Meandering Through Bear Country: A Review of Katherine Ayres’s Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by R. A. Voss

Cover credit: Autumn House Press

Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by Katherine Ayres

Autumn House Press (2013)

Reviewed by R. A. Voss

Katherine Ayres was already enamored by the legendary world of bears when an encounter with one—coupled with intellectual curiosity—turned an attraction into an obsessive crush. The result is Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae, a collection of essays that come from her heart and conscience regarding the myriad ways mankind and bear-kind have intersected across time. Intriguing epigraphs preface fascinating explorations of the bear-mystique throughout world history.

In the opening piece, “Protection,” the author notes how the series derived from a visit by a black bear outside her residence in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. When she sees the bear roaming her property, she initially registers it as trespassing. On further contemplation, she recognizes the behavior as territory-marking, which signals the bear declaring ownership and leads Ayres to speculate whether the visitor has caught her scent and “wonders who and why.” Alone in her new home, as the bear claims the yard, Ayres marks the house. Poetically, she shares how she rolls her “loneliness from paint cans onto drab walls, making them glow—lemon sorbet, rose parade.”

As she meanders deeper into the bear’s sphere, she probes the incongruity of laws established to shield bears against human predation, observing that:

“We humans protect these large, magnificent giants of the forest so we’ll have more of them to hunt and kill” (5).

Such topical revelations ponder the intricacies of how to determine the bear population a territory can support while considering farmers, residents, hunters, and wildlife management agencies. A gruesome example of how parties clash over these issues occurred on December 9, 2013, when an 18-year-old Pennsylvanian-woman was mauled by a mother bear during a deer-hunting expedition. While recovering from her wounds in the hospital, the traumatized woman received a letter from a representative of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The official suggested that the woman discontinue hunting and consider the terror that animals experience at the hands of hunters. The incident underscores the relevance of Ayres’s book in the ongoing conversation.

As the essays unfold, Ayres delves into the disjunction between people’s admiration for bears and cruelty against them—amidst images of cuddly bears and the fierce reality of mammals in their normal environment. This separation is brilliantly illuminated by her recounting of how Teddy Bears were created after a political cartoon satirized an event that was by turns terrible and noble. She writes:

“President Theodore Roosevelt had been on a hunting expedition, but had not shot a bear. Companions on the trip chased a bear, hounded it, exhausted it and tied it to a tree. When they showed it to Roosevelt, he refused to shoot such a beleaguered creature” (28).

The story inspired a toy manufacturer to produce Teddy Bears to commemorate Roosevelt’s presidential pardoning of the badgered beast. Its inclusion reveals Ayres’s ability to parallel external events with internal scrutiny of the concerns that plague these iconic animals. Covering subjects as diverse as dancing bears, endangered species, bear stock markets, and Russian political bears, she seeks answers to the central question: How can people and bears coexist harmoniously? Ayres’s appreciation for the natural world inspires every page as she examines the ecological, global, and personal—searching for the bear’s-eye view without slipping into anthropomorphism.

In “The Wise Man,” Ayres discusses the merits of labeling while pointing to the dangers of stereotyping and value judgments. Even the scientific nomenclature for bears—Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Carnivora, Ursidae, Ursus, and Ursus americanus—becomes something thoughtful and accessible through Ayres’s uplifting prose:

“I realize that I’m drawn to these names—to their scientific accuracy and their musicality. Writers are lovers of words after all—connoisseurs of sound and meaning transcribed into symbol” (24).

In some essays, a light-hearted approach balances the serious tone imparted by others, like in “Bear Etiquette” when she compares the “bare etiquette” practiced by nudists—“One doesn’t stare. One doesn’t walk too close or… touch by accident.”—to the appropriate “protocol when a bear has come into sight.” 

“Fake Fur” reviews the species of bears that currently prowl the planet. From the common brown bear to the South American mountains’ little known speckled bears, which are the only bears to roam the southern hemisphere, she informs readers about survival risk factors like habitat loss from shrinking forests and climate change, noting that though black bear numbers are increasing:

“The Sun bears, Sloth bears, Spectacled bears and Asian blacks…, also face human poaching and predation for food, folk medicine, and sport hunting, as well as capture to secure animals for performing, fighting and even as pets.  As a species, we humans have a very mixed record of living respectfully with our Ursidae neighbors” (40).

