All throughout my life my family has always gone camping, it’s a very fond part of my childhood and always brings a smile to my face when I reminisce those days. One of the places we frequented was lake placid, NY where we stayed in this paved campground filled with log cabins. The owner of the place was a somewhat short and pudgy man with short scraggly hair and looked at the time to be in his late 40s or 50s maybe. I believe we had stayed there previously with no issue and decided to come back for the Fourth of July. Without our knowledge things started to unravel before we had even gotten there. Our family friends arrived before us and started to clean their room since it hadn’t been done yet. This for some reason royally pissed off the owner of the campground and started us all off on the wrong foot. When we arrived, the trip was going as usual. Me and my family friends were in middle school at the time so we spent our stay playing cops and robbers on our bikes or riding down into town to swim in the lake. This took place around 2012 I’d say.
One night during that long weekend, we did the usual and grilled food by our campfire while me, my brother, and my friends played around the property. As we ran around close by our families, I noticed the owner walking around the cabins and I really didn’t think much of this as I was having too much fun. But one of my friends did and walked up to him. I had no idea this happened until later that night but he apparently took an interest in him because he noticed the man was casually walking around with a rifle. He asked the man what he was doing and simply said “I wanna show your dad something.” We really had no idea what was going on around us until the serene summer afternoon was filled with the angry shouts of one of my friends dad. When I looked over I saw him grabbing the rifle from the owners hands and throwing it away from him and onto the pavement. He yelled something akin to “ wtf are you doing with that? There’s kids running around here.” We all took this as the universal sign to get the hell out of there and we all ran back to my cabin as it was the biggest. I locked the doors and put on the tv to calm down my younger friend as she was now crying, as muffled shouting could be heard from outside. We were pretty freaked out as all of our parents were still out there with that guy and all we knew was that he had a gun. After maybe 10 minutes police arrived and took the man away and questioned the rest of us and our parents.
Later that night we heard the full story. The man approached our parents while we were playing and offered to buy a burger and beer from them. But since my parents are nice they offered all that to him for free. This beer, unbeknownst to my parents was far from his first that night. I guess he lingered for too long and wasn’t getting the hint that they just wanted to relax by themselves so one of the adults kindly told him this which sent the guy off. He then took off his shirt and tried fighting my friends dad. My father started to record this as he suspected he would have to call the police very soon. They got the man to leave eventually. That alcoholic asshole then got a rifle from his collection in the cabin he lives in. He was too inebriated to load the gun but he tried as he walked around which is what my friend saw and asked him about.
The owner was taken away by officers and one came back the next day to tell us we had a temporary restraining order against him for the rest of our stay. I always dread to think about what might have happened if he wasn’t too drunk or got lucky when trying to loading that gun.