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By Root 125 0

telling you, it’s not pretty down here. Foolish me, I kind of imagined that when I paid Javier’s EZ-Clean twenty bucks to clean and detail my car, that Javier and his lazy illegal children cleaned and detailed all of it. But down here I see bolts and pipes and panels and wires caked in melted tundra, which I guess is part of the off-road aesthetic my car and I aspire to, but also covered in a thick black paté of urban road filth, and the mixture of the two is nicely rubbing off on my camel hair sport jacket, bran-dnew and now ruined. Plus — and this really would piss me off if I wasn’t so very much Thinking Positive — plus something … the radiator? The fibrillator? I don’t know, I can’t tell but something is very slowly dripping. A.K.A., releasing fluid. A.K.A, leaking. My powerful, virile and incredibly expensive car is less than a year old and already needs adult diapers. A car like this is not supposed to drip like that.

Plus that tire blowing out — ultimate cause of my current trauma … Range Rover has a lot to answer for here, I think. And I’m sure somewhere there’s a lawyer who agrees. That lawyer and I are going to make Range Rover pay my hospital bills once I get out of here, once I’m rescued, once this god damn bear quits alternating between chewing on my foot — eeew — and straining with the fat, stubby wolverine that is his arm to reach the rest of me here in this thankfully claustrophobic spot under the car. And he’s eating not just my foot, mind you, but also my new Lands’ End suede chukka boot: huntsman brown, size eleven and a half, left, two hundred eighty nine dollars, ninety five cents. This bear is costing me. This bear is going to pay.

Where is Edna? Where is that stupid woman, the woman I married? She’s supposed to be here. Where are the useless little men of my department? Where’s Marcia from Product Dialogue? How is it that after we all trek up here with much fanfare, at great expense, for the purpose of team-building, and a perfect team-building exercise like this one presents itself, falls in my lap you could say … why is my whole stupid team absent? Where are they? Back at base camp, most likely; thumbs up butts, unable to motivate their way out of a paper bag without me.

Note to self: fire team, divorce wife. Escape bear.

This is so not my fault! I’m not an idiot, you know. I’m not naive in the ways of Bear. I researched them on the Internet for hours.

Fact! American Black Bears such as this one grow to between 130 and 500 pounds as adults — or larger, it would appear — and are found in 32 states, including Alaska. Fact! Black bears are solitary creatures, they forage for food in clearings like this one, in forested regions such as here, and they are omnivores, as we’ve seen. For their own safety and as a team-building exercise I had the entire hunting party memorize a set of bear facts and bear survival tips before we came, and for my own amusement I brought a bear-compatible shotgun, a Remington 870 police model with Core-Lokt Ultra Bonded Sabot slugs, which is now safely mounted above the driver’s seat of the car I’m trapped beneath, waiting to be fired bearwards by the first lucky Search and Rescue operative to get off his ass and make with some HELP!

It’s utterly not my fault. I did everything right. For instance: when I spied the bear, I did not run. Bears can outrun people. That’s a fact that I know. Instead I stood tall, turned, faced the bear, shouted at the bear and threw the tire wrench at the bear to let him know I was A) a human, and B) not afraid. The bear in response rose up upon his shaggy hind legs and tilted his head at me, snuffling his nose and waving his paws around like a stunned boxer. I took this to mean that he was getting a better look at and whiff of me, and that once he figured out he was dealing with Homo Sapiens — not just any Homo Sapiens, mind you, but MARV PUSHKIN, Senior Communications Creative, Corporate Warrior, Leader of Men, User of Women, Esquire subscriber — he would back off and return to his regularly scheduled bear lifestyle. That’s Bear Survival Tip