Wandering bear is welcome here

There is a black bear (more brown really) traveling near here and I want him to know that he is welcome to hang out in my woods, because out here the threat to his existence is small, no idiots with guns and no teenagers in cars. It’s really the best I can do. Every couple of years a bear or two comes trundling down from the north country somewhere, on their way to who knows where and I worry about them. Over the last century and a half we have taken over what was once natural habitat for them. Erstwhile woodlands and prairies are now concrete and manicured lawns and, alas, there is no going back.

Well, that’s not quite true. Some of us try. As of last week, I am officially a tree farmer and the federal government is going to send me a bit of cash (a few of your tax dollars) if I promise to maintain my woods and continue planting trees. Not sure what the feds call it, however, I call the program “rewilding,” a term that means letting nature take care of itself without us screwing it up. It’s all the rage in Europe and the United Kingdom.

I may not have black bears yet, but I do have mice. I rather like mice and believe that if they had fluffy tails we’d all love them. And because they’re wild animals they are not really subject to following rules, laws, or even suggestions. Thus it has been that I have been cleaning mouse nests out of the engine compartment of my tractor in the outbuilding about every third day, including one day when I also removed three squirming babies, babies that will likely be lined up on judgment day, pointing up to me and shouting, “He’s the one, God! He’s the one who caused us to die!” I felt horrible, and I still do.

On another note: some American slang came my way last week. You may already know it, but it was new to me. I was introduced to a man in a restaurant and was told he was a golf partner with a man named Ron, one I understood to be an excellent golfer. He was talking about recovering from some recent medical procedure or other and I said, “If you golfed with Ron you must have been pretty good.” He responded, “Yeah, I was, but now I’m on the ‘struggle bus.’” The struggle bus? What a brilliant combination of words. I’m gonna use them when needed.

A few days back I took a color photo of a view from my hammock. It’s a view to the north, up a lane from my house toward a gravel road that eventually leads to a two-lane highway, then to a four-lane, then to cities, airports, oceans, and the rest of the world. The lane reminds me that I am never truly isolated or alone and that there are people and places out there if I need them. It’s a gentle photo, a view past a line of maple trees, a walnut tree, and other trees unknown to me.

It’s not a heavily traveled lane, there mostly for me, and a bear if I’m lucky, wherein he can come down to the house, head into the woods, cavort in my pond away from sight, and grab all of the berries he can eat. Just leave a few wild raspberries for me to put on soft-serve vanilla ice cream later this summer and we’ll be fine. Sometimes the lane is used by others, coyotes, deer, wild turkeys, and sadly, on occasion, feral cats. And the old man you sometimes see, the one shuffling up his lane to a mailbox in search of the outside world? That would be me.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here