Chess in Bear Country

We stopped to play chess on the second day when a thunderstorm broke out along the trail

What a delightful picnic for a hungry bear: rice and lentils bubbling on the camp stove, a large box of cookies on the ground of the visitor parking lot in Yosemite National Park.

Better yet, the people supposedly in charge of supervising the food were not watching carefully. No, our eyes were locked on the chessboard, each of us trying to figure out how to wrench control of the center. Our headlamps barely deviated from the plastic pieces in front of us.

Insects began to crawl out from the dark and across the game board.

I didn’t care. It had been about a year since I’d played Andrew in a game of chess. Amazingly, I seemed to have the upper hand this time. It was a success that I wanted desperately to hold on to, and so I gave the board my absolute attention, only dimly aware of what was going on outside the board. I would be more aware of an attack from Andrew’s king side than I would a pair of hungry eyes staring at me from the darkness.

The funny thing is that for all my time in the outdoors, I could only remember two bear encounters. It seems unfair that when everyone else can break out their badass bear stories, the best that I've been able to do is recount the dark blur running across a road in Maine — or the blur that I saw crossing a path at the base of Mt. Washington.

In that sense, bears have always been something of an abstract threat to me, maybe even a hoax. Perhaps park rangers invented bears so they could enjoy breaking into cars and absconding with tourists’ cookies and jars of peanut butter.

Whether or not they exist, I’ve done my best to behave as though bears are a real thing that should be taken seriously. That includes me hanging up food, putting food in canisters and shouting my way through bear country with a can of bear spray at my hip.

It was this fear of an unforeseen threat that explained why I continued to shoot nervous glances over my shoulder, even as the chess game intensified.
No doubt, at times a feeling of uncertainty is valuable. A chess player who anticipates the conventional attack but not the unconventional, is vulnerable to a wily opponent. So would it be foolish of me to be unprepared for bears simply because none of the horror stories had happened to me.

A pair of headlights swept over the board. I saw a group of rangers step out of a pair of vans and begin pick their way around the cars, shining their flashlights in through the windows.

 Someone had left Nutella jars in the front, one ranger called out. He and another ranger began discussing what they should do. The food was clearly visible for a hungry bear. Even if a bear didn't end up smashing through the windows in order to get to it, the rangers could still hit the offender with a hefty fine.

Finally one of the rangers wandered over to our chess game. She took a quick survey of the soup and other food, we had out.

Should we put that away? I asked.

It was alright, she said, but she wanted to know where we were staying that night. We let her know that we had one of the sites for backcountry campers apart from the major campgrounds.

“Just so you know, we are like, on bear red alert right now,” she told us. The other rangers’ lights going through the parking lot seemed to reinforce the NCIS feeling of the scene.

“In fact, you will probably see a bear tonight.”

Then she ran through the usual drill of how to store food properly and clear the car of anything, that a bear could want. Anything. Deodorant, antifreeze and camp fuel could all be temptation enough for a hungry animal to bash the glass in.

Usually, the bears usually don’t make a move if they see people around, she said. So we would probably be OK where we were in the parking lot, even if we hadn't done the best job keeping our food locked down.

The rangers finished up their sweep and it was just Andrew and I in the parking lot, playing chess.

I had him just where I wanted. A successful ambush had left him a rook down. Now I was only a couple of moves away from getting a new queen and then he’d be really finished.

Sure he had his own pawn advancing toward my side, but I was confident that I could squelch the puny rebellion with my piece advantage.

The problem was that my opponent wasn't looking at the board as though it were a fight that anyone could win. It was a math problem. Somewhere in the equation was the variable that would destroy my lead and give him the game once more. He stared endlessly at the board, trying to find out what it was.

Sure enough, there was an Achilles Heel in my defenses: his advancing pawn, which threatened to give him a queen and turn the tables on the game. I ended up having to move my knight to the last square to block it. I would have to kill the little troublemaker soon, or my knight would stay trapped and eventually die.

It should have been easy to knock out the pesky pawn, but Andrew’s remaining rook proved more troublesome than I anticipated. He used it to put me in check, then to threaten the knight itself. I tried to hold ground, but the mathematics of inevitability had turned against me.

“Sonofabitch!”

The circuits in my brain had heated up like an overloaded switchboard, racing through the permutations, searching for the sequence of moves that would win back victory.

Meanwhile, the knight held its outpost — about to fall to the enemy’s aggressions.

The knight fell. The pawn moved forward, and in its place rose a queen for my enemy. I was screwed.

I stared at the pieces in the headlamp beams, then toppled my king.

It’s a crappy feeling when you squeeze yourself dry trying to prevent something and then fall short. Then again, it could have been the best game of chess I’d played yet.
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We packed our food into the bear boxes at the edge of the parking lot and grabbed the tent.

Of course we talked about the game the whole way over to the tent site including the various turns of favor and how things might have turned out differently. Finally, we got to the site and quit talking so as not to wake the other campers. The starlight shone through the boughs of the sequoias.

We pitched the tent and zonked out.

But in my dreams I was that solitary headlamp on the chessboard, a lamp that swung deep into the trees, looking to find where the bears were hiding.