The Dancing Bear

Can I take a moment to say that I love being the kind of person to whom other people send pictures of random snakes* and birds and whatever else that they’ve seen? Here’s a robin eating a worm, let’s send this to Hannah. Here’s a headless cicada, I bet Hannah would love to see this right around dinner time.

Source: Snek submitted by Jennifer M.

This brings me so much joy. Please, please keep sending these at all hours of the day, I love them all. You can send any bit of nature you see and enjoy to info@wanderfinder.com or tweet them @wanderfinder.

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*One absolutely idiotic debate going on right now in the herpetology twittosphere is whether or not it’s OK to call snakes by the pet names that have developed over social media for them: snek, long boi, danger noodle (for the poisonous ones), etc. Also, whether it’s OK to express a desire to “boop” a snek on its cute little “snoot” (or nose).

Needless to say, I am Team Snek forever. l mean, you can call snakes whatever you want, but trying to reduce *other people’s* joy in nature is the very definition of a spoilsport. I’m also guessing a rise in women herpers led to a rise in language emphasizing the adorability and approachability of sneks, which led to more women herpers, etc. A refusal to let language change with the changing population of herpers is probably way more about wanting to keep herpers the same rather than wanting to keep the word for snakes the same. The snakes themselves, after all, seem indifferent.

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I’m also full of joy about my nephew, who applied at the last minute and got accepted into the Joffrey summer ballet program in New York. This has led my family into a kind of gleeful chatter of texts. Not a family to keep a group chat going in general, this feels like a rehearsal for if one of us dies, except so much better.

All the travel reservations have to get made, canceled, then reserved all over again; outfits must be purchased; emotions must run high; but in the end, there’s a life taking off, coming into flight, rather than one sinking or coming to an end.

We use “dancing” as a metaphor for nature fairly often, but I’m not sure we think through what dancing means, the physicality of it, its intent. We say things like “the branches were dancing in the wind,” or “the sunlight danced on the surface of the water” as if dancing were some passive activity, as if dancing were something that lands upon you.

I am lucky enough to have been close to dancers, once — close enough that I have heard their bodies land and their skin sweat audibly and I know it’s the least passive activity on earth.

What brought the whole thing about was a storm.

The storm passed from south Louisiana to north, where I was living at the time: Natchitoches. It brought down branches, and birds, and also the plane of Alvin Ailey’s traveling dance troupe.

I wonder, now, what it was like for the dancers in an all-Black modern dance company, suddenly stranded in this red-clay place for two nights, on their way out to California, if I remember correctly.

Maybe some of them were from places like Natchitoches. Maybe it brought back good memories, being served sweet tea again, or bad memories, staying in this town, segregated as it was by a railway track.

The whole town smells like fake fried chicken when the cardboard factory really starts chugging. I wonder if they were there to smell it. It’s not a bad smell, necessarily, just odd.

What they decided to do with this literal down time — this flightless time — was to dance. It’s probably what all of them had been doing all their lives: to dance out their frustrations, to physically express the inexpressible.

I have since seen the troop perform in large city concert halls, and they’re wonderful and justifiably famous but I’m ruined of course. Imagine me, a young teenager, huddled into a small auditorium with my arty friends, and we’re audibly gasping, almost shouting, it’s the mid-90’s, there’s no internet, not really, and we’ve never seen anything like this, and these people can *fly.* They have a different relationship to gravity from anybody we’ve ever seen. And then they dance “Revelations.”

Revelations is possibly Alvin Ailey’s most famous work. The music draws from the long tradition of Black spirituals and gospels. The lifts are transcendent, enormous, women are floating in the air in front of us. 

You have to understand, most of my classmates came from very Christian households. The school I attended was a public boarding school and it was (and probably is) more racially diverse than most in Louisiana, but almost everyone was raised as some denomination of Christian. And like all teenagers, my classmates might have started to think about that, to question it, possibly even to buck it. And here these dancers came, crashing out of the sky from New York City, dancing something so recognizable to us and so foreign all at once, with so much respect for where they came from and also so much forward-facing newness, we about lost our damn minds.

We invited the Alvin Ailey dancers to our high school dance after the concert. They actually showed up.

We used to hold a lot of dances, there not being much else to do in Natchitoches, and we kept the blue mats hanging on the white gym walls, mostly to lean against awkwardly. But when the Alvin Ailey dancers arrived, we learned what they were really for: to run towards, to flip against, to lose your fear of gravity. To feel your physicality and express what cannot be expressed any other way.

When we danced with the Alvin Ailey dance troupe, we danced ourselves free of shame or embarrassment or all gravity’s weight.

This past week, a bear was found, four stories high, in a heronry. Ken MacDonald, the man who posted the sighting to the Midland-Penetanguishene Field Naturalists page on Facebook, joked, “How do I report this on Ebird?” 

Source: Ken MacDonald on the Midland-Penetanguishene Field Naturalists page on Facebook.

When I think of dancing in nature, I won’t think of grasses waving or sunlight glistening; I’ll think of this bear, heaving himself up, one branch further than he thinks he can, than another, panting maybe, the confusion of the herons, the soft brush of feathers and possibly a parental beak, some sharp moments, a little fright.

I’ll think of that that can only be expressed through flesh, through lift, through flight.