Too Bigfoot To Fail

Coming back to work after a vacation is always a little weird---It's even worse walking back in after five days in the hospital. I dropped my pack at my desk and found my co-workers in the stacks.

"I'm back," I said.

"How you doing? Man, you had me worried," said Zach.

"I'm up and around. Feeling fine," I said. "They sent me home Wednesday. No further problems."

"Can I give you a hug?" Holly asked.

"Of course," I said, and hugged her. I felt her hitch a little bit, and I said,"It's okay. It's okay. I was only dead for half a minute."

"You scared us," she said.

"I'm fine. Back at work now, and things are okay. Promise."

"You gonna be able to be at the first aid training Wednesday?" asked Julie.

"Yeah, I should be okay for that."

"Hey, Lou, my neighbor had a Bigfoot sighting while you were in the hospital," said Pam.

Sometimes my co-workers greet me this way.

I said,"Oh, yeah? Where at?"

"Up on the Lusk Run Road. She and a friend were riding horses, and it was getting dark. She said the horses got very skittish, and then she saw Bigfoot, along the side of the road."

"Interesting. That's not the first time Bigfoot's been sighted up there. Someone saw Bigfoot up along Lusk Run Road around this time of year in 1990."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah, I've written about it a couple of times."

I thought it over. The Lusk Run Road runs the back way from Lock Haven to Mill Hall, and thought most of it is residential, there are some wooded areas. Couldn't rule out the fact that it might have been a bear....

"She says it definitely wasn't a bear," added Pam.

"I'm gonna have to go check this out," I said. "Thanks, Pam. Haven't had as much to do since getting home."

"What do you want to do for Father's Day?" Michelle asked across the table.

I took a sip of my coffee. "I don't know, I hadn't thought about it. You know I don't really do much for that. Wouldn't mind going out and looking for Bigfoot later."

"Okay," Paul agreed.

"Got some laundry to do today, if I get a chance."

"Oh, yeah, the dryer is making another noise," Michelle said. "I think we need a new one."

"I go to the hospital for one trip...."

"We can go to Lowe's. I have the credit card there."

"Is it open tonight? Maybe we can go after dinner."

"I think it's open until eight," said Michelle. "We could ride out."

"Can we stop by Wal-Mart on the way?" Paul asked. "I want to get another of those Starburst sodas."

"No reason why not," I said.

You have to love Lowe's. You can create a whole house pretty much with one trip, if that's your inclination. Their motto is "Let's build something together," which I find to be inaccurate as it makes it sound like they're gonna come hand you the hammer, but otherwise, pretty cool place.

"Wow," Paul said, looking into a refrigerator. "This is the kind I'm gonna get when I'm grown up and have a house of my own."

"Thought you were gonna live with us forever," I said. "Which would be okay."

"I'm thinking about it."

Michelle walked along the row of washers and dryers. "What kind do we have now?" she asked me.

"I don't....I think the washer's an LG. The dryer....I don't know, how long have we owned that thing?"

"Do we want a front-loader or a top-loader?"

"You're the one who's always complaining because you're too short the reach the laundry in the washer---"

"You're right. Side."

Marriage. Jesus.

After around twenty minutes, she'd settled on a model. We put in the order and then rode across to Wal-Mart, where Paul and I went to find his candy-flavored sodas.

He picked up one, and I checked the price.

"A buck eight? Paul, for that price I'll get you two or three of these if you want."

"Okay." He selected two other flavors, and we checked and and went to the Jeep.

On the way home, Michelle drove us down the Fairpoint Road. It's the long way home from Mill Hall, but, you know, Bigfoot. I said,"About here is where the sighting was."

It was a wooded area, sort of wedged in between the residential neighborhoods. Paul said,"What were they doing out here?"

"Riding horses, apparently. They were riding horses and they saw Bigfoot along the side of the road."

He squinted. "Wasn't there another Bigfoot out here?"

"Yeah, back in the nineties. I wrote an article about it. You remember that?"

"We came out to get pictures once."

I looked over the terrain. "Gotta admit there's plenty of food for a Bigfoot. Water supply."

"Can we go home now?"

"Yeah, let's head home. I can follow up more later."

With my career, I've been invited into most of the buildings in Lock Haven. Especially the old ones. The older a building is, the more likely I've been inside it at some point.

I'd never been in the ambulance building on Liberty Street. It was a comparatively newer building, and until that morning, I'd never had the chance to go inside it. I was directed up the stairs into a conference room on the second floor.

