The number one threat

DID YOU KNOW? In Idaho, and possibly soon in California, all red lights will officially become stop signs if you're on a bicycle. Also, all yellow lights will become green lights and all stop signs will become yield signs. And at yield signs you'll just get to flip off Priuses.

So, you know, I do like Stephen Colbert and I do own this shirt, but I guess I never really believed that bears were actually the number one threat to America until I spent three days, three nights in a tent in Yosemite this week with Ruthie, worrying about whether we had stashed all our bear canisters far enough away from our campsite or remembered to lock our Purell inside of them or not. In case you're not aware, bears in national parks can smell anything that has a smell and they will come and try to eat it, and if they succeed they will just go crazy on whatever campsite you were at for a month until the park rangers eventually come and euthanize them. Bears.

The only thing you can do about it is rent some bear canisters--inch-thick plastic cylinders--from the park and stuff all your food in those. The bears can smell them, but they can't get inside them, so it'll basically be like me looking for lentils at Trader Joe's. They'll end up unsuccessful, just kind of mutter "aww, man" and go on their way. But seriously, leave out some toothpaste and, as far as my understanding goes, they could go on a rampage and kill you all.

It's serious. We had to down over a dozen off-brand fig bars in two minutes because the were among the last things we had to pack, the bear canisters were almost splitting open, and we deemed them to be more palatable to bears than dry elbow macaroni. I'm hoping that this is the last occasion in any of our lives when the dilemma of "eat fig bars or die" presents itself.

And after a horrible waking dream about our mostly-impenetrable tent being filled with ants and beetles at a particularly insect-filled campsite on Wednesday night (kind of my choice, mostly because I was tired of walking), I also have a deeper understanding of the following line from One Hundred Years of Solitude:

The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

Seriously, it was like biting ants and beetles from The Mummy. You would have been scared too.

But, yo. Yosemite. Indeed, I went to Yosemite this week, because apparently it doesn't even matter if I'm doing work anymore as long as I take vacations doing things that Professor Radke thinks are cool (having Sam's Mom help me move = bad; taking Sam's Mom to the Marin Headlands = good). We ended up hiking, oh, about 30 miles in three days and climbing over six or seven waterfalls and seeing seventy-two thousand mosquitoes and eating one-third of all the food we brought. Here are some representative pictures.










I know, you're jealous. Just remember: I could have died (had I not eaten four fig bars).