Black Bear Exposes Drug Lord

My grandparents have stories to rival Tim Burton's Big Fish. Seriously. From my grandfather's stint with the Eskimos in Alaska where he tried whale blubber to taking a dinghy filled with his family (young kids) from Vancouver to Seattle across the Puget Sound after the currents changed and dolphins leaped across the bow from one enormous wave to the next. Yup, they have some crazy stories, and what's crazier is they're all true. It's pretty much expected that every few months or so I'll hear some elaborate tale of something crazy that happened at one of their apartment complexes, on the "ranch", or in their little sleepy twin cities of Lewiston and Clarkston.

The current story of note is the black bear chase. My grandmother and aunt were doing some outside work at one of their apartment complexes when they noticed the sheriff with a gun. As he drew nearer, grandma saw that it was a dart gun. Suddenly, they noticed a 300+ lbs. black bear ~15 feet away from them. The sheriff yelled to them to go inside where it was safe. Apparently there were a lot of folks and children drifting outside to catch the excitement. Before the bear chase ended, he leapt over a fence into a neighbor's yard. That neighbor heard all the commotion with the police regarding the bear, so he was desparately trying to pull up his organic marijuana garden. As he pulled up the plants and threw them over the fence, one of them landed on an officer. Needless to say, the green thumb drug-pusher and his wife were locked up, a bear was shot, and then life went on as normal in the valley.

Apparently, marijuana grows very easily and frequently in this part of the country. After all, Pullman, WA is only a mere 30-45 min drive away: home of Washington State University and a medical cannabis research lab. In fact, my grandfather had large piles of fertilizer on one of the pastures. He saw a strange leafy, green plant growing from it. He pulled it out to analyze it since it wasn't anything indiginous that he'd ever noticed before. Soon enough, a field employee recognized it and eagerly said he'd help my grandfather "dispose" of it. My grandfather soon realized this guy sounded way too excited about a weed in his fertilizer, so he called the police and had them remove it.