Bears, baseball bats, and big stories

When a bear showed up at Cherry Hill Elementary School in Mission earlier this month, the school’s principal, Rob Clark, shooed it carefully away from students.

But ask the students of Cherry Hill Elementary and you might hear a different story. Maybe Clark beat up the bear with a baseball bat. Maybe he rode it around the playground like a horse.

The bear arrived on the school grounds during lunch on May 11. Most of the students were outside, and staff ushered them into the farthest corner of the grounds. The two doors to the school were in the bruin’s path, so the students couldn’t be sent inside.

Instead, they watched as their principal headed off the bear, making noise to convince it to leave.

“It was a situation where I just had to, in the moment, make that decision to get the bear to move along, quickly,” he told The Current recently.

The bear turned to go on its way at his urging. It was a bit of a “panicky” moment for some of the kids. Others, some of whom hadn’t seen a bear in the wild before, were just curious.

But as the principal walked back towards the school, someone handed him a baseball bat.

They suggested he could bang on the poles to make some extra noise.

“But right away I heard kids saying, ‘Mr. Clark just beat up a bear with a bat.’” he said.

Clark knew his pupils. And he knew how the stories could go.

He took to Facebook to get ahead of the wild narratives that were sure to follow the students home.

“When they come home and tell you a fantastic story about how Mr. Clark fought a bear, please understand there is fantasy involved. I want to assure you that during the encounter your kids were safe and as a precaution we all stayed inside for the rest of the afternoon,” he wrote.

This kind of mythbusting has to happen four or five times a year, Clark said. Dramatic, imaginative rumours can sprout like dandelions in a lawn. It’s one of the reasons he tries to have good relationships with the community surrounding the school. That way, he said, when tall tales spread, he can tell the story himself and be trusted to dismantle wild retellings.

Though some stories (like a principal riding a bear like a horse) seem too outlandish to be believed, each wild tale carries a series of risks and complications. In this case, Clark said it could give him a reputation as someone who doesn’t respect wildlife.

“What I don't want is people thinking that I'm actually intentionally going out after bears or trying to harm wildlife, because that's not who I am,” he said. Clark isn’t a stranger to bears and other wildlife. He worked at a rural school before his current post in Mission and said he has an outdoorsman’s “self-preservation skills.” He didn’t want that misconstrued.

More seriously, a story about a bear, blown out of proportion, could lead a parent to believe that their child was not kept as safe as they possibly could be during such an incident. That’s something Clark definitely wants to avoid.

Wild bear stories (and other tall tales) aren’t unique to elementary schools. There are lessons that adults can learn from the dramatic potential of the bear story—and the importance of getting ahead of it, Clark said.

“The imaginations of the kids, they’ll hear parts of that story and then they create their own story,” Clark said. “Then sometimes it's the same with adults—they'll see an event happen, but they only see parts of it,” Clark said.

With grown-ups, the instinct is different—it’s less the desire to tell a wonderful and exciting story, and more often the specter of a worst-case scenario.

“We tend to catastrophize, especially over the last couple of years, as a population,” Clark said. Negative parts of the story are emphasized, positive parts are downplayed, and the story morphs.

But, like the principal riding the bear, a tangled story can always be untangled.

“Being clear about it, being open about it, and honest about it—and sometimes a little bit funny about it—can help.”