Of bears and impulsive men

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union
…
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley

— Robert Burns, To a Mouse, 1785

As a child, I must have internalized the line “the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry” from the modern English translation of Burns’ Scottish poem. I grew up as a terrible planner, and married someone equally terrible at it. Thus we spent a mid-November Tuesday morning debating between four options for a vacation starting, well, that Tuesday. For each option, we had a Claude-generated itinerary that was vetted by two other LLMs. We were either going to stay at home and take long naps, or go on a vibe-vacation.

Sleep was forsaken and we decided to travel to Tennessee to visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 489 miles. 8 hours by car. All we knew about our destination was that the area was popular for black bear sightings. Two hours later, my wife had booked an Airbnb cabin; I had printed out a Great Smoky Mountains National Park Parking Tag; my almost-five-year-old son, forcibly woken up, had packed three each of half-sleeve shirts, full-sleeve shirts, pajamas, sweaters, pairs of socks, and underwear; and we had stuffed an instant pot, raw rice and raw lentils into the car. Four hours later, as I grabbed a handful of potato chips, dropping a few crumbs into my seat while looking at pictures of the cabin for the first time, I remarked that the plain wooden structure at the edge of a hill reminded me of the portacabin that was my workplace in Qatar. Five hours later, as I was navigating steeply ascending and descending hairpin bends in Gatlinburg, I felt that we would regret our lack of preparation.

Thy wee bit housie

The cabin looked exactly as I had feared from outside. But the inside was well-furnished and spacious. Even in the darkness, it was clear that we would wake up to some memorable views. And on Wednesday, we did. When you stare at the mountains, you immerse yourself only in the present, much like the mouse in Burns’ poem. But we had to pull ourselves together and look to the future. A sunny day, a filling breakfast, a short hike, and a scenic drive awaited us.

As I stepped out to pack the car’s boot, I noticed shards of glass strewn around the car. Had I just overlooked them when I parked last night after sunset? I glanced up, and it took me a moment to process what I was seeing. The passenger side rear window had vanished. There was a muddy print on the door, scratches on the door handle, and shattered glass outside the car. The inside was worse, with the child seat and the floor filled with glass pieces. I looked around to see if there was a possibility that some object had fallen on the car. I considered that someone had tried to break in. But my gut knew what had caused it. A black bear.

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

We reacted with inaction stemming from ignorance. But we had to do something, at least to pacify my scared son. Our Airbnb host had no useful advice to offer. Eventually, I decided to call the police non-emergency line, and a deputy sheriff stopped by to file a report. He was definitely not planning to track the bear and arrest it, but like characters in a Kafka novel, we needed a paper trail for filing insurance claims. At a nearby family-owned collision repair shop, the owner evaluated the car dispassionately. A shop worker thoroughly vacuumed out minute pieces of glass intermingled with food crumbs, and wiped the car clean. As he did this, we realized that we had both lived in Massachusetts once.

“I am from the Berkshire hills,” he said.
“Oh, I have driven through those parts.”
“Sure. You look like a city boy. You are a city boy.”

The owner informed me that the replacement glass would cost double the amount if he had to fix it in the next two days, and dissuaded me from spending extra money. He suggested a plastic tarp that would do until I was back home, and fixed the tarp. For all their effort, they refused to take any money from me. Bears and generosity. We were experiencing the South at its fullest.

Its feeble walls the winds are scattering

That night, my son got sick. It might have been fear, but it was probably the flu season. He still endured as we drove through Cades Cove and Roaring Fork and walked around Gatlinburg and Anakeesta. On Friday, our last day in the Smokies, winter had finally arrived with near-freezing temperatures. As we drove back home, the plastic tarp was surprisingly effective at trapping the heat inside the car. But the noise from the turbulent wind couldn’t be contained, reminding us that we are sometimes the man, but often the mouse.