The bears of Transylvania

As the train gained speed out of the station, the architecture transformed from ancient stone walls with russet clay tiles on steep gabled rooflines to what her Austrian friend coined as brutalistic socialist architecture: Dull grey cement apartment buildings, not high enough to be called skyscrapers, but loomingly overbearing, small glass windows, rounded edges and deep overhangs at the entryways that prevent the light from getting in. The damp cold stained the structures so it looked like the buildings were weeping. The train continued to build speed and departed from the city in haste. She was on her way to Brasov, Romania in the Region of Transylvania ringed by The Carpthian Mountains.

The country approached in the form of vast fields, shallow valleys and rounded plateaued peaks that rolled humbly towards the sunrise. Cornfields, herds of sheep, fallen down sheds, and bales of hay dispersed themselves across the landscape. Garbage was scattered in the ditches along the tracks; Plastic jugs, synthetic rope, a shoe, a tire. Whether it’s the train tracks in India or Indiana, Romania or the countryside of Thailand, the view is the same; garbage and the backside of civilization where less desirable things and dooming truths inhabit the landscape. Crippled narrow backroads, abandoned houses with roofs caved in, windows broken and falling from the deteriorated wood frames. A flock of starlings lifted off the dying autumn cornfield. The birds were an ever changing mass, cloudlike, yet swift with grand sweeps across the sky before they dove back down into the golden waste.

Her eyes fell upon an old man with a tightly woven fedora teetering on the top of his head with a pole in one hand and a herd of sheep in front of him. His faithful scruffy mutt had matted locks and stained fur, one ear was cut off. He paused and watched the train pass.His eyes flickered left and right attempting to see the passengers in the windows. He reached into his pocket with slow determination and pulled a handkerchief out. His hand shook as he wiped his eyes. Before he tucked the cloth back inside his coat he waved it in the air at the train, as if he was really going to miss her and then he whistled through his teeth and the dog proceeded to round up the sheep and they moved along.

She stepped off the train onto the platform, catching her breath, adjusting her suitcase in one hand and a bag over her shoulder, mentally preparing to search for her connection; a man named Razvan who was to be her guide for the next two weeks volunteering with the bears. Before she lifted her head to look around, a scarecrow of a man with round glasses and lanky outstretched arms, and a big smile on his face stood in front of her and shouted her name. One could have confused them for long lost friends reunited instead of strangers just meeting. She stumbled into the hug awkwardly. He proceeded to introduce her to the other volunteer who had accompanied him to the train station. She was from the UK and had been working with the bears for two weeks already. They did not hug and that was also awkward.

She followed behind these two who moved at the speed of light, sweeping her in their wake towards the car. Their enthusiastic chatter sounded like a mix of birdsong and barking dogs. She closed her eyes and placed her attention on her breath, slow and smooth, in and out. The sounds spilled from their mouths into her ears as if they weren't words, just birds, and dogs, and wind. Communication is so much more than words. Language does not only pour from our head and out of our lips and tongue. It is in the eye and hand. It is expression and vibration. If she feels safe then she can be open and present. If she is compassionate with herself she has a better chance of understanding how others might be feeling. She remembered the promise she had made. Every day she knelt and prayed at the edge of her bed in the early morning light. She had committed to paper and pen a list: take your vitamins, cleanse your body inside and out, drink water, lots of water, make yourself presentable, breathe, move, and meditate. She did these things to be prepared for moments like these. The story of Romania and the bears had begun.

In the 24 hours that transpired since she had met Razvan and Victoria at the train, she had been given the information on the town of Brasov, the tasks as a volunteer, the responsibilities of the housing situation which was a small flat she would be sharing with the other volunteer, where she should shop, she received a tour of the sanctuary, met around a third of the 105 bears that lived on the 200 acres of oak forest, heard the history of the sanctuary, and the future, and oh gosh, she was tired already and the volunteer work hadn't even begun.

A volunteer at the sanctuary helps prepare the food that will supplement the bears diet. Bears usually traverse 50 kilometers a day to find their food. These bears are sharing a much smaller space and it is an oak forest which is their natural habitat, but they do need some food supplementation. Once again, we come to the conclusion that a sanctuary is not a place of peaceful sunsets and happy endings. Much of the substance of a sanctuary shows the fucked up reality that something happened that can't be taken back and someone ‘s life has detrimentally been changed forever because of it. These bears are not free, yet it is the best we can do to help heal the wrong that can never truly be healed.

With these bears, once there is human contact there is no chance of returning to the wild. These bears will live their lives free, in one sense, yet always trapped in a world of human involvement.

