My Big Fat Greek Bear Encounter
On a recent trip to Greece, I learned something about the country’s ability to maintain its distinct identity despite being in such a busy crossroads of the world. In short, geology once again. There’s just not a lot of level terrain in Greece, and sooner or later, you bump up against rugged mountains.
EU money has built modern toll-highways in Greece to help get around this and, I suspect, to integrate this far corner of the EU better. Driving this new system of toll-highways from Thessaloniki in the northeast to Astakos on the west coast, I could see the hand of EU engineering at work, especially in the length of some of the tunnels blasted through miles of rock, the only way to traverse the incredibly rugged Pindus Mountains.
Before disappearing in one of these tunnels, I’d note how the mountains seemed impenetrable in every direction, and imagined ancient armies standing there demoralized by the same view that seemed to offer no way through or around.
Even today, the Pindus can feel isolated and remote. When I got off the toll-highway and began to explore back roads, I entered another world of ancient, withering mountain towns that seemed to be returning to the earth from which they’d been created centuries ago. The few structures still standing almost blended into the overgrown brush around them.
Occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of an ancient-looking man or woman in a doorway, hunched and moving slowly in some routine task. The few road signs were in Cyrillic and completely useless to me. None of these forgotten mountain villages had anything like a store or place to eat as far as I could tell. I’d become accustomed to using the navigation on my phone but, up here in the Pindus, getting a signal was impossible.
The paper map I’d bought at some rest area wasn’t fine-grained enough to help with this terrain. After passing through another of these fading towns, the buckling pavement ended and the road became a one-lane gravel and dirt track with forest on both sides. Luckily, the track slowed me down because, out or nowhere, a pack of what looked to be wild dogs came at me, several lunging at my tinny rental car and slamming it. An especially fierce mastiff looking mutt even bit at my door handle!
Packs of dogs were not an uncommon sight in many of the towns I’d stop in once off the toll road. What was this about? I wondered. There was such variety in the breeds and most seemed fairly well fed, as if only recently detached from a shelter or home. Most of the time you’d find them at the edge of a town, just hanging out, looking kind of lost and uncertain.
The dogs trying to tear up my rental car, on the other hand, were highly territorial, like shepherd dogs I’d seen in parts of Asia. They had the car surrounded, blocking the dirt track in front of me. Just then, a man emerged from the edge of the surrounding woods and yelled something that turned the heat down on the dogs enough for me to turn around and head back the way I’d come.
I still figured my best bet was moving forward rather than retracing my route back through all the little towns and switchbacks. Daylight was at a premium and I made the calculation that this twisty mountain road would likely crest at a pass and a different way down.
So, I took another turn that went uphill, hoping the road didn’t just dead-end. It seemed promising and had even been paved at one time. The terrain on each side of the buckled and forgotten road was rocky and steep, the trees short and scrubby. I’d gained elevation and could see pinnacles of weathered stone up ahead against an empty blue sky. There had been no houses or another driver for the last hour or so and it felt like those pinnacles had to be the pass.
As I mused on this beguiling alpine landscape, my eye caught something moving just ahead — a scrubby pine about the size of a person quivered against a large boulder. No sooner had I noticed this movement when a massive bear bolted out from the behind the tree and ran across the road, scrambling up a scree slope before disappearing in some scrubby pines about twelve feet up.
The whole thing lasted all of four seconds or so as I watched the bear scramble up the rocky slope and out of view, its flesh jiggling beneath its fur. A bear! Unusually colored too: a deep mocha brown with a pale patch circling its back shoulders, almost like a collar. Was it a male or female? Old or young? I’ll never know.
And it didn’t really matter, because I was dumbstruck and thrilled. It heartened me to think that such a creature could be doing okay in an EU country in the 21st century. The higher elevations of the Pindus Mountains had thwarted human settlement for centuries and now, with the scattered and moribund settlements at lower elevations fading away, this bear represents a glimmer of hope for the mega fauna of Europe, and our beleaguered planet.
