Night Visitor

The memory is dream-like now, but some parts are vivid as if the events happened yesterday.

It was a summer evening in the early 1960s. My parents, older brother, and I joined my father’s younger sister and her family for an overnight trip to the Great Smoky Mountains. We piled into my uncle’s truck, most of us riding in the truck bed, for the two hour drive to East Tennessee from our home in Marion, North Carolina.

My family members were not seasoned campers. Our outdoor adventures had mainly been confined to short hikes in the woods near my grandmother’s house and leisurely Sunday afternoon drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was a short distance from our home. So this camping trip to the Smokies was unusual for us.

When we arrived in Tennessee, we didn’t seek a campground that offered picnic tables, grills, or bathroom facilities. Instead, we simply pulled off the road onto a grassy shoulder and entered the woods to make our campsite. 

We built no campfire to cook hotdogs or toast marshmallows. Rather, we ate the meal my mother and aunt had prepared at home and packed for our supper.

At dusk, while the rest of our group sat around and talked, I tagged along with my father and his brother-in-law as they strolled down a path for their final smoke of the evening. My father was a heavy cigarette smoker then, his pack of Camels always stored in his front shirt pocket.

As darkness fell, we settled down for the night. No tents, air mattresses, or sleeping bags had been brought for our comfort. Our tent was the starry sky and canopy of tree limbs above us; our beds, the patchwork quilts we spread on the forest floor. The mountain air, cool and pungent with the scent of firs and pines, was our coverlet.

Sometime in the night, I was startled from sleep by my mother who was awake and standing beside me. 

“What’s goin’ on?” I asked and stood, unsteady on my bare feet and rubbing my eyes, still half-shut from drowsiness.

“Ssh!” she responded and grasped my shoulder to quieten me and keep me still.

I noticed that others in our group, dazed and groggy, were awake, too. Everyone seemed to be looking at my father, who remained asleep on his quilt.

In the moonlight, we watched as a large black bear slowly circled my father.

The adults kept their children at a safe distance, and we were all hushed with fear, the only sounds being the bear’s paws crunching the undergrowth and my father’s vigorous snoring. As long as I knew him, my father was a deep sleeper and heavy snorer, and this night was no exception.

While we stood watching—no one shooing the bear, perhaps thinking that our noise would only anger it—the bear stepped onto my father’s quilt and sniffed it. Soon, though, it lost interest and ambled off into the darkness, leaving my father unscathed and oblivious to its presence.

The next morning, before we headed back home, we told my father about his night visitor. 

“It ‘bout stepped on you,” I said. “It was big.”

“Like Papa Bear?” he asked and smiled. He knew that “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was my favorite bedtime story—one he had told me many times.

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

My father had been a Merchant Marine during World War II, who ferried supplies in a Liberty ship, the SS Booker T. Washington, to England, France, and Belgium. During these voyages across the Atlantic, his ship entered the war zone and risked U-boat attacks. And now here in the Smokies he had faced another kind of danger. Yet he didn’t seem fazed when we recounted the bear incident. In fact, I’m not sure he even believed us.

But what we told him was true, and I have the memory to prove it.

After that brief but memorable camping experience, my family traveled many weekends to the Smoky Mountains to enjoy the unique culture of the Cherokee Indian Reservation and the colorful shops of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

During these weekend getaways, however, we spent our nights in a motel.