If you know me, you know I don't hang on to many things (books would be the main exception and even those I've cut down on). But I've kept this artifact since the summer of 1997, when I worked for the forest service out in Wyoming. It has moved to Cambridge, MA; Providence, RI; Naples, FL; Newport, RI; Washington DC; Exeter, NH; and now Lovell, ME.
It's original purpose, which it has long since ceased to serve, was to deter grizzly bears; when the trigger is pressed, the red nozzle emits a fine mist of pepper spray. I worked in the Shoshone National Forest, in Wapiti, Wyoming, at a highway visitor information stand informally known as the bear box. Most of my job was to inform folks about how to stay safe in Grizzly Country and most of my advice pertained to how to store food when camping.
My very kind boss recommended that I purchase a can of bear spray when he saw me coming back from a run in the backcountry (more on that later) one morning. I thought he was pulling my leg, the sort of joke a Wyoming Forest Ranger tries on an East Coast College Student. But he wasn't joking. He made that clear. And I bought a can of spray the next time I went into town. That summer, I took a run pretty much every morning, and I saw a lot of bears (black bears only thought) on my runs, as well as pronghorn, elk, rabbits, countless birds, mountain goats (which weren't mountain goats, but some kind of mountain sheep, but they looked like goats), and lots of other critters that I either never learned the name for or have long since forgotten.
The Bear Spray came home with me at the end of the summer. It made for a good story starter, if someone saw it on my desk. It also stood for something else, a present danger, a reminder that I'd been somewhere awfully foreign and not entirely hospitable. A reminder that I'd been lucky not to use it.
Ultimately, twenty or so years after that summer, I started writing the manuscript that would become Continental Divide, which is a fictionalized account of my time in Wyoming. Some part of me thinks that if I hadn't kept this can of Bear Spray, hadn't looked at it and considered everything it embodied, I might not have been stirred to write this novel. So, I'm starting this series of posts with this artifact... it seems like a good place to launch the story of how Continental Divide came to be.