The Winner of "Fat Bear Week" & The End of Quiet Quitting
Fat Bear Week ended Tuesday! I missed it too. I missed voting for the fattest bear in Katmai National Park (Alaska). This is a real competition with real bears in a wilderness area in Alaska. But 70,000+ others did not miss it! They’ve been tuned in to this extraordinary webcam where you can watch these bears in action as they pack on the pounds for winter. (This is not strictly ursine behavior, however, right? We all do it too, but there’s no webcam on our fridge, thank goodness!)
I share this with you because Katmai National Park is in my neighborhood, just 50 miles from Harvester Island, right across the Straits. (Harvester is near Larsen Bay.) And here in Kodiak we deal with bear issues nearly every day. So I feel a kinship with these fat bears. Shall we see some of the competitors?
Here is Holly, who was a favorite and a front runner for some time. She ended up being runner-up, losing by 7,000 votes. But clearly a winner in her own right.
The winner, with a total of more than 37,000 votes, was——drum roll———a bear so big he needs numbers rather than letters to describe his impressive girth: “747”
Here’s the founder of the competition who gave up all neutrality and urged votes for 747:
"Friends, humans, and ursids, let us stand in awe of a true competitor," writes Mike Fitz, a former Katmai park ranger and currently a resident naturalist for explore.org, the organization that livestreams the bears. "A candidate with conviction. A candidate with strength. A candidate that stands up for what he believes. A candidate the size of a double-wide refrigerator. This Fat Bear Week vote for the mighty 747."
And they did.
I’m following this bear story for one more reason. Most of us have heard of the “quiet quitting” going on in the workplace, when workers decide to stop working so hard at work. Voices on tiktok and other media urge people to just punch in, do the minimum required, enough to keep from being fired, then punch out and live the rest of your happy life elsewhere.
It’s meant to be freeing, to give people space for mental health, to combat overwork. Some people need some measure of this. But what a strange formula for happiness. Doesn’t not caring about those 8 hours of work make work longer, harder, less rewarding? Doesn’t ennui at work make work worse?
So where do the bears come in? Lest you’ve forgotten them, here are my own pics of bears at Katmai. (Taken while standing about 50 feet away. They were so focused on feeding on salmon they paid no attention to me and my friends standing in the water nearby.)
I saw for myself —-these bears work. It’s not easy to chase down food every moment of the day. And if they don’t, they won’t make it through the long winter. Ennui would kill them. Ennui kills us too. Haven’t you seen the dead eyes of an employee who hated her job?
Last year, in my travels, I entered a busy women’s restroom in an airport. A vivacious woman with a mop in her hand greeted each of us in line enthusiastically. “Welcome to my office! I am Rozette,” she grinned broadly, as she swung the mop across the floor. She had much more to say and I listened, entranced by every word. I left her a generous tip.
I haven’t loved all my jobs, like waitressing for 3 years at the worst restaurant in town (Howard Johnson’s). Nor have I loved all the jobs I didn’t get paid for (fishing, mending net, cleaning toilets in a household of six males.) But I have tried to love the people I’ve served. St Catherine of Siena wrote, “You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love.”
No matter where you work, no matter how little you like your job, find a way to love the people you work with and for. Why? you ask. What’s on the other end of it? Do you know how wide, how deep, how strong love can grow us?
Love can grow us as beautiful and strong as a bear who’s eaten a river of salmon all summer long.
Jared Lloyd photography:https://jaredlloydphoto.com/2018/09/04/teaching-bears-fish/
