Blog Challenge Day 17

Your favorite memory.

I have thought and thought on this challenge for a quite few days. I have plenty of memories, but I am not sure that I have a favorite one. I don't tend to dwell on memories in the past a lot, but I do spend a lot of time planning things in the future, which of course doesn't always work out. Mom thought I should share my earliest memories, but I wrote a couple of those down just now and they were pretty boring...so I deleted them. Memories are usually something that are best shared, and the best of those are the ones that come up over and over in stories told amongst friends or family. So I would have to say the memory that is most hashed and re-told in my family is the Infamous 4th of July at the Cabin.

This all starts on a 4th of July long weekend when I was around 8. We still go up to our cabin near the Canadian border every year and in those years we went in the middle of the summer. My Mom and Gram andI would drive up in our truck and my cousin David and wife Leslie (well, not at the time...but later) would drive up in theirs. Now I know you are thinking sweet cushy multi-room cabin on a lake, but in reality it is a single room miner's cabin with no electricity, running water or cell phone service, near a beaver pond that smells like rotten eggs with a million mosquitoes hunting you down...and it's better than any cushy cabin could be. We have to drive in our food, water, bedding, etc. and that's why it takes two trucks to do it. At those times David and Leslie lived in Yakima, so we would all drive up together. That year the holiday fell on Friday, so we were driving up on the 4th. It was really hot and as we were getting further into the mountains you could see thunderheads developing. We stopped at a small gas station and noticed that there was a required permit we needed to have to build a campfire, which we couldn't get because it was a holiday. We made it up to the cabin and rushed to get the cabin cleaned out. The wildlife move in as soon as we move out and a packrat had made our cabin his (or her) home while we were gone. David used the pistol we brought (along with an assortment of other guns...it's the mountains) to kill the packrat. While I was holding the dogs in a safe place away from where David was shooting, Mom and Leslie and I saw a truck go by with kids sitting on the tailgate. There are other miner's cabins up in the mountains by us, so we figured it was someone staying up at one of those. My Gram shouted something at them, probably about how they were on private property and to get the hell out of there, because that was her typical line. Since we had the dogs with us and we didn't want them eating the packrat, David buried it behind the cabin. Just as we got the last of the stuff in the cabin the sky literally opened up and it began to pour. Leslie had already started a campfire with the nest material from the packrat and other branches and junk that was in the camp, and the fire was going pretty good. Now along with the rain came thunder and lightening and when I was little I HATED thunderstorms. They are no picnic now to me, but I would get physically ill just thinking it was going to thunder when I was younger. So I was in the cabin in my bed with headphones on and my head under a pillow. The rest of this is what I have only heard. At some point Leslie noticed a car or truck pulling up because she called to Mom and Gram, "Here comes a forest ranger and we've got a fire." But it wasn't a forest ranger. There were actually 4 or 5 cop cars on the road beyond some trees that hide our cabin and there were cops coming through those trees with flack jackets on and big guns. They yelled for everyone to come out of the cabin and put your hands in the air. So Mom and David and Leslie all came out with their hands up, but my Gram came out to the top step and put her hands on her hips and said "This is private property and you have no right to trespass here!" My Mom yelled that I was in the cabin and was too afraid to come out. Gram kept arguing with the police and my Mom finally said "Shut up Mom and put your hands in the air before they shoot you!" So finally someone asked what this was all about. And they said that a group of people had called into the police saying that they saw a man with a gun pointing it at a woman who was on the ground screaming and they thought he was going to kill her. We figure this was the group of people that drove by with the kids on the tailgate. We told them what really happened, that we were killing a packrat. They asked to check our guns and had us dig up the packrat and took everyone's IDs and probably had them checked. About this point we all started to get friendly. They told us where they had come from...Chewelah, Kettle Falls, Colville and Spokane. There was even a K-9 unit that was called in because they thought it was a drug raid, not something that is uncommon in that area. We were so sorry and my Mom said to one of the guys, "This is the 4th of July!" and the guy said, "Yeah and I had my hamburger thisclose," holding his hands in front of his face. We laughed about it the whole time we were there. When we were hauling in the old table we leave up there someone dragged it to the door of the cabin leaving two long drag marks in the dirt. It made it look like we had dragged a dead body into the cabin after all.