Revenge of the Cocaine Bear

What do you get when you cross cocaine lost by smugglers and a curious black bear? In reality, a dead bear. In Hollywood, a hit movie.

(Theatrical release poster courtesy of Universal Pictures)

In a strange and tragic event back in 1985, a 175-pound black bear was found dead of an overdose on the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Georgia, after tearing open and ingesting an undetermined amount of cocaine spilled from a duffel bag tossed out of an airplane by smugglers.

(United Press International, December, 1985)

In a stranger but only cinematically-tragic event, screen writer Jimmy Warden and director Elizabeth Banks recently took that tiny powder of truth, along with barrels of fake blood, and spun it into a regrettable movie wittily titled “Cocaine Bear.” In that movie, a 500-pound computer generated bear ingests a brick of cocaine. “Let’s see what effect that has on him,” one character says.

The “effect” is a one hour and 35 minute continuously over-the-top rampage and the gore-splattered deaths of at least eight people in a variety of ways including one where the drug-crazed bear leaps into the back of a moving ambulance. Reviewers have dubbed the film “violent, stupid and fast-paced,” and “pure, uncut ridiculousness … an apex predator on a rampage for blow and blood.” Despite the less than blood-curdling reviews, the film, starring Ray Liotta in one of his final roles, is currently trending at #8 in the U.S. on Amazon Prime, and has grossed over $57 million worldwide.

I am NOT thinking of any of that as I slowly realize that the pair of black, rounded ears just now materializing out of the forest behind our picnic spot on Oak Island have a bear attached to them.

Or, am I?

Bears have long prowled the silver screen. From the vengeful monsters of movies like The Revenant and The Edge and, of course, Night of the Grizzly, to the cuddly and merch-friendly bundles of fur and wit of such cinematic gems as Paddington and Ted, bears have been the stars, villains, and foils of an endless string of films, books, and campfire stories. Even as their numbers decline in many of our national parks and wilderness areas, bears still, and likely always will, leave deep tracks in our cultural landscape and in our minds.

We have been so inundated with the mixed messages of everything from Grizzly Man to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, how can we not see flashes of those images on the back screen of our brains when we find ourselves face-to-face with a real bear? How can we not wonder, somewhere deep in the media-mush of our brains, just where Hollywood’s poetic license ends and the real bear begins? Particularly as the bushes part and a living, breathing example of that “real bear” steps out on to the beach where just moments ago you were sitting?

It had been the perfect picnic kind of a summer day. Our daughter Hannah was home for a visit with her dog Finch and wanted to spend time in the islands on the Little Dipper. We packed the proverbial picnic basket and motored out towards a favorite, spot on Oak Island we have long called “Hannah Beach” for all the daughter time and footprints we have stitched across its sands. That beach was occupied. But there is a string of remote beaches on that stretch of shoreline so we simply settled on another, this one promptly dubbed “Alligator Beach” for a small lagoon just behind the sand strip. We unloaded the picnic supplies, and settled in for an afternoon of sun, eating, and sandy feet.

It seemed idyllic, the stuff of postcards not horror movies. But something was unsettling Finch. Despite the food we had for the picnic, despite the cozy sun tent we had set up for shade, despite even the lifetime supply of tennis balls to be thrown and fetched, the dog just would not settle down and was repeatedly peering off into the thick brush behind the lagoon, ears up, senses on alert. Something was out there.

If life were a movie, now would be the time to cue the dramatic music.

I pushed myself out of my beach chair, peeled back every branch and every leaf with my eyes. Nothing. I listened hard for any footfall or cracking twig. Still nothing. I was just about to give up and return to my sandwich when the shadows shifted and I locked eyes with a 300 lb. black bear, ears up, snout up, and not 20 yards away.

“Get in the boat.”

In my over 30 years exploring the Apostle Islands, I’ve seen only a handful of bears - mostly as a flash of black lightning as one vanished into the forest behind a campsite. More often there was just the crack of a branch in the dark or a string of fresh tracks in the morning sand.

