It's the bear that will bring us together ...

There is no question that the most dangerous thing we all do regularly in our lives is - crossing the street (and apparently wearing an iPod makes it all the more dangerous). But, of course, as it is such a common experience - and we often don't have a choice as to whether we want to cross the street or not - we don't think about it. There is a street in Berlin called Gneisenaustrasse, that I had to cross every day for six years in order to get home. I often wondered how much time I spent waiting to cross that darned road. I even contemplated whether recording me waiting to cross that street every day may make for an interesting conceptual 'art' piece (which one would have to entitle "Reflections on Modern Life IV", or something similarly preposterous - and fun ...?). But never ever did I calculate how likely I was to get killed on that road - even though I often, I confess, ignored the traffic lights ...
My point is, and I know you are wondering by now ... that for some primordial reason - it's very different with bears! You are about as unlikely to be eaten by one as you are to win the lottery, but you wouldn't get that impression from talking to hikers or reading the papers in Canada in the last few days. When we were there, you were only allowed to walk in groups of four (or more) around Moraine Lake (a famous tourist spot) due to bear sightings. And, truth be told, I also was mightily nervous when two grizzlies were spotted by fellow hikers near the Egypt Lake campground (where the last hiking trip of our holiday took my partner and me for two nights). I was even more concerned when I realized, that the evidence of someone digging in the grass, that we had seen, were in fact signs of bears going about their business (see picture above). But fear, like adversity, unites people. And so, with due apologies to The Smiths, "if it's not love, it is the bear, it is the bear that will bring us together" ... The fear of bears certainly did unite an unilkely group of us when the time came to leave Egypt Lake and hike back down to the road. I love cities because they are places where contrasts, inevitably, meet. The fear of bears managed something similar in the unlikely location of the Canadian Rockies. Last Friday, Kathrin and I hiked for 5 hours with a two American doctors from LA and a construction worker and his partner from Edmonton. It was fun - and fascinating. We enjoyed listening to our North American 'fellow bear cowards' comparing their medical systems; we heard about chance encounters with celebrities (as one of the doctors lived in Holywood); we found out that, due to the oil induced housing boom, construction never stops in Edmonton these days (unless temperatures fall below minus 25 degrees and there is not heat source on the construction site, apparently). All interesting stuff - and not stuff that I would have predicted I would learn while seeing beautiful alpine meadows in bloom on Healy Pass.
I want to thank our fellow hikers for a great time had, and Canada's mighty grizzlies for making this encounter possible. I will pay my respects soon - at a safe distance in the Berlin Zoo. Bears behind bars are not scary. - that's what I learned from my nephews (7 and 5) yesterday. They, unlike me, had seen real bears - right here in Germany - and they had clearly not been afraid at all ...
P.S. The picture below shows us happy hikers (except me) some 500 meters from the Sunshine parking lot. As you can see, we believed in safety and survival by that point!