Brothers, Bears, and Bad Ideas: Happy Camp Days
Calvin Griswold here—yeah, the same Cal who's now runnin' a quiet little inn up in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But before the cabins, the crashes, the fires, and the endless remodels, there was a different life: growin' up in the wilds around Happy Camp, California, back in the 1970s and '80s, with four rowdy brothers who figured rules were just suggestions whispered by adults who didn't know how to have fun.
Happy Camp wasn't exactly a metropolis. It was a timber town on the Klamath River—big trees, bigger logging trucks, and kids who treated the whole forest like their personal playground. We were the Griswold boys: me (the middle one, always tryin' to keep up), big brother Kent (the brains, or so he claimed), little brothers Forest and Steven (the chaos twins), and the oldest, who we'll call "The Enforcer" 'cause he could bench-press a chainsaw and still outrun us all. Five boys, one beat-up house near the river, parents who worked long hours at the mill, and zero supervision after school let out. What could go wrong?
Plenty.
Take the summer of '78. We decided the Klamath River needed a homemade raft race. No store-bought junk—we lashed together old logs, inner tubes from logging trucks, and whatever scrap lumber we could "borrow" from the mill yard. The plan: launch from the bridge, race downstream to the old swimming hole, winner gets the last slice of Mom's blackberry pie. Losers swim back upstream.
We launched at dusk. The raft held for about 30 seconds before the logs started rollin' like a bad log-rolling contest. Kent went overboard first, screamin' about his new sneakers. Forest and Steven turned it into a dunking war. I ended up clingin' to a single tube, floatin' past a family of startled deer who looked at us like, "These idiots again?" The Enforcer rode the thing like a rodeo bull till it hit a rock and exploded into splinters. We all washed up downstream, soaked, laughin', covered in river mud and pine needles. No one drowned. Pie got eaten anyway—by raccoons, probably.
Then there was the Great Bear Scare of '81. We heard Bigfoot stories around every campfire (Happy Camp's got more Sasquatch sightings per capita than anywhere else), so we built a "bear trap" in the woods behind the house. Dug a pit, covered it with branches, baited it with a half-eaten baloney sandwich. Night falls, we're hidin' in the bushes with flashlights, waitin' for the monster.
What shows up? Not Bigfoot. A black bear. Real one. Sniffs the sandwich, steps right on the trap cover—crunch—and drops about four feet into our hole. The bear looks up at us, annoyed. We look at the bear, terrified. Steven yells, "RUN!" We bolt like our pants are on fire. The bear climbs out in about two seconds (turns out our trap sucked), ambles off with the sandwich. Next morning, Dad finds the hole, sighs, and says, "Boys, if you're gonna trap somethin', at least make it big enough to hold it." We never told him the whole story. Still haven't.
Or the time in '84 when we "borrowed" Dad's old logging truck for a joyride. Kent hot-wired it (he swore he learned from a TV show). We cruised the back roads, honkin' at deer, pretendin' we were haulin' the biggest load ever. Made it about three miles before the brakes decided they were done. Truck starts rollin' backward down a hill toward the river. We bail out, roll into the ditch like action heroes (except Steven face-planted in blackberry bushes). Truck stops inches from the water, engine still rumblin'. We push it back uphill—five scrawny kids against a ton of metal—sweatin', cursin', laughin'. Got it home before Dad got off shift. He never noticed the fresh mud on the tires. Or maybe he did and just figured it was another Tuesday.
We did dumb stuff. Dangerous stuff. Stuff that today would get Child Protective Services called faster than you can say "helicopter parent." But we survived—every scraped knee, every near-miss, every "hold my beer" moment (well, it was soda back then). Those years in the redwoods and along that wild Klamath River taught us more than any school ever could: stick together, laugh at the close calls, and never trust a homemade raft.
Now I'm out here in South Dakota, runnin' Restmore Inn with Vy, tellin' guests stories by the firepit. They think the vehicle crash and the house fire were wild. I just smile and say, "You should've seen the bear trap." Or the raft. Or the truck.
Life's short. Make it loud, make it messy, make it with your brothers. And if you live to tell the tales... well, that's the real win.