UNK

All my cousins and brothers called our uncle Harold, "Unk."  He was the only one in my extended family who had any money.  We all thought he was rich because he was a traveling pharmaceutical salesman and always had a newer car.  In comparison, in 1962, our family car was a 1955 station wagon with 110,000 miles on it and rusted floorboards.  He also had a boat and it even had a motor.  It was about 16 feet long and had a 15 HP outboard. 

Unk was the one uncle who took all the boy cousins camping in the summer.  We would always go to a state park and sleep in tents with sleeping bags.  We would cook our fameous stew ( a story for another time) and fish or hike.  One trip was to the mountains and was memorable due to the unexpected visitor in the night.  During the middle of the night, I heard some noises coming from outside the tent and woke my cousins who were in my tent.  The noise was of things being knocked around, banged, and generally abused.  We whispered about what it may be and finally decided it was someone who had stumbled into something in the dark on the way to the bathhouse.

Next morning, we were shocked to learn the source of the noise from Unk.  He told all of us that it had been a pair of black bears rumaging through the trash cans.  When we asked if bears had ever come into campers' tents, he only said that he had only heard of that happening once and that it was actually an accident on the part of the bear when it tripped on the tent cord and fell into the side of the tenr.

There was not much sleeping the following night in our camp.