BOOKS // BEARS, THREE WAYS
Our Ursidae, Ourselves
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
In a vintage postcard from the ’60s, little girls in flouncy dresses peer into the pint-sized home of the Three Little Bears, among other attractions of the since-shuttered Fairyland Forest on Pennsylvania’s Conneaut Lake Park, which sits about 90 miles north of Pittsburgh, not far from the shores of Lake Erie. Another vintage postcard’s cheery description of the place offers this delight: “Feeding the bears … A popular pastime for children and adults, Catchum and Tuffy are very amusing and they have enormous appetites, too.”
Real black bears, Ursus americanus, would clamber to the top of two tall poles equipped with circular platforms, where they would retrieve cans of food relayed by parkgoers via pulley. Yet another postcard, of the now-dilapidated Hotel Conneaut, has a handwritten note on the back that reads, “We’re spending the evening here and enjoying ourselves — Isadore.” Isadore’s whereabouts are unknown, but at last count, the PA Game Commission tells us we have about 18,000 neighbors in the woods. As the average lifespan of a black bear is ten years, we can only assume that Catchum and Tuffy are long gone.
Gloria Dickie’s new book, Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, is a must-read for anyone interested in how our lives and rituals have been intertwined with bears.
Before she starts her journey across the world to detail the eight remaining bear species, Dickie relates some of the history, myth, and lore that entangle us with our fellow travelers, who occasionally walk upright. “When skinned, a bear’s pale gleaming carcass exhibits a disturbing resemblance to the human body,” she writes, later observing, “The belief that humans and bears were of close relation, underlined by the writings of Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, persisted until the Middle Ages.”
But we’ve not always been kind to them, from the gladiatorial combat of the Roman Colosseum to the dancing bears of the Romani “Ursari,” who busked with them throughout Europe until the practice was outlawed in 2007. A hideous little Goldilocks lives in all of us, it seems. //
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