Wild
Here it was. The big, brown, Grizzly bear. A window was separating us, I was seating in a bus, stopped on the side of the road. There was a short moment of quiet before everybody else also noticed the bear and jumped off their seats, pushing each other, yelling, elbowing me, and smooshing my face into the window to get closer to snap a picture ... or ten. I made myself smaller in the chair and cautiously moved my head left and right from the people to the bear, and back. Inside, in the cage, it was chaos. Outside, in the wild, the bear could not care less about all the fuss. The bear (If this were a movie, this is where the camera would zoom out; the inside noise would be replaced by the quiet of wilderness, and the bus would become a small green dot on a big green map, then disappear.) The bus My day had started several hours before that moment, around 4 am in the parking lot of the Hilton in Anchorage, Alaska. Powered by caffeine and anticipation, I then drove for several ho
