| Paige Williams
Staff writer  Photograph by Corey Arnold for The New Yorker When I went to Lake Tahoe to report for my story in this week’s issue, I imagined finding amusing anecdotes about black bears (bears are funny), but not such a troubling ending. The black bear’s behavioral profile in the area—ranging from high jinks to a gruesome first, for California—turned out to be symptoms of a problem with humans. The pandemic had prompted thousands of people to relocate to Tahoe, which Mark Twain, who lived near the lake for several years, starting in 1861, described as “the fairest picture the whole earth affords.” Do newcomers not realize that they’ve moved to nature? The commercial names alone should serve as a clue—there’s the Tahoe Bear Tea House, Black Bear Trading Company, Black Bear Lodge, Bear Belly Brewing Company, and on and on. There’s also the sighting of bears. I saw my first one in the wild on a Sunday morning—followed by three more, elsewhere in the basin, that same day. Those bears were in the woods, foraging; a fourth was dashing across a highway, near an electronic road sign (“BEARS IN AREA”) that reminded drivers to be careful. I spoke to the leaders of a longtime Tahoe nonprofit called BEAR League that teaches humans how to live in bear country without endangering the animals or themselves. Their warnings involve taking some care with garbage and leftovers, and avoiding general cluelessness. “Only leave windows open if you are right there in that room so you can furiously yell at the bear if he tries to come in,” the organization posted on Facebook in July, not long before I arrived. Someone replied, “It’s crazy how many people don't get this! I kinda feel like there should be a required class in ‘coexisting with bears’ before being allowed to rent or buy a house in Tahoe!!” It might be time to require Realtors to disclose bear activity near a property the way that California, South Dakota, and Alaska require homeowners who are selling to disclose certain on-site deaths. “Some of the real-estate agents don't want to do that,” one bear advocate told me. “They don’t want buyers to find out there’s bears, and back out of the sale.” Black bears live throughout the United States. They are resilient, crafty animals that generally don’t hunt humans but that, as became darkly clear in Tahoe, will do anything to survive. The good news is that with a few adjustments, it’s possible to live safely among black bears for as long as our forests exist. Paige Williams, who has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2013, writes the series U.S. Journal, which Calvin Trillin created 1967. Previously in the series: a road trip though America’s annual celebration of other people’s stuff, and inside the slimy, smelly, secretive world of glass-eel fishing. | 
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