I Meet Dreaming Bear

Blue Ridge and Fannin County continue to amaze me. This place is like that commercial: characters welcome. Last Saturday I was introduced to one of the local characters. Her name is Dreaming Bear.

It happened at the monthly beer tasting at Grumpy Old Men Brewing Company in Blue Ridge. Grumpy Old Men is a nano-brewery formed by a couple of, well, old guys. Here’s a link to its website: Grumpy Old Men. Grumpy Old Men’s idea of a beer tasting is to charge ten bucks for a Grumpy Old Men beer glass and let you drink all the beer you want. Typically there are 40 or 50 people milling around out front having fun.

I was introduced to Dreaming Bear by a new friend. Dreaming Bear is a 71-year-old woman who lives on 70 acres on a mountain top in Fannin County. When I first met her she was pouring down glasses of beer with impressive gusto (as was I). Intrigued, I sat down and talked with her.

The first thing I wanted to know is how she got her name. (The entire time I was talking to her I could not get the old song Running Bear Loves Little White Dove out of my mind.) She said she got her name through a personal experience, but was reticent to give more details. The thought occurred to me that maybe she is in a federal witness protection program, and her case agent was a Native American who gave her the name as a joke.

I wanted to know whether Bear was her last name. If I entered her name in my phone, last name first, would it be Bear, Dreaming? If I wrote her a letter would the proper salutation be “Dear Ms. Bear”? I knew the answer, of course. You would never refer to Bull, Sitting or Horse, Crazy. I think she appreciated that my questions were in good humor and that I was well on my way to getting drunk.

She proceeded to tell me part of her life story. She is a lesbian, and her long-time partner died two years ago. She moved to Fannin County 33 years ago. I’ll give her credit. I bet it took some balls (well, not balls, but you know what I mean) to be openly lesbian in north Georgia 33 years ago.

She said that in the early days she was harassed by the county sheriff. Among other indignities, he would raid her property and take her “plants” and then sell them rather than arrest her and destroy the plants. I guess that means she was growing marijuana in the early 80’s. Thirty years of pot smoking may go a long way in explaining how she acquired the name Dreaming Bear. I didn’t ask her whether she’s still growing it.

She claims she was a crusader for gay rights in Georgia for years. She told me that Blue Ridge is one of the top three places for gays and lesbians in Georgia and that gays and lesbians are largely responsible for the transformation of Blue Ridge from a backward hillbilly town to the charming place it is now. She said (and I’m paraphrasing) that gays and lesbians have turned Blue Ridge into quite an artsy-fartsy community. I don’t remember reading anything about that in the tourist brochures.

Well, I couldn’t top that. I’m just a retired lawyer from Clearwater who’s been married for 35 years and has two kids. I did tell her that I have met at least one artist in my life while working as the city attorney for Tarpon Springs.

She said she wanted to start a raised bed garden on her property and that she was going to invite a bunch of her friends to help her. She intended to make a party of it by serving large quantities of alcohol. I volunteered to help. The offer of assistance was not pure altruism on my part. I suspect that an evening with Dreaming Bear and her friends will provide plenty of fodder for this blog.

When I was writing this post I googled “Dreaming Bear Georgia” just for the hell of it. I’ll be damned if she doesn’t have website: Dreaming Bear. I won’t comment on the website other than to say that it may be proof that she’s done a lot of hallucinogenic drugs in her life.

When it was time for Meredith to drive me home, I told Dreaming Bear that I wanted to have a Native American name too, and I wanted her to bestow it on me. She said that a Native American name was not something that someone gave you, but something that must come from within. After I sobered up I concluded that it was a good thing that Dreaming Bear did not give me a name. I might have ended up being called Prancing Beaver or Pink Buffalo.

So I’ve been thinking about it. The only names I’ve come up with are Dribbling Turtle, Farting Elk, and Bloated Antelope. It looks like I will have to go on a vision quest to discover my true and, hopefully, better Native American name. I’m thinking the next grumpy Old Men beer tasting would be a good time for a vision quest.

Now that I think about it, I may have a little artist in me. I've become the poet laureate of the Master Gardener groups in Fannin, Union and Towns County.

I was bored one day in my Master Gardener class and wrote a parody of the song “I am a Modern Major General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. The first verse goes like this:

I am the very model of a modern Master Gardener.
I’ve read the very latest in the scientific lit-rit-ture.
I know of flower gardening and matters horticultural,
I’m cautious with my pesticides and inorganic chemicals.
With a quick perceptive glance I know your leafy specimen
Suffers from the type of wilt that we call Fusarium.
When others freeze in panic and succumb to mass hysteria
I can calmly recommend a spray for your wisteria.
Whether perennial or annual or woody ornamental,
To me the proper planting steps are simply elemental.
I know the basic function of your xylem and your phloem.
Regardless of the type of plants—you name ‘em, I can grow ‘em.

I will be the first to admit this verse shows no talent whatsoever and is at best sophomoric doggerel. Even so, the Towns/Union County Master Gardeners thought enough of it to post it on their website. I am reminded of an old McDonald’s commercial that had the line: Gee, you’re easily amused.

Most of you will recognize that I am following the old adage well known to trial attorneys that if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, befuddle them with your bullshit. Maybe they won’t notice that I can’t identify more than five flowers and shrubs.

Now that the Master Gardener course is winding down, I am thinking about what I can do next to amuse myself.

Georgia has a Georgia Master Naturalist course. Becoming a Master Naturalist has some appeal to me. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference between the type of person who becomes a Master Gardener and the type of person who becomes a Master Naturalist. If Master Gardeners are aging hippies, then Master Naturalists would be what? Aging Euell Gibbons? Aging Eco-terrorists?

I was toying with the idea of becoming a certified arborist, but I learned that one of the requirements is that you must have full-time work experience in a tree-related field. I’m not going to spend the next two years of my life working full time at anything, much less in a tree-related field, so becoming a certified arborist is out.

That’s too bad. An extension agent who taught one of the Master Gardener courses said that there are almost no certified arborists in north Georgia. Not only would it be interesting to learn how to care for trees, but if I became a certified arborist I could have opened a little business on the side.

I had even given some thought to how I would advertise the business. I would run ads with me standing naked with my private parts covered by a bush under the caption “Got Wood?”

Meanwhile, spring keeps creeping up on north Georgia. Some of the trees are starting to show leaves, dandelions are popping up on lawns, and a number of shrubs and bushes have flowered. It won’t be long before its time to put my seeds into the ground. Man, that sounds like something Prancing Beaver would say. On that note I’ll end this post.