I sat down in the front, because nobody else was there. The instructor lowered the lights and started a video, which showed EMTs arriving in an ambulance and giving CPR. And that hit a little too close to home at the moment.

I found Tif at work, in her office. She looked at me and said,"Dad, sit down. What's wrong? Are you hurt? Do you need to go back to the hospital?"

"No. No. I just...." I collapsed into a chair. I felt tears in my eyes. "I just had the mandatory first aid training for work. It....It was pretty bad."

"What happened?"
"A lot of the stuff they were showing is actual stuff that was done to me last week. And if you've ever wondered what it was going to take to traumatize your father, I think we've nailed it now."

"You had to die before something felt traumatic to you? That affected you more than you let on."

"I was okay in the moment. But being required to sit and watch all of that, this soon....It was terrible. It really hit me."

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Gonna have to be. I have a tour for Piper in an hour, and another one on Saturday."

Tacos for dinner. Paul's favorite. As we sat at the table, I said,"Hey, Pipper. Get this---something cool."

"What?"

"I got a message from Tami today, from the ghost-hunting team. She was out behind Millbrook Playhouse, and she thinks she encountered Bigfoot. She heard something really big in the woods nearby."

"Cool! Is that near where we looked?"
"Overland, it's not too far off. The woods connects Millbrook to the Fairpoint Road, and it's basically on the southern end of the Bucktail Natural Area, which means it's up against a whole lot of forest. It's not a huge stretch to think that Bigfoot is roaming the forest and occasionally coming out on the busy end."

"Are we going back out there?"

"I think we should check it out, yeah."

 I got my stitches out Friday. It left me with a slightly swollen place and a scar on my lower lip. I kept glancing at myself in the mirror. Saturday night, Paul planned a sleepover with his little friend Rylan, and we wound up eating dinner at Burger King.

"Tell you what," I said. "After we're done, we got a little time. How about we ride out to Mill Hall and follow up on that Bigfoot sighting I got from Tami?"

"Yeah," said Paul.

I looked at Rylan. "What do you think? Bigfoot?"

She grinned and nodded.

As we left, thunder as beginning to roll over the mountain to the north. We rode in the Jeep out to Mill Hall, in a small wooded area behind Millbrook. Michelle said,"Where are we going?"

"Up here---Right near the bridge."

She pulled us over on the opposite side of the bridge, near the creek. I got out, with Paul and Rylan following.

I walked down to the creek, pulling out the litmus paper. I tore off a piece and handed it to Paul.

"Rylan!" he said. "We get to do water testing!"

I handed a piece to Rylan, too.

We all tested the creek. There were a couple of fishermen upstream, under the bridge. The paper came back a light shade of green. I didn't have to check the chart; I'd seen it enough times.

"The water's drinkable," I said. "That's a start."

Paul and Rylan explored around the creek for a little while. I walked up to the rode, jumped the guardrail, and walked across the bridge to the forested area. It was beginning to rain, and I briefly considered going back to the Jeep before I decided that I was not as weak as the hospital had made me feel.

There was a place in the forest that was all stomped down. Something big had been sleeping there. Could be a deer. Could be a Sasquatch. There were berries around---Raspberry bushes. A lot of them had been picked. I could hear a rooster in the distance.

I looked around a while. There seemed to be a cherry tree growing, as well. It's one of the rules for cryptids---You gotta look where the food supply is.

In the rain, I walked back to the parking area. The kids were playing around in the clearing. 

"Did you find him?" asked Rylan.

"No, but there are maybe signs," I said. We climbed into the van. "This forest area isn't very big, but as you go north it connect with Fairpoint Road, and above that, Bucktail Forest. So there's a lot of forest space to the north. Here on this end, there's a safe water supply. There's berries, fish, and even chickens."

"So Bigfoot could be coming for food," said Paul.

"Could be. It's not proven, but it's plausible."

When I got up the next morning, my heart monitor and the phone that came with it were charged; I'd had them plugged in overnight. I grabbed a shower while I didn't have the patch on my chest, then stuck everything back on and walked downstairs for coffee.

I sat and looked at the phone part of the monitor, and ran a quick test. No odd signals; my heart was doing just fine. They still didn't know what had caused it to stop in the first place.

I wasn't what I'd been. But I was getting there.

I slipped the phone back in my pocket and had some coffee.

"The delivery guys just called," Michelle called in from the other room. "They'll be bringing the new washer in twenty minutes."

"Okay," I said, and stood up to start the day.