Skip to main content

Samson and Delilah

A few years ago a man and his son discovered a black bear prowling outside their home in Two Rivers, Alaska. In that neighborhood, it's common to hear stories of bears smashing cabin windows, drawn by the smell of a candy-bar wrapper. In defense against such invaders, many Alaskans dispose of their garbage assiduously and keep jumbo cans of pepper spray next to their car keys. In this case, the man called 911, and shortly thereafter an Alaska State Trooper pulled into the driveway. The trooper asked a few questions, but on the whole, seemed unreasonably calm about the whole situation. With the citizens at a safe distance, the trooper called out sharply a few times, and the bear came bounding from the bushes, lunged at the trooper, and seized his leg in its paws. Rather than sinking in its teeth, however, the bear simply clung to the leg, trembling a bit. Moments later, it followed the trooper into the patrol car.

The trooper's name is Ron Richards, and the bear's name is Delilah. Ron and Delilah live a block from my parents home on Chena Hot Springs Road. Ron adopted his first bear, a male, in 1986 when the bear was orphaned in Petersburg. Ron constructed a three-acre pen resembling the bear's natural habitat on his extensive property. He had some experience caring for animals of varying degrees of domestication, and the male bear bonded with Ron as they spent time together. Casting about for a name for the bear, Ron held a contest among children at the local elementary school and church, and Samson was the result. Delilah came later, in 1989, an orphaned cub from Kaltag. Delilah imprinted with Ron, and was docile enough that for a time she lived safely in Ron's house with his children. Later, Ron attempted to transfer her to the pen with Samson, where she waxed a bit territorial until Samson eventually nipped her in the hindquarters. After that, the two bears cohabited in relative peace.

I met Ron, Samson, and Delilah recently during a ten day visit to my hometown. The visit was private, informal, and non-commercial; Ron loves to tell stories about his bears to friends and children. Two neighborhood kids watched along with my family as Ron filled large silver mixing bowls with dog kibble, fish scraps, grapes, and apples, then placed them on two concrete platforms. The bears moved closer upon Ron's approach and seemed affectionate, though I noticed that Ron wore thick suede gloves throughout the feeding process.

Samson and Delilah have eating rituals. They mount their concrete blocks, which designate separate dining areas an are easy to clean. Samson immediately finds and devours the fish, while Delilah picks out the grapes. The bears then trade places, dismounting their platforms. It's understood that Delilah will eat a portion of Samson's grapes, and in return, Samson eats some fish from Delilah's dish. After this exchange, the bears return to their own places and finish the meal in dignified silence. As they crouched over their bowls, the word "porridge" kept surfacing in my mind. Samson is getting up there in bear years, so he sits rather still after completing his meal. Delilah is more interested in people, and sniffs us through the metal fence, sometimes emitting noises that demonstrate that her meal was satisfactory. I was comforted to hear that she does not escape often.

I wasn't equipped to create a full-color illustration during my visit home, but I did manage to jot down some quick pencil sketches of Samson and Delilah. I'm fascinated by the size of their foreheads--the sheer real estate between their ears and their eyes. I've included some of the sketches below, as well as original photos of Ron and the bears.









Comments

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...

Ad Hominem and the Carney Lexicon

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick...

Work from Home

  The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...