Bears were not always so common in Pennsylvania. There was a time when they were never spotted south of the Blue Mountain. The few thousand that lived in the state inhabited the northern forests.
Sighting one of them was an experience worth retelling. Prime spots for seeing the bruins were the many active, open dumpsites in northern Pennsylvania, where my family regularly camped in state parks. The local general stores usually could direct us to the current, most promising spots.
If we hit those spots in the early evening, we would usually see a bear or three. In the campgrounds we often saw the busted coolers and the shredded food containers that resulted from late-night bruin raids on campsites.
It was never our campsite. My father was too careful with clean-ups for that to happen at our site.
But bears remained a special treat of our visits to the north.
It was on one of those trips, en route to Ole Bull State Park, with the pop-up camper trailer in tow behind the pick-up truck, that my mother spotted a bear crossing a clearcut, electrical right-of way.
“A bear, a bear, a bear,” she shouted, as my father scanned for a spot to pull off the roadway. No such spot presented itself and by the time he had slowed the vehicle the bear had disappeared back into the distant forest.
He and I never saw the bear, but we all were left with the tale of “a bear, a bear, a bear!”
