Descriptive Essay: Hacking's Jackson Hole

People tend to believe that bad things can’t happen to them. We go through life seeing tragedies on the news and throughout the media. We understand them in our minds, but not in our hearts. It’s as if when the remote is clicked and the television goes black, the horrors of the world disappear. We seek the safety that is ignorance, and it is this facade of safety, that makes us vulnerable. I used to be one of these people.
It happened on my birthday. With a swift lurch forward, the gondola rose into the sky and the land below me began to fade away. Tourists sat around me snapping photos of the hazed Wyoming landscape. Each of them plump and blank, listening to the monotone voice of the gondola worker dispassionately describing the history of Jackson Hole. I stood out with my green …show more content…
I sat in a blackness incomparable to the shadows of home. The twilight had faded, and the fabric walls around me were nothing but a void. Crack. Snap. It must have only been a mere foot from my tent as it circled. Crack. The sounds crept to my feet. Snap. It stopped. There was silence. A brief silence, like the calm before a storm. And that is when I heard it: two powerful beastly inhales. My heart sank. My fears had been correct. It was a four-hundred-pound behemoth of pure strength and terror – a grizzly bear. My family had warned me of these monsters. I had seen it as a joke. “At least if I get mauled by a bear, they’ll have something to write on my tombstone,” I had said mockingly. But in that moment, I had no sense of humor.
I was a statue waiting for its next move. Should I make noise? I had read that bears are frightened of humans, but it certainly did not feel that way. If I were to make noise it would either be frightened off or startled. Even with my lacking knowledge, I knew to never startle a bear. It would only end badly and in blood, so I sat there in silence and continued to wait. The footsteps faded, but I knew it would be