The woe worsens in “Unbearable,” which provokes stomach-turning outrage and a wilderness of misery due to images of bears suffering immense cruelty that linger after one finishes the read: bear baiting, Russian bears playing hockey in ice skates, and circus bears performing unnatural acts. And “In Sickness and in Health” awakens readers to the procedure of bear milking—bile extraction for homeopathic medicinal treatments. Ayres explains:

“Somewhere between eight and ten thousand live bears are currently being farmed in Asia for the production of bile. These bears are obtained as cubs, then caged in enclosures so small that an adult bear cannot fully stand or extend its body. The caged bears have injuries to their heads and faces, and broken teeth from trying to bite through the bars to escape” (154-155).

This deplorable practice continues despite the fact that the efficacy of using bile for the treatment of such ailments as hemorrhoids, fevers and alcohol over-indulgence has never been substantiated.

Throughout this all-encompassing survey of bears, Ayres’s respect and affection for them is evident. Facts are plentiful—deftly interspersed with answers dispensed at the exact instant questions arise in readers’ minds. By journey’s end, having used research, folklore and anecdotes the author accomplishes her task of raising awareness while creating an entertaining, absorbing, and well-formed portrait of these impressive creatures.

Seeking Fellow Travelers: A Review of R. A. Voss's We Never Travel Alone by Brigette Bernagozzi

cover credit: CreateSpace Publishing

We Never Travel Alone by R. A. Voss
CreateSpace Publishing (2013)

Reviewed by Brigette Bernagozzi

R. A. Voss’s essay collection, We Never Travel Alone, has been accurately billed as an all-in-one book that nonfiction readers with tight schedules and chaotic lives always seek. And, indeed, it is a mixture of “Travel/Nature/Memoir/History,” as the book’s back cover proclaims.

The introduction is less elegant than the rest; its earnest hopes for the reader to learn something from its pages gives an appearance of a thesis proposal. However, each chapter is well-crafted and inviting. Some are suspenseful, like “Buttermilk Road” with its opening confession: “Something happened that day … Something I never told anyone.” A few offer humor, including the tongue-in-cheek opening to an insomnia chapter: “Will I get lucky tonight?”

At the heart of each chapter, Voss invites readers to travel the world with her as she charts geographical locations such as the Anne of Green Gables historic site on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, her ancestors’ hometown in northern Germany, and her brother’s archaeological dig site in Israel. And that’s before factoring in the Iowa landscape where she was raised. But not all of Voss’s travels feature traditional globetrotting. Her chapter “My Solitary Journey to the Deep” leads readers into the realms of deep sleep. Or, more accurately, into the no man’s land that lies on the other side of a good night’s slumber—one disrupted by blaring alarm clocks, a snoring husband, and the near-constant urge to pee. And in “Bragging Rights,” Voss shows both literal and metaphorical journeys when strains of discord emerge during a boat trip with her then-husband.

Voss raises the stakes in her devastating chapter “Disruptions.” Here, during a visit to observe nesting birds, she refers frequently to the work of Rachel Carson, famed author of Silent Spring—the book that first revealed to the masses potential complications linked with the widespread use of the insecticide DDT. Carson’s work crops up during Voss’s discussion of “environmental endocrine disrupter chemicals” and the devastation they once caused the mating rituals of bald eagles. Readers witness these difficulties in the natural world through the eyes of a woman who hopes to experience motherhood but whose natural cycles, much like those of the eagles she seeks to protect, have been thwarted. In an example of the author’s seamless transition between the personal and the global, she confides:

“I have missed feeling their first kicks inside my womb. I have missed feeling their soft warmth nestled against my chest. I have missed their sticky faces and their muddy little hands. I have missed my unborn children each time a child of one of my friends, born near the time one of mine would have been born, passes through any of the milestones that mark a child’s journey through life” (127).

Naturally, the memoir label applies to this book due to reflective passages like this one, as well as several chapters regarding the author’s childhood in Iowa. In “The Road to Recovery,” a chapter that braids her grandparents’ lives with the economics of the Great Depression, she offers this commentary on present-day Iowa:

“One can take a drive through the countryside in any county in Iowa and find the landscape still dotted with now-defunct windmills standing like sentries over the land” (59).

Here, as in many other places in We Never Travel Alone, Voss’s practiced eye and straightforward yet imaginative prose allow readers to find beauty in a seemingly wasted landscape.

All in all, Voss’s collection of dazzling journeys is impressive in its scope. Although constantly surrounded by appealing locals and fellow travelers, she manages to craft a series of thoughtful meditations on a diverse array of places. Whether ruminating on a surprising act of violence in a Buddhist monastery or exploring notions of motherhood during a road trip to visit nesting eagles, Voss proves a thoughtful tour guide and, most importantly, a worthy companion for any armchair traveler.