-wholesome, carb-laden goodness, had jumped into the back of the work truck and selected one of the man's brand new worknboots to claim as his own. He took off running with the boot in his maw as the man actually chased him while screaming at the massive bear to drop his boot.
By this point we were all rolling around on the floor laughing because the footage was just hilarious. Samson got his cookies and a brand new caulk boot too.
As the video footage involved feeding human food to wildlife, I am pretty sure that it never left camp or has been lost in the archives of time and in the to be hidden irresponsible human behavior memory hole. Truth be told, there were a lot of things that I witnessed or did during that time that definitely wouldn't fly in our world today, and my tenure in the logging camp really wasn't that long ago on the timeline.
I just know that I am going to make sure if I ever give an offering of baked goods to a garbage dump bear that it's going to be a Costco sized amount. I like my boots.
And as not most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken from Pixabay because I still don't really know where Mom has our Icy Bay pictures.
