When things gets unbearable

The Lake Tahoe area is one of the prettiest places I've ever been. The mountains. The pine-covered hills. The too-cold-to-swim-in water. The clear, sharr air (when there aren't wildfires and/or insane traffic in the vicinity...). It's just lovely. 

West Virginia was "almost heaven" to John Denver. To the great naturalist John Muir, Tahoe was "a kind of heaven." It's also been overrun by tech bros who took up permanent residency during the pandemic, and tourists, who flock there for the breathtaking beauty of the area: the mountains, the pine-covered hills, the too-cold-to-swim-in, etc., and who are widely considered "tourons" (a portmanteau of tourist and moron). Of course, where there are humans, there is food. Which happens to be something that black bears really like. (And, of course, when there is human encroachment on the wilderness, the wild things need to go somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be what humans have turned into human habitation.)

The Tahoe basin is also home to one of the continent’s densest populations of black bears, Ursus americanus. The species flourished after its chief predator, the grizzly, was extirpated there, in the early twentieth century. Grizzlies are not to be fucked with. Black bears, which can be brown, reddish, or blond, are defensive and lazy, smart and resilient, ravenous and opportunistic. All they really want to do is eat. They lived mostly on grasses, berries, and insects until humans showed up. Why spend all day dismantling a yellow-jacket nest for the paltry reward of larvae when there’s dumpster pizza to be had?

Even if something is not edible, bears will try to eat it—scented air fresheners, cherry lip balm. The black bear is the terrestrial equivalent of a shark, the sharpest nose in the ocean; its sense of smell is seven times better than a bloodhound’s, several thousand times better than a human’s. A bear that detects so much as a Tic Tac will remember the location of that score forever—and teach it to her cubs.(Source: The New Yorker)

Fifty-plus years later, I still recall all the notices posted in the National Parks warning campers against sleeping in the clothing they cooked in, leaving any food out, and covering their hands with fragrant lotion before they popped in to their sleeping bags for the night. On one memorable night during our cross-country camping trip, my friend Joyce and I were in our sleeping bags, in our tent, in Shenandoah National Park. We had gone through our checklist: we weren't wearing our cooking clothes, food was safety stored, no handcream on. (A ranger had come by our campsite to warn us of bears in the area.) Before we drifted off, we heard a loud sniffing noise around our tent. We reached across the space between our sleeping bags and clutched each other's hands, not daring to make a sound, barely breathing. The headlines about two young girls eaten by bears flashed into both of our minds. Then, by the light of the silvery moon, we saw that the aggressive tent sniffer was a skunk. Not that getting sprayed - which didn't happen - would have been so great, but it was better than being clawed.

In Tahoe, the black bears have been marauding around, coming into town, raiding dumpsters, stealing food from picnickers on the beach, and breaking into homes to raid the fridge with an appetite and ferocity far worse than that of the growingest teenage boy. Bears have been known to grab groceries out of grocery bags while folks are unloading their trunks. When they find their way into empty houses, bears knocking about have been known to turn on burners and faucets. And, in case you're wondering, bears not only shit in the woods. They'll shit in your house if they're on a forage.

In this environment, it's no wonder that a robust bear-protection industry has sprung up around Tahoe. 

Ryan Welch is an electrical contractor who used to fix hot tubs. Then he started noticing a lot of bear break-ins. And a lot of "home remedies" that were failing to keep the bears out. So he invented something called a bear mat, a.k.a., an unwelcome mat, a device that gives a bear enough of a jolt to have them stay away from your doors and windows. Bear mats cost a few hundred bucks, and Welch has sold about 5,000 of them. The company he founded, Bear Busters, also sells electric fences and inpenetrable "bear boxes" for storing your trash. And if you've suffered damage from an ursine B&E, they'll fix your place up. 

Kathi Zollinger is a volunteer with the Bear League, a pro-bear non-profit that focuses on keeping bears safe (and wild) and does a lot of education of the public. 

“I heard someone say, ‘We shouldn’t have to turn our houses into fortresses because of bears.’ To me, yeah—if you want to live in Lake Tahoe, you need to secure the home so that bears don’t come in. That’s the responsible thing to do. We live in the forest! People call and say, ‘I’ve lived here thirty, forty, fifty years and I’ve never had a problem with bears.’ I’m, like, Well, now we have fires, and they have no habitat anymore, and we continue to develop.”

And so it goes...

If you're Bear Busters, the unbearable is plenty good for business. 

Something strange in the neighborhood? Who you gonna call? Bear Busters!