I took a running leap before landing safely upon the ledge that was to be my resting place for the night. Just a little short, and I would have been a goner, falling to their waiting jaws. They were there, vicious, drooling mouths agape, ready in an instant, should I slip within their evil reach, to suck me down, down, down into their innards. Every evening it was the same as they came out to stalk the night alongside the lake where we waited in our little house deep and alone in the north woods. They could eat you before anyone ever even knew.

I don’t know if it was my Scandinavian upbringing or simply the imagination of a typical child, but the trolls, gnomes and other troubling creatures surely lurked about my childhood home. Our house was a tiny two room log cabin built by Danish immigrants. It had been added on to but was barely able to hold our family of five. There was only one room, perhaps 10×12′ that could really be called a bedroom. Mom and Dad slept there, just off the living room which then adjoined the kitchen. Off the kitchen were two doors, one leading to our small bathroom and the other leading to my sister’s 6×6′ room. My nineteen-year-old brother and I shared the hall, the only remaining room there was, perhaps 8×10′ which doubled as the rear entryway to our house. Can you picture it? There was only an open doorway between the kitchen and our hall. The basement door also came out into the hall as well as the outside entrance to our house. My brother, ten years older, shared a double bed with me. Can you not see why that room was surely haunted by monsters?

Lord only knows what might have silently, cunningly slipped up from that concrete block basement where the furnace rattled and shook, where the spiders and mice played, where my mother forced us kids to join with her in seeking shelter in the darkness of violent, summer storm-caused, power outages. And one could only imagine what sort of creatures lurked just beyond that flimsy screen door, hidden in the darkness of a night lit only by the moon and stars of the northern sky. During the winter, the lake, so close at hand, moaned and groaned as the temperature dropped. I had seen wolves run across that lake in broad daylight. The hoot of the owl and the whine of the north wind were frequent visitors. Surely these all could be signs of the vengeful beasts who longed to reclaim from humans this clearing in their forest. They must be ready to pounce upon any youngster who failed to stay alert in that house! I could not even let so much as my foot hang over the edge of the bed for fear of being dragged down forever! Do you wonder why I lay awake there, late, night after night, longing for my older brother, my protector, to arrive home from his factory job or from a date with some girl or other? Only then would I be able to finally rest easy and allow my weary eyes to close in peaceful sleep.

Monsters – in the summer, many nights we would have company, friends or relatives who would come over to fish with us. As darkness fell, everyone would come in off the lake and head up the hill to share a little lunch in our well-lit kitchen. Once company, fish in tow, headed home, I would be discharged from the house, to slink down that long, dark hill, past the swamp, to the very edge of the woods and lake, flashlight in hand, to retrieve the fishing poles, net, life preservers and other odd items from our boat. I faithfully kept my precious, life-preserving beam trained on those woods, swinging around as quickly as I could to scan the swamp behind me. But it is very hard, once loaded down with all the gear, flashlight now held in your mouth, to train that beam on anything other than the ground at your feet. So, to salvage any hope whatsoever of survival, it was necessary to sprint up that hill at full tilt until you finally reached the security offered by the too-faint glow of the back-porch light . . . Those dark night monsters never got me, but I can tell you it was close at times . . . To this very day the hair still sometimes stands up on the back of my neck when I find myself alone in some wilderness of darkness.

Thankfully, my brother usually did come home, finally, late, after work or after his date. And he did offer at least some small measure of security for me. Relieved, once he had climbed into our double bed, I would begin my ready-to-go-to-sleep ritual. I didn’t dare to start until he was home. Somewhere along the line, I had discovered how good a cool spot on the pillow felt. After all that stress, I needed my pillow to be cool. However, a warm, sweaty head quickly warms such cool spots; so, it would become necessary for me to make a few adjustments of that pillow prior to falling asleep. I found that I could get three cool spots running down one edge of my pillow and then three more running down the other edge by rotating the pillow left to right. Once the cool spots on the top side of the pillow had been used, I could turn it over and by the same process get six more cool spots upon which to lay my head on the bottom side. It all worked very well except for one thing. I still remember the night that it happened, the night the monster came to visit for real.

Apparently, my brother was especially tired, cranky or impatient that night and wasn’t falling asleep right away as he usually did. Apparently, my pillow rotation system began to cause him some amount of distress. Apparently, he didn’t think carefully before letting his little brother know of his concerns over my search for the cool spots on my pillow. It was then that the monster appeared!

“Lay still!” he hollered, “or I’ll slug you!”

I froze.

His words also echoed out into the kitchen, across the living room and through the open door into my parents’ bedroom. Apparently, the monsters had been keeping my father awake too, because it was only a split second before an equally loud shout returned:

“You slug him and I’ll slug you!”

A tense but peaceful quiet settled quickly over the house. I was safe for another night. I moved my pillow, carefully, to find another cool spot before slipping off to sleep. (Taken from Campfire in the Basement: Reflections from a North Woods Lake.)

Both books are also available from Amazon.