Some of the bears she got to know:

His name is King. He was captured as an orphan most likely after his mother had been killed. As a baby cub, he was thrown into an enclosure with a concrete floor and a small patch of grass. He lived over 20 years that way. To really imagine that brings such a pain to the heart and this is what makes one’s compassion grow deeper and conviction grow stronger. It was a ten year struggle to rescue him from the hands of his abusers. Now he lives his days in an oak forest with a pool to swim in and dens to sleep in and sun to warm him when he wants. The most important instinct for a bear is to stay away from humans. Once that is lost they are nearly doomed. The desire to engage with a wild animal is selfish and detrimental. We must respect their wildness. Because of sanctuaries such as Libearty Bear Sanctuary they do have a chance to live a peaceful life. At least there is that.

Mama bear and her cubs. Mama bear is very protective of her babies, always keeping watch. Baby climbs on mama. Cub moans and yawns. She nibbles on his neck. The cub lays on his back and yawns. Other cub comes to play. Their fur is wet from the pond. They love swimming in the water, tossing a stick about, rolling around in the grass. One cub moans gently play fighting with a stick and then runs to hide in the hole at the bottom of the tree trunk. This family will forever be contained within this forest enclosure, unable to travel distances through the Carpathian mountains, make their dens where they choose. The cubs will grow and never breed, never be truly free because two men who owned property along a lake tempted them with food so they could call the authorities and have these bears either killed or removed because they were encroaching on territory that humans had appropriated.

Brigitte. She came to the sanctuary as a little cub. She is now just over a year old. She is a playful bear, but does not know she is a bear. She always wants human attention because she was a bottle fed orphan. This sanctuary gets support from visitors who take a tour of the place with a guide who educates them about the bears. They don’t come around Brigitte because they want her to remember her instincts of being a bear. Brigitte spends much of the day sucking on her paw which is a coping mechanism that the cubs use to deal with the trauma of being a motherless child. They suck on their paw and moan their grief. Here at the sanctuary they have had to deal with cubs sucking on their paws for comfort until it’s raw and needing medical care. Her mum was most likely shot and killed by a greedy unaware hunter. Humans make so many motherless: bears, chimps, elephants, rhinos, human beings with parents who are undocumented, children in war zones, farm animals, it goes on... There is so much unnecessary suffering in the world caused by the human species. A child should always be with their nurturing parent. Humans must stop interfering with nature.

Betsy is one of the oldest bears in the sanctuary. She was tortured into performing in the circus. They were difficult years of torment in the arena and left deep wounds both physically and mentally. She crossed the ocean with a ship transporting a traveling circus in Europe. After the circus closed, she "lived" another nine years on a farm, where she was kept in a dirty, small hen coop. She came to Libearty Bear Sanctuary in 2010, at the age of 24. She loves to swim. It helps relieve her arthritis. She will live in peace here until she passes.

China. This beautiful bear has a dark brown coat with white patches over her shoulders. She also has no upper lip because some human forced her to obey with a ring in her nose that eventually was most painfully ripped out. The past is the past and some things can be forgotten, but there are some things we just can’t take back, we can’t fix, we just have to accept and keep living. She has a playful energy to her, and a confidence that may be a symptom of her overcoming her challenges, yet that can’t be presumed. She is

The sanctuary has an arrangement with local communities to receive the food waste from supermarkets and restaurants: expired dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and meat. She spent 6 hours every day preparing the supplementary food for the bears. Every day they would receive a truck load of discarded food from the surrounding area of Brasov. One day, it would be pallets of expired, as well as not expired, dairy products which she would slowly but surely with a box cutter knife and rubber gloves empty all the containers into bus tubs to be frozen. They called it bear ice cream. The bears loved it. It is part of their daily diet. So this dairy, the mother’s milk of cows, sheep, and goats that live in horrible conditions having been force bred (raped) and their babies stolen from them (so humans can take the milk) is being saved from being wasted by giving it to bears who only need it because they are also products of human torture and abuse.

So then we have the plastic containers: many garbagebags full every day; all over the world whether empty or full, millions of plastic containers strewn across the earth and oceans. So many of the containers were cutesy little kiddy lunch promo packaging that held two tiny tablespoons of yoghurt ending up with more plastic packaging than there was food. Most of it was Nestle, a corporation resembling a disease.

When it wasn’t dairy it was produce or meat. Truckloads of fruits and vegetables would be delivered. 75% of the load was completely edible, good quality food. This was easier to take because the bears deserve fresh food. An example of the meat coming in would be a truckload pallet, about 800 lbs, of frozen chicken parts. So the bears benefit from our wastefulness, but do the chickens that suffer their whole lives in tiny cages, shot with antibiotics, and crammed together to be killed and then wasted except for the fact that they don’t because we have bears rescued from the human cruelty of forcing them to live in tiny cages as well where they can’t turn around and when they let them out the ‘trainers’ beat them into balancing on tightrope wires and riding little bicycles after we have killed their mothers and stolen them away when they were months old which is the same as a human child’s experience of being months old still nursing and needing their mama’s love. Is any of this redeeming? It is a cycle of saviors created from their own creation of suffering.

