Cave Point

The first time I was shown Cave Point

in Door County near the tip of Wisconsin's thumb peninsula.............

it was 53 years ago. I was taken there by the parents of my girlfriend, to their traditional camping wilderness, a distant woods: Peninsula State Park. They wanted to show me one of their secret places, Cave Point, which is even now not widely heralded by road signs pointing the way.

You pretty much need to know how to get there, though the roads to it are now paved. Back then, they were winding dirt roads leading to the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, near Sevastopol. Now, there's a website (several): http://www.doorcountynavigator.com/html/gems/cave.html

Ironically, I was much later taken to Cave Point, after many subsequent visits - including some when he was a boy - by son David jr after my hospitalization for a repair to my heart, the self-same heart that always beat more rapidly with the excitement of approaching the drop-off cliffs, where one unprotected step further would see you plunging over the edge and, during windy or stormy weather, maybe being dashed against the time-eroded rocks below, deep within which the surf resounded like thunder under your feet. It gives one a funny feeling in his stomach.

The irony is that my son is the issue, with me, of that latter-day girlfriend. what goes around comes around.

My first familiarity with raccoons occurred within that earlier and much wilder surround of Peninsula S. P. The raccoons visited the farther-flung-than-now campsites, looking for what could be donated or stolen. Pre-macadam, I studied their ways, and I knew I liked them, but had no inkling that I would some day much farther down my own road edit a non-profit journal about their citified cousins. [There's more to this than I care to mention.]