Diane, Christine, Jeri, Joel, and our great big Diamond Brand Dome Tent. It was a good one.
Years ago Diane and I loved tent camping. We started out with a Winchester single-wall umbrella tent and we packed it and all our gear into the backseat of our 69 VW bug. We went all over the Blue Ridge Parkway in that car. We had our first child, Christine, so we had to put her in the back seat so the tent and camping gear went up on the roof in a carrier. Our family grew larger, we bought a bigger car, then a minivan, along with a much larger tent, and then two tents. The Blue Ridge was usually our destination of choice, and that never changed.
One August day in 1976, when Christine was just a couple of months old we packed up the Bug and headed to the Pisgah Campground on the Parkway near Asheville, NC. We arrived in the afternoon and picked out our site. It was on the far end of the campground next to a valley with what looked like a small trail going down the side. It was not a marked trail, but one made by washouts and other things. The view was nice and we had a cool breeze blowing up from below.
There were bear warnings posted at the Ranger/Check-in station. The warnings also included instructions to pack up all food and put it in your vehicle at night. Hikers had poles where they could hang their backpacks up away from critters. We followed those instructions. The sites had steel trashcans buried in the ground with a foot pedal that raised the ground-level lid so you could toss something inside. They were emptied every day by park personnel. The hope was this would discourage the bears.
We had been there a few days and we were enjoying our stay. We had chipmunks running across the table stealing crumbs and such. They were not afraid of people at all. We tried not to feed them, either by accident or on purpose, but they were so cute, that well we sometimes gave in to the temptation to hand one a cracker or something. I know that was a bad thing to do.
One night the moon was almost full, and it was so bright that it lit up the side of our tent. Diane awoke late to the sound of the trash cans being opened. She thought it was too late for the trash collectors to be coming around. The sounds started to fade as other sites has their can lids opened and shut. She was right, it was too late. The next morning we found out the trash collectors were not humans, they were bears. They left a trail of paper, plastic, banana peels, and other things throughout the campground along with piles of stuff that bears make themselves after eating berries, food scraps, and hikers. The last part is a joke, but the rumor is that is where bear bells are found, in one of those piles. This evidence of furry invaders of the park made us a bit nervous but not enough to leave, we loved it there too much to do that.
The next night the moon was even brighter and we lay awake in the tent wondering if we would have visitors again. We finally feel asleep. I don’t know how long I had been out when I awoke with the sound of snorting in my right ear.
“That can’t be Diane snoring, she is on the other side of me” I sleepily thought. Then the side of the tent came in and pushed against my head, That woke me up and made me sit up. I looked to my left and there on the side of our tent was the shadowy form of a standing bear cub leaning on our tent. Oh God, the mom must have been the thing poking my ear.
“Diane” I whispered “Diane, there is a bear on our tent.”
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“Diane”, I said as I shook her, “There is a bear leaning on the tent!”
She sat up and saw it.
“What do we do?” she whispered. “ There is nothing in here it should want is there?”
How should I know? Maybe it wanted us since there was nothing else. No food or anything like that, but we did have a two-month-old baby, and Diane well she was, oh never mind that couldn’t be it.
I could only think of one thing to do.
“GIT BEAR, GIT!” I yelled and it got. The shadowy form left the tent side, the tent stood back up. We looked at each other.
“I need to go to the comfort station,” I thought to myself but there was no way I was going out there.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Diane said, “But I am not going out there!”
I held out longer than her. She made a run for it just as the sun was coming up.
The next day we heard that a tent was shredded by a bear. A motorcyclist decided to attract them by spreading marshmallows around the tent. A Bear ate them and then decided there must be more of those sweet things where those came from and went inside looking for them. The camper went out the back door, lucky for him he had one, leaving the bear to its treasure hunt which didn’t take long.
The ranger telling us this story said that fortunately, they don’t get many people that stupid staying in the campground. They would have to trap the bear and move it a long way from the park due to his stunt. Hopefully, that would work and save the bear’s life. One time before they had a bear that was very aggressive while looking for food and they captured it, took it to the Outer Banks, and released it in the Pea Island Refuge. It walked all the way back to Pisgah. The final ending for that bear was sad. The moral of this story is:
“Don’t Feed the Bears!”
Some years later we were fall camping on Skyline Drive. We finished dinner, it was dark, and I was washing up by lantern light. Diane was helping our girls and Joel git, I mean to get, ready for bed when a family of skunks came walking up to our site. I do mean a family, four of them. Now, this bothered me almost as much as the bear, and I had no idea what to do.
“Diane there are four skunks out here!”
“Don’t kid me” she replied;
“I am not kidding, two are under the table and one is just looking at me. What do I do?”
“Well, don’t yell GIT!, I don’t think that will work” was her wise reply.
Thanks for that advice, which I didn’t say out loud. I grabbed a handful of ginger snaps and started throwing them like little frisbees into the woods. The skunks followed them. I waited, moved to the next site, and threw some more. Those striped creatures did not come back, and I finished packing up and put all the foodstuff in our car. I didn’t know that I left a pair of Diane’s gloves on the table. It had been cold and she was wearing them while cooking. The next morning we found them, still on the table, with the fingers chewed off.
I bought her some new ones.
We traveled all over the Blue Ridge, visiting small towns, hiking, and getting as much from the area as we could. I told my kids about the history of the parkway, repeated legends and tall tales to them and I also wanted to educate them. I told them the names of wildflowers and of trees. I told them that all those fields we passed with the round bales of hay were Shredded Wheat farms. Some were the round ones and some were the square ones and they sat out in the fields until they shrank down and could be put in cereal boxes. At first, they didn’t believe me, but I convinced them, and we also saw ones that were frosted. Jeri asked me about the fruit-stuffed ones and I replied that she really didn’t want to know where those came from. She insisted, so I told her that fruit was birds and bugs and other things that got caught in the shrinking process.
Jeri hates the above story. She admits that she believed me for many years and was mad when she discovered I had told her a big fat shredded wheat lie.
What can I say? It wasn’t a lie. Isn’t that how Shredded wheat is made?
Derrick
