Yosemite - Part III

When I was a kid, my family had a puke green Nash Rambler station wagon. My dad loved these cars so much, we had two of them, the second being red and sporting one of those "push-button" transmissions. Whenever we took family vacations, we took them in the green Rambler. My dad had built a huge green wooden box that fit on top of the car and we would load it up with camping supplies, leaving plenty of room inside for my parents, and my three brothers and me, and, in the very early years, my sister. It was a full load of kids and that big box was much needed.

When we would camp, we had at least two tents, one big one for the older kids and a pup tent that my brother Keith and I would share. My parents slept in the back of the Rambler. I think my parents would also keep the food in the car for safe keeping and one night in Yosemite my mom woke up to the jostling of the car, only to find the back window of the station wagon completely blocked by the body of a bear. He could smell the food in the car and was standing up on his back legs and rummaging through the big green box on top looking for the food his nose was telling him was somewhere nearby.

This was before the days of the iron bear boxes that they now have at Yosemite. It's a beautiful valley, but there does not appear to be much that can be done about the bears there. For some strange reason, I have bears on the brain this weekend.