Story #9 “Site 77”

In the 80’s my family, and our dear friends Jeff and Karen would go camping for a week at MacKerricher State Park just north of Fort Bragg CA. Our first year there, we asked the Park Ranger if there were any sites that were in a private setting. He told us to check out site 77. Site 77 was small, but it had brush growing all around it except for the trail leading to it from the parking space. Both Families had large tents, and the only way to make them fit on the small site was to have the tents actually touching each other. The next morning we had bacon with our breakfast, and Kim dug a deep hole and buried the bacon grease. That evening we sat at the picnic table playing UNO, when Jeff said “there’s a huge skunk over there staring at us!” “Yea right!” I said. I thought he was joking. “Really, there is a huge skunk right behind you!” He said! As I turned around, I saw a very large skunk looking right at us! I jumped up and ran around to the other side of the table. It wasn’t very brave of Jeff and me, as we used our wives to shield us from the spray.

We finally got the skunk to leave the camp site and then we went to bed. It started raining, and a pool of water started to form on the roof of our tent. As I took a broom handle and pushed the water off, we heard Jeff and Karen yell, “you’re getting us all wet!” The water had gone through the door of their tent landing on their heads. Later that night we heard Jeff get out of bed, and a couple of seconds later we heard “Shew Shew Shew!” then “Don’t you dare spray me”, that’s when Kim and I started cracking up! The next morning Jeff told us “when I got up last night, there were skunks everywhere! There were Mama Skunks, Daddy Skunks, Children and Baby Skunks; it looked like the ground was moving because there were so many Skunks!” We looked over at the grease pit, and the skunks had dug the hole deeper then Kim had originally dug it. We had been eating popcorn while playing UNO the night before, and when the skunk startled us we knocked the popcorn all over the ground. The next morning there was no popcorn to be found anywhere on the ground.

The third day we cooked our breakfast, but this time we put the grease in a garbage bag, and took it to the dumpster. We then headed to the beach where Jeff and I found this log, and we rolled it down to the ocean. We stood on the log as it was moving back and forth with the waves. I had planned to only get my feet wet, however, in only a short time I was wet up to my knees, then it was my waist, and a few minutes later we were 100 feet off the beach hanging onto this log with seals popping up around us in the water. When we were done playing with the seals, we went back to camp and we got cleaned up, so that we could go to Fort Bragg and have dinner at a place called the Redwood Cook House. On our way out we stopped at the front gate and told the Park Ranger all about the Skunks, and we asked if there was anything he could do about them. The Park Ranger replied “Sorry, the Skunks were here first!”