My Encounter with Black Bear by Elkhorn Vaughan

As we drove up the steep winding road that leads to the top of the Smoky Mountains, I couldn’t help but think that we were lost. My family and I had drove all the way from Maryland to Tennessee and Missouri to visit family, and had decided to return home by way of Cherokee, NC so we could pay a quick visit to our distant but unknown relatives at the reservation. We had to go through the Smoky Mountains to get there.


I drove on, but made a mental note that the directions we had retrieved from the Google web site had not adequately prepared us for this experience. We were traveling around 35 mph on a thin winding road that seemed to gradually climb up the mountains into the sky, until we could no longer see the mountain floor below us. We were amongst the clouds, and it seemed as if we had entered into another world; Sky World to be exact.

My wife and children were getting frightened, or at least pretended they were. At each twist and turn in the road, we could see through the mountains from an over hang that seemed to drop down into nothingness. Oh but it was so beautiful, yet difficult to comprehend. We found it hard to believe that we were on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina driving on a precarious mountain road that leads to heaven. Mountain upon mountain vista appeared, allowing us to witness this majesty of the Creator’s creation, only to quickly disappear as we continued to drive around yet another twist in the road. My family forgot their fear, and started taking pictures with their cell phone cameras.

My thoughts began to go back in time. Visions of my Cherokee ancestors and others struggling to survive in their ancestral land began to rise and fall in my head. President Andrew Jackson had ordered U. S. soldiers to remove the so-called ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ west of the Mississippi, and they had hid in these mountains in an effort to escape removal. I imagined Indian men hunting the wildlife in these mountains for food, although we had not seen much wildlife along the road. I saw Indian women washing clothes near humble wooden shacks that offered minimal shelter. I began to understand why they would fight or die rather than leave the tranquility of these mountains that they had known for thousands of years. I wondered if even now there were indigenous people living high up in these mountains that nobody knew anything about.

Finally, we reached the top of the mountain we had been climbing. I navigated an extremely tight curve in the road and headed up a steep incline. A large clearing appeared through the trees that cover these mountains, and suddenly, we could see it all. Mountain upon mountain stretched before us as the setting Sun struggled to shine through misty clouds resting on every mountaintop. We could see all the way down the steep mountainsides to the forest floor below. It was overwhelmingly beautiful, and we could not help but feel the Presence of the Great Spirit as the road widened to invite us to stop at one of the observation decks that are spaced periodically along the road.

I heard my wife yell “Stop! We have to get out and thank the Creator here.” I agreed. The Creator had brought us to witness this miraculous place, and it only seemed appropriate that we take time to pray and thank him for this blessing. I slowly pulled over to the observation site that seemed to hang in the air off the side of the mountain, and my wife and I got out of the van. I was completely moved and overwhelmed by the awesome majesty of the place, and began to give heartfelt thanks as we moved closer to the edge. From where we now stood, it seemed as if the mountainside dropped straight down to the forest floor, and my wife was afraid to get too close to the ledge. “This is far enough,” she said, but I wanted to get close enough to look down. Carefully, I took a step, and then another, until I was right at the edge of a 3 ft. brick wall that had been erected so no one would fall into the abyss below.

Slowly, I leaned over the wall and looked down. Something large and black moved, and then looked up at me. I hesitated just long enough to realize that a fairly large black bear was sitting about 3 ft. directly below the wall! My instincts took over. I quickly moved back while keeping an eye on the wall to see if the bear was climbing up. “Get in the car!” I snapped. “A bear is there!” Before I even knew it, I was at the driver’s side of our van, but waited to get in until my wife was safely inside (she still maintains that I left her!). We got into the van and then just sat in suspense as we waited to see if the bear would climb over the wall. He didn’t. Suddenly, some tourists from Arizona drove up and got out of their van to look out over the ledge. “A black bear is there!” I blurted quickly out the van window. The tourist kept coming. I got out of our van. “A black bear is there just below the ledge!” I emphatically stated again, but one of the men jumped up on the ledge and began to take pictures with his digital camera. “Have you ever seen wild bears before” he calmly asked, to which I replied “No. At least not this close!” The man laughed and continued to take pictures while standing on the wall. I slowly moved closer. “Do you see him?” I asked. “Yeah. He’s moving off into the brush.” I moved close enough to look over the ledge, but all I could see were bushes moving further down the mountainside. “Wow!” I exclaimed. “He was just here under the wall a minute ago.” “Where are you from?” the man still taking pictures said. “New York originally” I found myself saying, “but now we live in Maryland, and we’re traveling back home from Tennessee through the mountains. Where are you from?” “Arizona” he calmly stated while looking at the bear making tracks through the brush. “Oh, I see” I said somewhat meekly, not knowing why his being from Arizona seemed to account for his being unafraid of bears. I stood looking at the disappearing bear for a while until it became apparent that the sacredness of the moment had been irrecoverably interrupted. I turned and started back to our van.

Bear in the mountains North of Spain

“Have a safe trip home,” I said to the man from Arizona over my shoulder. “You too” he said as others from his van began to join him at the wall. I got in behind the driver's seat and slowly pulled back onto the road. My family began to poke fun at me for being so afraid of the bear. I laughed with them. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have moved away,” I thought. “Perhaps I should have let happen whatever was going to happen,” I second-guessed myself. Perhaps. But I couldn’t help feeling as I drove further up the road through the mountains, that those tourist from Arizona had not shown sufficient reverence and respect for the nature of this place, or for the black bear.

Sadness came over me as I realized that what was a sacred experience to me, had been intruded upon by others who merely saw it as an opportunity for more pictures and sightseeing. It dawned on me that I had just experienced in microcosm what my ancestors must have felt when others who did not feel the way they felt about the land began to encroach upon them, belittle their world view and way of life, and ultimately move them out of the way so they could use the land as they saw fit. A tear rolled down my check, and I said a silent prayer as we reached the mountaintop and began heading down the winding road. A few feet away, I could see a small sign on the side of the road that read: “Cherokee Reservation – 20 miles.”

by Elkhorn Vaughan January 26, 2011

Elkhorn Vaughn in his regalia decembre 2010