As a National Park Ranger last summer, I was often asked what to do if a bear came into the campsite. This might be a standard question for most park rangers, but I wasn’t surrounded by Yellowstone’s erupting geysers or the rocky majesty of the Grand Canyon, but by weedy fields dotted with occasional clumps of pine trees at Gateway National Recreation Area. The park is Brooklyn’s largest national park, located on the southern tip of the borough. I follow the news pretty closely, but the frequency of the bear question left me wondering whether there was a rash of bear attacks sweeping New York that I hadn’t heard about.
Floyd Bennett Field, part of Gateway National Recreation Area, consistently wallows among the bottom of national park rankings, both in government funding and visitor satisfaction. In its glory days as New York City’s first municipal airport, every plane that flew in the European Theater of World War II was inspected there (just one of the many semi-interesting facts I was obligated to learn). Now it has deteriorated into six collapsing hangars, a dilapidated air control tower and a couple hundred wooded acres criss-crossed with old runways—all bear-free mind you—where the campsites were located. As a ranger, my job was to guide inner-city middle schoolers into Brooklyn’s wilderness, culminating in an overnight camping trip. The lack of large animals was probably for the best. If a bear came into my campsite, I would have trampled the kids in an effort to get out of there.
The building I worked in was missing shingles and coated in chipped brown paint. Poisonous mold dotted our long-neglected offices. Yet we still had to use the building for camper orientation everyday, where we would ready the kids to see raccoons, rabbits and owls. We told them the standard line: “All of the animals are more afraid of you than you are of the animals.” It was here that I would be asked about the bears. Every now and then a kid would ask about wolves, but it was mostly bears.
The children who camped with us were some of the poorest in New York City; the furthest most of them ever ventured from their homes was to the neighborhood bodega to pick up a gallon of milk. They came out with community groups from the New York Housing Authority to experience something new and different: nature. The closest many had ever come previously was the manicured grass of Prospect Park, and this was a far cry from that, though not far enough that the jets from Kennedy Airport couldn’t be heard overhead or a car horn on Flatbush Avenue couldn’t pierce the silent night.
I led the kids on hikes to the water and in programs on the history of the park, recycling and local wildlife. Outside their natural urban habitat, the kids were timid; every step was hesitant, as if the ground might give out beneath them. We were surrounded on both sides by tall grass, at least eight or nine feet tall, swaying in the breeze from the shore. Watching the grass move, the kids shrieked that an animal hidden in the field was stalking them, no doubt a result of their exposure to the Discovery Channel features and horror movies.
The same kids who were playing tag moments before became withdrawn when it came time for the nature scavenger hunt. Try as I might to get them involved, they remained reluctant throughout the unfamiliar game. By the late afternoon, we would lead the groups to their campsite where they would unpack and spend the night alone with their chaperones, and we would not see them until the next morning. When we left them I would always hope that they had taken away something positive from the day.
The young campers would run up to me the next morning, excitedly jumping up and down as if they were going to explode if they didn’t tell me what had happened during the night. Maybe they were going to talk about an owl they saw during their night hike or how they spotted Orion’s Belt from the field.
“Ranger Dan, Ranger Dan! An animal came into our tent last night!” After telling me about the animal and how it went through all their bags, one of the kids who was in the tent came up to me. He was much younger than the other boys.
“Ranger Dan,” he said, “I think it was a bear, but, you know, like a baby bear.”
