Bear etiquette

I was biking on "Old K" when a mother bear and three (yes, three!) cubs lumbered out onto the road in front of me and just sat there! At one in the afternoon! I went a good ways in the other direction...and tried to get my fingers steady enough to work the cell phone camera's buttons, to no avail. I was a bit shaky. The mother bear and three just sat there for a bit. My bike derailleur and shifters are thirty years old. If the bear decided to go after me, I had enough space that I could have outpedalled it, IF everything worked right. But they soon moved in into the woods, the cubs first. I sat a while, wondering what the official polite time was to wait for the bears to disappear. Was there some sort of human-bear contract about this? It was the kind of etiquette question I really wanted to get right. Or should I just go back and take the long way, on Highway K? I was about to go forward again when another cub, this one scrawny and bedraggled, crossed the road. Geez, this was Day Care for Bears! Sorry, no pictures.

Fireworks are for the fourth, and the fourth is over, cont...

People launch fireworks in the northwoods for one of two reasons:

1) they think the northwoods is a wilderness: they can do what they want because no one else is around. The truth is,it isn't a wilderness, its a neighborhood, there are lots of folks around who come to the northwoods for quiet recreation. It is what the northwoods has to offer, that no other place has. If a person launch fireworks here as opposed to wherever they are from, its because they think it doesn't matter to most people who vacation or live here. But it does.

2) Some people know, but really just don't care, that other people are around who want to enjoy the northwoods in peace. Like people with loud mufflers, part of the enjoyment is screwing with someone else's private space. As we rank what values we should try to have in the northwoods, violation as a form of pleasure shouldn't rank very high.

Stop using fireworks in the northwoods.

Fireworks are for the Fourth, and the fourth is over.

Time to let the Northwoods do what the Northwoods does best. Loons, wood thrush, owls, peepers, coyotes-Lots of critters sound great all by themselves!