Remembrance of Things Past

I was reading my friend Susans blog"Trout Towers" which you all should search out since I'm a dummy when it comes to linking other blogs and she was talking about taking her kids blueberry picking and childhood memories when I thought what a great idea to "borrow".I sometimes recall moments like that with my brothers kids but as for my own childhood memories of the sort most involve our family camping trips.Most of these can be backed up with slides or photos but some just live on in memory.When we first camped we went to the Adirondacks each summer and my enduring memory is going to the dump at dusk of whatever town we were near.For in those black and White days the dump at dusk in the Adirondacks meant the Bears came out for pre theatre dining.It was like going to the drive in.A bunch of cars would be parked by the dump mostly station wagons and one by one the bears would appear to start ripping boxes open and eating garbage.Sometimes a dumb human would roll down the window of a car and offer food which brought the bears out into the audience.In 1965 we went west to the natl parks and the bears were all over.In Yellowstone where we camped the trash cans were in the ground at each site with the lid at ground level.My father one morning saw a small bear pull the lid off so he told us to stand behind the trash can for a pic.So my brothers and I stood while my father adjusted his lens and adjusted some more while the bear started taking backward glances at us and my father continued to play with the camera and just as he snapped the shot the bear rose and it wasn't so little anymore.Luckily the noise of the camera shutter spooked it and Yogi ran off into the woods.Another great childhood memory on that trip was some town in Wyoming ,Thermopolie or something close where my father made us all take the sulfur/mineral baths in a large indoor tub.My mother refused to go on the ladies side and she said we smelled like rotten eggs for two days.There was the trailer park in South Carolina where my brother yanked off a sink faucet and flooded the bathroom my father and the owner of the place digging a rather large hole in the ground to find the shutoff valve and the owner giving us the Stink Eye when we pulled out next morning and a year later in South Carolina a bit farther south in a trailer park on our way to Florida my father got a bargain price at the end of a meadow by some tracks that turned out to have 9 trains come through that night.I'll never forget the sound of the first one as it came close and then sounded as if it was coming right through our camper trailer.By the third one we were all laughing though you couldn't here us because of the roar of a wide open freight train by a meadow in the South Carolina countryside.Forget the tourist things I have a lot more of these memories than any Monument or battlefield.