That Time I Saw Something I Could Not Explain

When I was young, we lived near a highway life was hustling and bustling. I saw a bus wreck, hit-and-run, several trucks overturned and was awakened in the middle of the night countless times to broken down drivers needing to use the phone to get help all of this at the ripe old age of Six.

By the time I was Ten, I had PTSD and was pushing the washing machine against the backdoor to make sure no one could get in. Then finally, it came time to move, and as God often does in my life. I call it the Three voices. The First is subtle and offering. The Second is loud and abrasive. The Third is He unleashes chaos which is often the case chaos is my signal to do something now.

My parents, in a flurry, had to gather their stuff, and we had to move. Thankfully my grandparents had a spot graded for us in anticipation of this event, and my dad, a carpenter, promptly built a house, and we were well on our way to having a home and a new home far better than the roadside shack we once lived in beside old highway 80.

Mom would cook large dinners. She had twelve brothers and sisters, and they all showed up, (somehow I don't remember that many people before we moved, but once we settled in, they came in groves). So I found out I had Forty (Yes, I said Forty) First cousins (still blows my mind today), and my uncles all loved guns while my aunts would gather around the kitchen table and talk. I was grateful for this because there were no lights. It was the darkest dark I had ever seen. Sometimes it was so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

Mom shouted at me, "Go get your dad!" I then peek out the window, and dread came over me. I could see that night was falling. I was afraid of the dark and not afraid to admit it. Fear of stepping on a snake and this hill is called Copper Head Road (Not to be confused with the song, By the way). Because my grandpa found so many Copperhead Snakes in one day, I think he said there was Fourteen, and then my cousin found Eleven Two weeks later, and there has been a steady stream of them since and Rattlesnakes).

I get up off the couch. Flip the porch light on, step outside, and step off the porch. To my utter horror, there stood someone (or I thought it was someone). I scared it (I'm not sure what it indeed was). It scared me. It fell backward. I saw its arms fly out to catch itself as he went down. Then it looked me dead in the eyes; the light was funny his eyes were bright orange like you would see in a heating stove where the ambers are red hot, only beautiful and so far apart. I tried to scream, and there was no wind in my body to scream. He did too. Then he flipped over just like you or me would and started running on all Fours. I never saw anything like that before. What on earth am I seeing? Is it even human? It was my height, and I am about 5' 2"? I had watched the movie "Bat People" on TV in the '60s. Sure it wasn't something like that, was it?

I finally moved enough to figure out I could move, and off I went to the basement to get my dad. He knew something wasn't right. "What's wrong, son?" I explained what I had just encountered. I said this man was standing there! He wasn't having that.

He ran to the house, grabbed his shotgun, and promptly shot in the air. Then he gave me that "You're not pulling my leg" look. He stood with me and listened to me for a minute. He grew more sure as I talked. The next few days, we stood guard, watching every move in the bushes and listening to the radio to see if there was a prison break or if some stranger was on the loose and there was nothing.

Years later, I saw this video of a creature they called Bigfoot and was dumbfounded. I had on several occasions been out in the woods and had tiny rocks were thrown at me, which perplexed my mind. I had never heard of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, so that was alien to me. My friends would walk up the hill to spend the night would swear someone was walking along with them, yet none of us ever got hurt. Except for that time, I fell over a log trying to figure out what I was looking at; we'll discuss that story later.

I walked outside in a dash to go to the grocery store (I could drive now), and I met with my father bewildered and noise coming out of the woods like nothing I had ever heard before in my lifetime or since. My only words were, "Still doubt me?" He never called me a liar again. When he told the story, he made sure he noted my trying to say to him about it years prior. My friends, this is a true story. I can't tell you with one-hundred percent accuracy what I saw that evening. My therapist, however, is convinced I saw Bigfoot. She gets a thrill when I talk about it (I still think I sound crazy when I tell people). I say, "We should leave him alone and let him be who he is, without our interference. They don't need us to survive."