She felt so lost. She tried to stay away from thinking she had a purpose. She was not that important to this place, her efforts needing no praise. She wanted to cause as little harm as possible. She saw that the longer she was here and the more she looked around, the less she understood.

She woke from a strange dream; A great danger was in the air. She was frantic and unsure, but determined somehow to protect tiny soft creatures from mechanical monsters.

As she left the world of dreams and adjusted to being in the ‘real’ world, she prepared herself for the day where she might have to deal with the monsters in her own head: judgement, resentment, insecurity, and fear. They are cunning, slipping in to take the mike every chance they get. She stabilized by visualizing the earth below her feet. She called upon the rooted strength of the oak forest where the sanctuary was. She planned to mimic the stoic and observant vibe of the bears until perhaps it would become a true sensation within her. She committed to live just for today with her purpose to be of service to the bears. She would not let unnecessary things bother her. She would take in what is valuable, let the rest go, and make herself useful.

If Victoria, the other volunteer, had not been there to train her, she would have felt very alone and unaware of what her job was. She had been mistaken in thinking Razvan would be her guide. He had given her the details the first day, but was not part of working at the sanctuary. The staff consisted of men who spoke no English, and to be quite honest, the Romanian culture had a stone faced quality to it. Most of the time they did not acknowledge that she was there.

The educational aspect of the internship was experience based by prepping the food, feeding the bears, and observing, so she felt so very fortunate to be there when two bears from the Ukranian Circus were rescued. She got to be up close and personal with the process of integrating these two bears into the safe space of the forest.

Masha and Lora had lived their lives in steel cages, transported from town to town to perform in a Ukranian circus. They were sisters, stolen from their mother as cubs, always separated even though in the same circus. The rumor was that they were aggressive towards each other. For 24 years they lived this way, a life of whips and cages, trainers, loud applause, and bright lights, bikes and tightrope wires all to entertain the public. They showed the behaviors of trauma by pacing back and forth in very tight quarters, rocking side to side, circling themselves and unable to lay down and be at ease.

It was a serious wagering deal to have these bears released from the hands of their abusers in another country and brought to Libearty Sanctuary. Transported many hours through the night, crossing borders, and official channels, this was a political act. When they finally arrived it took days for them to settle in their quarters that were small, yet larger than the steel cage. Sometimes what we know, even if it is damaging, feels comfortable. If being caged is familiar, spaciousness and freedom can feel very scary. Eventually the doors were opened to the outdoor enclosure with the hope that they felt safe enough to come out. It was an incredible moment to witness the two girls stepping out of their separate quarters and able to touch for the first time. The gratitude and relief was palpable as they hugged each other and tears began to flow from her eyes when she watched Masha lay down in the grass and roll around rubbing the smell of the earth all over her body. With this new life for the two sisters, the sanctuary chose to give them new names; Dasha and Katia. She was changed forever by witnessing their well deserved freedom.

She walked out of the flat. The city was settled into a canyon that led her into the Carpathian Mountains. She walked through the tight cobblestone streets banked by crumbling walls until the houses faded and the forest took over with rushing waters , steep rock faces, and trails paved in rubies and gold, the fallen leaves of Autumn. These mountains were filled with bears, lynx, fox, and wild boar. She was so glad they were here but she did not want to meet one in their territory where she did not belong. All wildlife’s problems begin when they meet a human. Really the only true friendship she could offer was to leave them so alone that they never knew she existed.

She had traveled across the world to indulge in solitude, to be alone while trying not to be lonely. She walked through the crisp leaves that blanketed the forest floor tucked into the foothills of the Mountains of Transylvania. There was a creek so small it held a cupful, yet the trickling sound danced equally with the chatter of chickadees and wrens. This land reminded her of home. She pondered why some must travel so far away to find home.

She felt back into this past month and acknowledged that it was not all rainbows and unicorns. She was actually bruised and tender from all that she had experienced. It had been a long time since she had an easy simple smile rise up on her face with no strings attached. Perhaps that idea was lost to her now that she had turned a corner in the timeline of her life. She couldn’t foresee the future though. There is always more to be revealed. At the moment, as the sun began to set, a flock of small birds had congregated in the trees surrounding her. She couldn’t understand what they were saying, but as they flitted about and chirped and chattered, their language had a consoling ripple to it. It left her feeling grateful that she even had a glimpse of this place, the bears, this space, this culture, and this time. She was thankful for who she was today. Her life was special because it was hers. That’s what makes a life unique, to live it with a deep intimacy.