Honeymoon Road Trip Part 10: Case of the Rogue Poo

Dad didn't believe in hotels when I was growing up. Vacation = camping. The more remote the campsite, the better the vacation (according to Dad). His favorite fishing spot in Alaska rested along a remote stretch of the Gulkana River. It was 6 hours by highway, a right turn in the middle of nowhere, then twenty minutes in the lottery-ball machine as we churned our way through a tire-gouged, muddy path laughingly referred to as a road. The campsite stood near a bluff that looked down upon a horseshoe-shaped section of the river. There was no electricity, no running water (except for the river) and the rickety shacks that straddled holes (a.k.a. outhouses) were a five minute excursion to the fringe of the Wilds. Each time I left the camp to go pee, my dad would tell me no make a lot of noise and keep an eye out for bears. I became the swiftest, most-efficient whizzer in History.

So, it's obvious that I wasn't some goofball, city slicker trying to play outdoorsman for a few days. I have camped my entire, developing life. I pitched tents, fished and filleted them for dinner, foraged for wood and wiped my ass with leaves when toilet paper was unavailable. I earned my scout badges by sleeping under hand-fashioned lean-tos and lighting fires with sticks or scavenged flint stones. When Kat and I stared down upon the heaping pile of shit in our newly-claimed campsite in the distant corner of Yellowstone National Park, I was at a loss as to the owner of said defecation. Admittedly, the first, panicked thought that rifled through my citified brain was, 'Oh, shit! Did I just pitch a tent three feet from bear shit?!'

Not to point any fingers on the paranoia and fear that colored our first night in the park, but it is true that there was a culture of bear-phobia in our midst. For the last couple days, Kat had been grilling me for the Proper Procedure for surviving an encounter with a bear. The Black Hills had posted warnings about leaving food or unwashed dishes in the campsite. In our hotel room back in Cody (the night before our arrival in Yellowstone), I watched Michael Keaton tell David Letterman of his terrifying encounter with a grizzly bear in the backcountry of Yellowstone. Soon, I found myself glancing into the woods for signs of menacing, furry objects.

"Why don't you ask your parents," Kat asked. My dad had hunted bears in Alaska. He would have puddle-jumper planes drop him off in remote corners of the state and live off the land for two-week excursions. Let's not forget that my parents were savvy enough to prevent their two sons from being eaten in all those years of rustic camping. Why not?

Kat handed me the cell phone and I then proceeded to make one of the strangest calls in my adult life. Never had I felt like more of a lost Urbanite as that moment when I stood at our remote campsite in the middle of a beautiful, mountain valley and asked my mom what bear poop looked like.

"Well," she drawled in an effort to buy time, " I don't remember. It looked like bear poop, you know?"

I wasn't sure whether I was expected to answer this rhetorical questioned so I offered a, "Uh huh?"

"James," my mother cried, half into her bedroom and half into my ear. A long, weighty pause ensued, followed by the distant mumble of my father's acknowledgment. "John wants to know what bear poop looks like!"

The pause gave me time to watch Kat as she poked around the campsite and peered into the woods in search of the guilty party. I looked back at the poo. To an outsider, I no doubt looked like I was in the midst of reporting the defecation to the local police.

"I don't know," came my father's voice over the line. "Are there blueberries in it?"

"Are there blueberries in it," parroted my mother into the phone.

"I don't see any."

"Well. I don't know," she sighed, "Most of the bear droppings we saw were in Alaska and they had blueberries. If you see blueberries in it, you'll know that's bear poop."

"I don't see any blueberries, mom." Kat's eyebrow furrowed at my comment.

"So," my mom chirped over the phone, " how's the honeymoon going?"

I briefly entertained the notion of photo-documenting the poop, then showing it to a park ranger, but then I thought better of it. I felt that my coolness cover was already blown. No sense in provoking further ridicule. Kat and I noted the poo characteristics for future reference, then I opened up the camping shovel and chucked the evidence into the woods.

An hour later, we stood together in the Yellowstone Visitors Center, scanning the bookstore section for scatological reference books. We each found a book and, at virtually the same moment, came to a swift agreement on the perpetrator- bison. I'm not entirely sure why we felt so relieved that a half-ton animal with horns and an aggressive demeanor had shit in our campsite instead of a 400 lb. animal with teeth and claws. At least bison are herbivores.