I am in Glacier National Park and in a philosophical dilemma: I believe bears should be allowed to be bears, but I don’t want to be a bear’s daily allowance of protein.

Consequently, I have attached a bear bell to my backpack and am toting a can of bear pepper spray in a holster on my hip, while my sister and I periodically shout out nonsense like “Hey! Bears! Here we are!” Not that we want them to come check us out, but because loud voices are supposed to irritate bears (in a good way) and make them wander off looking for some place more peaceful.

Like, say, a national park.
My brother-in-law, who has hiked more mountains than I will ever see, thinks (probably like the bears) that we are idiots. He suspected we were foolish when we first attached the bells to our packs in North Cascades National Park, and he thought we proved it when we insisted on buying the bear spray before we entered Glacier. He refuses to wear a bell, won’t carry spray, never raises his voice above a civil conversational tone, albeit marked by a few dismissive snorts about our caution. Probably he sees a kind of smug wisdom in the old joke that bear droppings can be identified by the presence of chewed up bells and an odor of pepper spray, because you’re either going to be eaten by a bear or you’re not.

I, on the other hand, am handicapped -- putting me pretty low on the food chain or, if you will, last in the line of terrified tourists fleeing a pursuing bear. More importantly, I am not a fatalist. And since all the park rangers I have seen are wearing spray cans on their shoulders or hips, I feel as vindicated as I can be, short of actually meeting a bear and saving everyone – including my brother-in-law and a party of cowering handicapped children – with a well-aimed spritz.

However, these personal safety thoughts are not my philosophical quandaries.  What’s engaging me is the quiet rage I feel walking in an environment where something may be actively trying to kill me.

I am a day visitor here, of course, but my thoughts are going out to people around the world who live year by year with bears, wolves, cougars, alligators and tigers. Are they not justified in arguing that their dangers should be exterminated? Outside the park, in my living room, I sympathize with the creatures, but here on the trails I’m beginning to understand the humans, too. There is fear; I feel it, if even in the smallest way, and it leads to anger that the world is the way it is.

As it turns out, I am not eaten by bears, and the only sign of them we see is a pile of droppings without any bells in it. (I do not bend down close enough to sniff for pepper spray.) But my experiences have got me thinking, and as we stop later along the park’s famous Going To The Sun Road, to photograph some goats or some dizzying vista or other, I begin to wonder about scale.

It’s commonplace, I’m sure, for people to feel both exalted and humbled by the grandeur of Glacier National Park. The mountains are soaring; the valleys are plunging. But the vastness soon begins to dwarf itself. I feel small in Glacier, but then I remember that Glacier is only a small part of the world, and what appear as dramatic heights and depths here are just minor scratches on the big cue ball of the world.

I wouldn’t want to fall off the top of Logan Mountain any more than I’d want to worm my way through the belly of a bear, but my fears are, like the peaks and valleys themselves, both terrific and tiny. I can see them from my rock-clutching, spray-wielding self, and also from the cold, even smug, perspective of not the fatalist, but the naturalist, who recognizes the world must be allowed to continue as it is, bears and all.