October 14, 2026

One morning during the summer, I walked to the end of our driveway to retrieve our trash and recycling barrels and saw that the trash barrel had been dragged fifty feet across the road and was lying on its side. Although the bear-proof straps had held, a strip of the hard plastic lid had been pried off. In addition to jostling the trash around inside, the bear was able to reach in and pull some of the garbage out, which was strewn around the woods within a not-too-onerous radius. I was able to clean it up relatively quickly, but the longer and more disgusting task was transferring the mess now inside the barrel, swarming with insects, into new trash bags.

Still, I’ve cleaned up worse, crawling up our hillside through a thicket of thorns to pick up, piece by piece, a long thin line of what my family had thrown away over the previous week. The worst kind of deja vu. I emailed the trash company and apologized for the barrel. They said they’d bring a replacement in two weeks; there wasn’t time to bring one with pick-up today. When it arrived, I transferred the straps and figured (god knows why) it was unlikely the bear would pull the same stunt again. We would simply keep the barrel up by the house and put it out in the morning on trash day, rather than the night before.

However many mornings later, at 4 in the morning I was woken from sleep by rumbling and bumping. It sounds like a draft of air jostling the wooden sliding door of our bedroom on its rails, which happens. But it was persistent, and my barely awake brain realized something was wrong. I shot straight up, then went to the window looking out at our parked cars and the small shed in front of which we keep the trash and recycling. I couldn’t see the trash barrel. I shined the flashlight of my phone pressed up against the window screen, then heard a grunt and a crashing through branches. I made a few loud barks and cursed, then, maybe foolishly, went to put on some shoes and grabbed a wood-and-metal percussion instrument, a vibraslap, conveniently hanging in our mudroom from the key rack for some reason. Then I trooped outside and around the house in the pre-dawn darkness to inspect the mess.

The new trash barrel now had an almost identical strip of plastic missing, but the bear must have had less time for mischief before it ran off, spooked. I’d have some clean-up to do when the sun was up, but less than before. I went back and lied down in bed, alert for any and all sounds, until it was light enough to attend to that.

I checked my trail camera, which was pointed out at the road, remotely using an app. In fresh pictures and video from that morning, the dim outline of a huge black bear can be seen walking slowly down the middle of the road, its head turning briefly to look at the infrared lights of the camera, eyes seeming to glow. These were captured before it caught scent of our garbage and turned to amble up into our woods.

Since then, I’ve cut a section of hard pink insulation foam in a size and shape that fits snugly inside the barrel, over our trash bags. Then I’ve put a tarp over the lid before closing it and securing it with the still intact straps. I’m not under any illusions that this will definitely work, but maybe it will at least buy time so that we’re able to hear and shoo off the bear before it gets to the garbage. It hasn’t tried since, however.

In August, while my family and I were in Yosemite, our trash inside our shed (whose doors do not lock and don’t even click shut) with my wife’s car backed up blocking the doors, I checked my trail camera again, now positioned in the back yard facing our house. At 9 pm on a Sunday night it captured maybe the same black bear, a male, within feet of the camera, moseying through the yard.