Days passed during summer holidays in the home country are not always considered as relaxing as holidays are meant to be. Often you hear members complain about their travails at home, dealing with renters who do not pay, leave a mess, or unabashedly just ruin the place. I have heard of a case where the Indian caretaker erected a shrine on the plot he was supposed to take care of, wrecking the owner’s dream of a retirement home on that now holy piece of land. These things do happen!

Family members and friends can easily get upset when you do not visit them enough during the short time you are back. And then, there is the weather factor; very few places on earth are blessed with sunshine as eternal as we have in the DC area. Contrast that with the showery summers in Europe, and it is not difficult to see why we decided this year on a trip to discover more of the beautiful American landscape.

We rented a car, plugged our tents, sleeping and swimming gear in the back and happily drove north. The campsites of the National State Parks are really magnificent in the US. The bathrooms are without exception spotless, often beautifully designed with wood, stones and other natural materials. The camping spots are gorgeous, with often a royal part of trees in the woods to consider as your place to hang your hammock. Every campsite comes with a decent picnic table, benches, fireplace, and adjustable grill. You pitch your tent next to a lovely stream, prepare your salads while the deer roam the bushes around you and light your fire at night. We know that many people hate camping, but for us it was pure bliss. Our first place was a direct hit: the Codorus State Park just over the border in Pennsylvania, close to Hanover, a little north of Westminster (MD), which you can easily reach by driving north on Connecticut Avenue, and then on I -97. From our tent, we saw grassy slopes in the golden light of the sun, where deer strolled along the line of cool trees and that night we signed up for a kayak tour on the lake with the light of the full moon. This was a promising start: nature, sport and real quiet hours. After 10 pm we heard almost nothing, except for the crickets and a lonely bird.

In the center of Hanover, we stumbled upon an outlet of quality Clarks Shoes for incredibly low prices. Wonder what would have happened if we had rented a van!

Our second camping, at the Reeds Gap State Park, was not bad either. There was a huge municipal swimming pool free of cost. All roads were winding through the beautiful hilly landscapes, with an occasional barn or church. But this was alcohol-free country. It was difficult to find the only (state-owned) shops in the bigger towns that were allowed to sell you the dangerous stuff that you were not allowed to drink openly at the campground. Quaint little towns like Mifflinburg even had a Buggy Museum; several covered bridges were still intact. And so we drove more and more to the north, and marveled at the craftsmanship of the carpenters who built all those white wooden houses, the porches, and the furniture. We were struck again by the almost park-like quality of these hundreds of little villages and towns, where the art of lawn mowing has reached levels never seen elsewhere on earth. A house is not a proper house if it does not have a neatly mowed lawn all wrapped around, preferably without any fences to stress the vastness of the terrain. Almost no obstacles such as flowers or bushes are allowed to give the mower on his John Deere Mower, free movement. Once we happened to come upon a proud file of villagers on their John Deere machines, some more than a hundred years old, but still rolling! We stood there for thirty minutes to watch them pass, as the drivers threw candies to the cheering public. Beautifully maintained machines, polished, and taken care of by many generations. And all were lawn mowers! The lawn must have its own special place in the American psyche.

As long as you avoid the Interstates, driving through America is like driving was meant to be in the beginning: enjoyable, remarkably well maintained and almost empty roads, winding through an ever changing décor of woodlands and grass fields. We visited eight states, and ended up 70 miles from New York, in the Smartswood State Park (NJ). There was a lake, where kayaks and canoes where available for rent, a little beach and a gorgeous, almost empty, campsite. Four deer didn’t bother to stop their grazing around the spot where we pitched our tent. Yes, there was a warning on our picnic table that said that this was bear country. So, we carefully washed the dishes after dinner, stocked the food in the trunk, and lit our fire for the night. My husband did not sleep well that night, suspecting every sound to be the announcement of some danger. But the place was so paradise-like that I begged him to stay another night, and we spent our day in the hammock reading and relaxing. The kayaks turned out to be hopeless, leaking and badly maintained. We asked the office why they did not warn about the rocks around the corner under the waterline that probably had caused the leaking of several boats. The students’ in-charge shrugged their shoulders, and considered it not their responsibility.

At about five I suggested a swim; I wanted swim across the lake since it was not that big. As my husband prepared to enter the water he observed a black creature on the other side of the lake. It appeared for a moment at the right of a moored boat, and then again on the left side. We could see the people on the boat throwing objects at the pacing black creature, and we decided that it definitely was a bear. This bear was clearly not shy, as it was intimidating the people on the boat in broad daylight. After some minutes, the bear disappeared, someone from the boat quickly unmoored the boat by entering the water, and then the boat left at full speed. As we lay watching this spectacle in the water, a ranger stopped by, and ordered us out of the water, as we were not allowed to swim in this part of the lake. We told him about what we just had watched, and he answered, that, by the way, that same afternoon at three, while we lay in our hammocks, three male bears had been sighted at campsite No. 40. We thanked him for this information and told him that we would pack our things.

He was clearly surprised by our reaction, and told us not to worry, since he had a double shotgun and was on duty till midnight. And what if the bear came to our phoneless tent at 1 am? Before I could phrase my question, he told us he had warned everybody at the official swimming site, as that was the place where most guests gathered, and stressed that we should keep our coolers out of sight, since bears recognize them for what they are. Once he had seen how a bear had smattered a cooler to pieces in less than 10 seconds, only to discover empty tins.

We quickly packed our dry tent and other belongings, gave our firewood to a Polish family with three little kids, who had been sleeping around the campfire the night before. They had not heard from the ranger, and apparently were not sure what strategy to follow: to stay put, or return home to Staten Island. We decided to have a look at camping spot No. 40, a beautiful lonely spot at the end of the camping trail. A full blood American was packing his camper to leave as well. No! He too had not heard about the bears. People should not make such a fuss about bears! Yes, four years earlier, there had been a drought, and he had seen that bears had smashed several windows of a van to get to the food. We did not dare to ask why he was leaving, as he had a big fighting dog and maybe other weapons as well to protect himself. We found a comfy motel with an excellent restaurant. That night it started pouring. When we came home, we read in the newspaper that a little girl had drowned when her father tried in vain to get her out of the van taken by the floods. We felt we had escaped two dangers. My husband started googling bear attacks in New Jersey and found some troubling articles. The bear population in NJ had risen from 300 to over 3000 in the last years. Typically, a mother bear tells her youngsters to leave and find their own place to live when they are old enough to fend for themselves. Since they are protected, their numbers rise more and more, and thus, inevitably, they encounter humans. More worrisome is that they thus get more and more used to humans, and what humans are associated with: food. Bears can be fierce predators; they run 35 miles an hour and are excellent climbers and swimmers. Imagine the surprise food I would have been for the bear, if I had indeed crossed the lake by swimming! In the last 7 years, two people per year on average have been killed and or eaten by bears. In some cases it has been established that they have carefully observed their victims, before attacking a small kid, a woman on a mountain bike or an elderly person fishing.

Now it dawned on us why the staff of the Camp site left at 4 pm, why the camp site was virtually empty, and why people were only allowed on the official “beach” where constantly two guards watched the swimmers. Maybe this explains as well the big empty lawns around the house: they make it much easier to see the danger coming. But I still fail to understand how you are supposed to act upon the advice to “fight back if a black bear attacks you.” We don’t have a shotgun, nor a fighting dog. But it seems that bears absolutely dislike the smell of paprika; a hiker through the Rocky Mountains told me that they attached pieces of paprika on their back pack and wherever they could. Fight nature with nature!

Maaike le Grand