The Inside Passage. Open to everyone now?

Early last year I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do by way of a trip during the summer. I've always been quite interested in doing some of the Inside Passage. It looks doable as a solo trip. A good portion of it is in Canada and Canada is just full of nice. Nice scenery. Clean ferries. Nice people.

Really nice people. Like Stepford wife nice. Depending on what part of the world you're from it can really put you on edge. You're like all waiting for one with a knife to come up from behind and terminate you so your really nice robot double can take your place and move the diabolical Canadian plan of a world full of nice one step closer to realization. But, no, no knives. Just nice. So far anyway.

The one thing that's not nice though is that there are bears. I had a frightening experience with a bear when I was a boy scout and now I'm fairly content to just let bears alone. In general bears don't frequent the places I do, like restaurants, museums or bars, so I'm totally willing to stay out of the places they frequent, like portions of the Inside Passage.

I was mentioning this to a couple friends a while back and they laughed. They've been out millions of times and never had a problem with bears. They said.The bears, I told my friends, really had convinced them they were all:

Hello. Would you like a beer?

But I think bears are all:

GTFO!

There is, I think, a subtle but important distinction being demonstrated here. Yes, bears can be urbane. Charming. Considerate even. But they can also fucking eat you.

It turns out that Canada does not allow handguns. This probably has to do with an empirically determined inverse relationship between the number of handguns and the degree of nice in a given locale and Canada I guess tends to optimize for nice. Go figure. Nevertheless handguns are what I'm told is the best thing to carry in bear country because, again, bears can eat you and this is frequently not an outcome you desire for yourself and you might therefore want to stop them from doing so. But, to be honest, I'm not very interested in shooting a bear. It's really their house not mine and they're allowed to get cranky I think. Hell, if people shot me just because I got cranky in my house I'd be dead more from lead poisoning than trauma.

Ultimately though one thing we're good at down here is catering to most tastes for violence needs for self defense. Which brings me to the point of this. Taser has a wild life edition! You can check it out here. I'm guessing tasers are allowed in Canada since it's not a weapon (it's called an Electronic Control Device). I'll have to look it up to be sure, but it might be ok. That means I can head to the Inside Passage armed equipped with a device that will ensure all of us, the bears and I, are nice. Maybe not Canada nice, but at least please-don't-eat-me nice. And that's enough for me I think. Time to start looking at some charts.

Don't tase me bro!