But they are out there.

Bear tracks stitch the beaches and trails of nearly every island in the Apostles. Powerful swimmers, the wake from their wide paws and pointed snouts string the islands together like beads on a necklace. For years Stockton Island was famed for having the highest density of black bears in Wisconsin and one of the highest densities in all of North America (as high as 2.1 bears per square mile, double the density of the mainland). The population of black bears on Sand Island nearly doubled between 2002 and 2010. Bears have been documented on nearly every single island.

For all those bears mixing with all those summertime humans, there has never been a fatal mauling in the history of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. There have been campsite closures, even whole islands closed. There have been relocated bears and rubber bullets. But the history between bears and humans in the Apostle Islands has been mostly peaceful. Mostly.

But not always. “Skar” named for a large wound on its flank, was a big bear who became all-too-accustom to picnic food at Presque Isle and Quarry Bay on Stockton Island. In 2002, when non-lethal methods failed to discourage Skar’s picnic basket raiding ways, rangers were forced to shoot and kill the bear who now serves as a taxidermized reminder that “A fed bear is a dead bear.”

And “MacArthur” another infamous Stockton Island bear. Trapped at Trout Point in 1988, the bear was given a red radio collar which made it trackable and easy to recognize when it tore open a tent to lick clean a frying pan in the campground, plundered garbage cans at the ranger quarters, and approached a crowd gathered at the fire ring for a ranger talk. The final straw came on the night of July 31, 1988, when the bear approached the dock at Presque Isle where at least three boats were tied up for the night: the Sugar n’ Spice, Arrowhead, and Atlantis. Sometime after midnight, lured by the lingering scent of food, the bear brazenly boarded each boat in turn searching for something to eat, ripping a hatch cover from the Atlantis before being driven off by a barking dog.

Park rangers captured it in a culvert trap on August 16th, relocating the bear 20 miles south of Bayfield on the mainland of Chequamegon National Forest. With its radio collar, researchers could see that it circled a few times to get its bearings, and then turned straight north returning to the lakeshore near Cornucopia. From there, it plunged straight into the waters of Lake Superior, and swam for the islands. By September 18th, it was back on Stockton Island earning its nickname, a tip of the furry ears to the statement of General Douglas MacArthur who famously vowed, “I shall return” after being forced to leave the Philippine island of Corregidor after it was taken by Japanese troops during World War II..

Despite expectations, the bear caused no more trouble on Stockton Island. By the fall of 1989, the radio-collar rotted through and fell off. MacArthur faded quietly into island history.

Back on Oak Island, we quickly toss the remnants of our picnic onto the deck of the Little Dipper not even bothering to take the sun tent down, just plopping it aboard like a space capsule. I pull the anchor from the sand and shove off, pushing the boat back into deeper waters for safety.

From a safe distance, we watch the bear come out of the forest, sniff the spot where we had been picnicking and find, much to its disappointment, nothing. We left it no food, nothing to eat, and much to the chagrin of movie-goers everywhere, not a single gram or left-over duffle bag of cocaine.

This was no silver screen moment. There will be no box office bonanza or merchandise available at fast food outlets everywhere. We simply watched a beautiful animal trying to survive on an island, a mixture of power, myth, and reality, walking the beach, leaving tracks in the sand and in our souls.

After a time, with the bear seemingly in no hurry to leave, we organized our gear aboard the Little Dipper, dropped the engine, and turned for home, relinquishing Alligator Beach to the bear. The last we saw of the creature, it was still there, sniffing, searching, just a bear being a bear, no movie coming soon to a theater near you. Although, think of the possibilities: a bear AND an alligator find a duffle bag of cocaine on a remote island and …

— Jeff Rennicke

For a nice compare/contrast look at the actions of the bear in the movie and those of bears in real life, in addition to much more good information on bears, check out the BearWise website at the link below.

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