AUGUST 15, 2026 – Anyone who grew up with a family cabin or camp or cottage tradition knows the principal features—a lake, trees, a hammock, watercraft, swimming, fishing, s’mores, three family generations, sunsets, moonrises and star-gazing . . . and, of course, a cabin or cottage. Did I miss something? Oh, yeah. Wildlife.
This morning while seated out on our screen porch at our family lake cabin, our guests inquired about the bears in our woods. My wife took the lead in responding. Her initiative was appropriate given that between the two of us, she’s had more sightings and close encounters with the local black bear population. Our company was impressed.
Soon we turned to other subjects of conversation as we ate muffins and sipped our coffee. Some of our crew still slumbered. Others were otherwise engaged, including our daughter-in-law, mother of two young kids, who’d decided to take advantage of a few minutes of calm before the storm and squeeze in a 30-minute run.
“Is she training for a marathon?” I asked our son. It was a fair question. During our visit to their home in Connecticut last June, she’d quizzed me thoroughly about my own marathon training.
“No,” he said. “She’s just trying to stay in shape.”
The general conversation among four of us continued.
Suddenly, my eye caught a bright pink running shirt as our daughter-in-law dashed along outside the length of our screen porch and pulled up to the entrance like a self-driving getaway car that had just lost the cops and was now trying to lose its sole occupant.
“I saw a bear!” she said, her face flushed and sweating as much, no doubt, from her encounter with wildlife as from her four minutes of cardio-exercise.
With eyes and ears wide open, we were eager to hear every detail. She’d taken off down our narrow dirt drive that winds a third of a mile from the back of the Red Cabin.
“At the end, just before the big hill you have to drive up,” she said, “a bear came out of the woods and looked at me.
“I stopped, and my heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Where was I to go? I stepped backward as far as I could, trying to distance myself from the bear as fast as possible. The bear then shook itself off and headed into the woods. I turned around and ran as fast as I could back to the cabin.”
This real-time exposition of our daughter-in-law’s encounter with a black bear set off a flurry of overlapping questions that me think of a presidential press conference.
“Did you get a picture of the bear?” asked my wife.
“No. I didn’t dare take the time. I didn’t want to take any chances,” said our daughter-in-law. “What if other bears were around? What if the bear I did see decided to chase me? What then?”
“I can’t believe we were just talking about bear sightings up here,” said my wife.
For the next five minutes all of us participated in a highly animated conversation about the most recent sighting: the one our daughter-in-law had just experienced. I then noticed her futzing with her phone.
Eventually, her frown turned positive. “Hey, everyone. Listen to this. I just checked the app that keeps track of my workouts. It says I just set a PR for a one-kilometer race!”
We all laughed spontaneously. Of course she set a PR! Who wouldn’t under such circumstances?
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
