April Fools' Business

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

That bit of wisdom is one of my top-10 favorite all-time gems of philosophy. It obviously did not originate in Washington D.C., so it must have been a Greek named Plato.

I am writing this column on Sunday, April 1, 2018 because I again forgot to do it last Friday like I am supposed to. That’s my feeble excuse for making it a short effort before we go up to daughter Wendy’s home for Easter dinner. It is also a very good excuse for passing along a yarn which completely ignores “unmitigated seriousness” on April Fools’ Day.

“Grizzly bear milk is 10 times richer than human milk…” That is what I once read in a famous grizzly bear report from biological research papers.

None of the people I run around with had ever milked a grizzly bear, so I unsuccessfully tried to find one who had. Ranger Gniadek up at Glacier Park said the Grizzly Almanac quotes a 33 percent fat content for the big bears and 3.5 percent for human milk, but he didn’t know who milked the griz to get that important information.

I actually had the perfect chance several years ago when a lactating female was snared and tranquilized at Moose City by the grizzly recovery team. She was immobile for over and hour, but it never once occurred to me to milk her. I don’t know what I was thinking about to miss such a wonderful opportunity.

This reminds me of an old Klondike story about a North Dakota guy who went to Alaska and didn’t like being called a “chee-chako” tenderfoot. I don’t recall if he was Swede or Norwegian. Anyway, he asked some miners and trappers in a bar how he could get accepted as one of them. They told him he had to swig a quart of Yukon moonshine, then go fight a grizzly bear and end the day’s test by making love to a wild Eskimo woman. Ole immediately drained the quart of whiskey and headed out into the bush.

Three hours later, he staggered back into the bar. His clothes were in shreds and covered in blood. There were tooth marks all over his body. Ole ordered another quart of moonshine, drained it down and then asked, “Vell, all right you guys, yust vhere iss dat Voman I’m supposed ta fight?”

I hope you all had a wonderful April Fools’ Day.

G.George Ostrom is an award-winning columnist from Kalispell.