Speakin' of explaining & too dumb to move,...
I went to an Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA) conference in Rapid City, SD in 1981 and rented a car for the week. The owner of a place nearby called Bear Country USA, a drive thru wildlife park, had attended and invited anyone to visit for free. I had a drink in the bar with him that night.
I had a late afternoon flight on the the day I was leaving, so I decided to drive over & see if there were any photo opportunities.
Each area had fences & cattle guards to separate the various critters into huge pens. One had about six black bears in residence. The dusty dirt road passed right thru the middle of it, and an "security" observer sat up in a tower about 20 feet high. If a visitor stopped in the enclosure, the observer would use a loud speaker system to say, "Please keep moving. Do not stop."
Naturally when I tried to take a photo, I heard the warning. So I made my first pass, stopped at the main headquarters and asked to speak to the owner if he was there. He remembered me from our bar visit. I asked him if there was a way he could contact the observer to tell him to ignore me if I stopped in the bear enclosure. He got on a radio & gave the order. Off I went.
I stopped about halfway thru, rolled down the window, grabbed a camera & waited for something photo worthy. While I was waiting, a pickup with two guys in it, pulled up and stopped about 50 yds. up the road. They jumped out and started tossing all sorts of the edible goodies out of the back of the truck. Every bear in the place headed to the breakfast table.
Soon after, a nice cinnamon-color boar headed my way. But he was walking down the road in front of me, so I couldn't get any pix from the side window. He finally got to my car & walked around to the passenger door, where he proceeded to latch his front claws in the space between the glass & metal. He then put his rear feet up on the lower door panel and started to rock the car. I had the feeling that he had done it before.
When he had enough of that after about 30 sec., he grabbed the sideview mirror and bent it into a somewhat unusable position with it hanging there by one screw. He then meandered around to my side of the car. I quickly rolled up the window, of course. So he decided to climb up on the hood, while I was trying to switch my camera lens to a wide-angle one. In the meantime, he had torn off the windshirld wiper and was now slobbering on the windshield. I got a couple photos thru the dusty smeared glass before he got bored and decided to go back to the food bonanza with his friends.
Once I was able to stop somewhere safe, I got out an inspected the damage. The top edge of the passenger door was pulled out about an inch from the glass. His rear paw prints were clearly visible in the dust below. I affixed the mirror as best I could with the screw that was left and my small screwdriver from my camera bag. The wiper was back on the ground in the bear impoundment where I left it.
A few hours later, I parked the car in the rental lot, took the shuttle to the terminal and turned in the paper work at the rental counter. I didn't say a word about the bear encounter, and I never heard anything from the rental agency in the ensuing days.
I have a scanned photo of the bear slobering on the windshield somewhere on a computer or online. I just can't recall where that somewhere is right now.
