Bears and Other Challenges
When you live in Northeastern Pennsylvania, you must take part in the weekly bear vs. man trash challenge. People spend hours and hundreds of dollars trying to find ways to keep the bears out of their trash. It has been my experience (having a family of bears living in the Wetlands behind my cottage) that there is no such thing as a bear proof trash can. My favorite is when someone new to the area says “I heard that if you sprinkle cayenne pepper on your trash can, it keeps them out.” A bear will claw his way through a wooden and metal shed or a garage to get to a smelly garbage can, a little sprinkle of cayenne pepper just serves as a little extra flavor for his midnight snack.
The only way I have found to keep the bear from getting into my trash is the hope that my neighbor has better, more foul smelling garbage than me. I typically clean out my refrigerator every week and wait until the last moment to put it in the garbage so as to not attract the bear. The only downside to this strategy is that my garbage is picked up at 5:58 AM each week (which is ridiculous). So at 5:45 AM every Tuesday morning, I jump out of bed, empty my refrigerator, run it out to the garbage can, and am usually just walking away when the garbage truck comes rumbling down the street. One more week of outwitting the bears…
Yesterday, when talking to my mom (who lives across the street from me), she told me the bear got into their garbage. A friend of my parents had kindly sent them fresh lobsters earlier in the week which they cooked and happily ate. But my father, who is an experienced bear vs. trash warrior, made the rookie mistake of only triple bagging the lobster shells and putting them in the trash three days before garbage pick up. Silly man. So as my mom went out to her car yesterday, the garbage can was down and the bags were ripped apart with garbage strewn all over the driveway.
As many of you know, my mom has had some health challenges the last couple of years. While she is doing fantastic and is nearly fully independent, occasionally she runs into a challenge the would test the limits of her mobility. Getting down on the ground to pick up the strewn garbage was one of those challenges. But fortunately, my mom lives in an amazing community—Lake Nuangola—where neighbors look out for each other and help each other out. Just as she was trying to figure out how to clean up the bear’s mess, a neighbor down the road walked by with her dog. She saw my mom’s dilemma and quickly walked up to help. The neighbor then picked up every piece of trash the bear had scattered and put the can right again.
And that story right there is just one of the reasons I love Northeastern Pennsylvania, bears and all.
