New York City is a town with a million tales to tell — images of meteoric success, sordid criminal affairs, elevator pitches, hard-luck stories, legends of loves won and lost — and sometimes it feels like all these unique, deeply felt personal memories are destined to be lost in time, like tears in rain. But c’mon now, we all still remember when a dead bear cub was randomly found in Central Park ten years ago, don’t we?
Yes, that’s right; some stories break through, and The One about the Dead Bear in the Park back in 2014 was an episode of Big Apple randomness that came unexplained and gently faded away in the same manner, lingering uncomfortably in a few memories as a mysterious occurrence akin to the Dyatlov Pass Incident. How in God’s name did a dead black bear cub — which the subsequent autopsy showed had been hit by a car — find its way to Central Park in downtown Manhattan? Bears can indeed be found throughout upstate New York, but it’s hard to imagine a lone cub crossing not only Westchester County but also the Bronx in order to meet an unlikely end in the leafy center of Manhattan Island. (With permission, an older gay friend of mine from NYC supplies some explanatory context: “It’s the city. I once ran into a bear in the bushes of Central Park myself, but that was a rather different scenario . . .”)
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