Alright bitches. Listen up. Lemme tell you ungrateful leeches a story from two summers ago, when I was taking violin lessons. My violin teacher and his students (yes, including me) all went for a two-week long music intensive at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Now let me tell you sissy-ass Southern California city kids something about Alaska. It's a fucking frontier. You think the laws of the city apply, where you can just do your thing and not die in a gruesome wildlife attack? Wrong. You can be walking down the street, minding your own business and BAM, get eaten by a bear. Yeah, just like that! BAM!! You're an afternoon snack, you soft-serve American cream pie!
And one more thing, in Alaska, the bears don't look like normal bears. This is a normal bear compared to an Alaskan black bear:
And here is the Alaskan black bear.
Yeah. Who would you rather to tangle with in a dark alley?
I remember the day I realized I was not the one-with-nature earth mother I'd once fancied myself to be. That day, my violin teacher, Mr. Ferril, decided to pile us all in a Dodge Caravan for a walk in Denali National Forrest. Fresh air! Exercise! Pristine nature, unmolested! We're lolly-gagging along a trail and we see a caribou off in the distance. Ahhh! A deer! How lovely, you say. Oh, rapture!!
Well, a caribou is a deer on steroids, kids. Imagine a Ford F350 with horns. There, you've just pictured a caribou. So there's this big caribou ahead of us, standing there in the road. Then he decides, "well, shit, they ain't made of much" and lowers his horns. We turn around. "Walk away, be calm," Mr. Ferril tells us. The 10 of us, all a bunch of foppish San Fernando Valley musicians whose experience of the great outdoors consists of outdoor malls and the Venice Beach drag, try to control our terror and walk.
The caribou starts to trot toward us with his horns lowered. Then there are two of them trotting toward us. It was all over. No more self-control, no more restraint. It was an all out wuss-fest. "Just be calm and walk!" Mr. Ferril was saying. We were running, gasping, cursing. Well, more like waddling, fluttering and whimpering. We resembled a bunch of frightened toddlers with wet diapers, running for mommy.
At this point, the caribou were starting to think it was all too easy.
"Dude, what the fuck is their problem, we're not even carnivores!"
They go up on a hillside over our heads, out of our sight. At any moment, these mad wildebeests of doom could come crashing down on us. A couple of the guys are almost in tears. Me and my room mate, Michelle, are holding clammy hands and waiting to meet our deaths in a flurry of fur and hooves. My teacher is praying fervently. Then out of no where, comes a bus. A bus, no doubt, from heaven on high. We flag it down.
The driver stops and drawls, "Sorry y'all, I don't have enough seats." Without heeding a word, we clamber aboard. Breathlessly, we try to explain to her that we had almost lost our lives to a couple of caribou with Mad Cow. We find seats and then comes the deluge of Southern accents. The bus, it seemed, happened to be carrying a large group of much hardier people, albeit with fewer teeth.
"Caribou?? Whaah? Well, it's jest ruttin season, they ain't gon hurt ye."
"Now when that happens, all ye have to dew is, grab 'im by 'ees antlers, an wrastle 'im to the ground."
"Stupid know-nothin city folks."
Now look, rednecks. What you said was fine and good, but where were you when we needed you, you useless twig chompers?
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