Messin' With Sasquatch

I wasn’t giving much thought to the t-shirt I pulled on over my head. One of my closest friends, who was visiting from out of state, had just informed me that she felt a trip to the hospital was in order. Her throat was feeling tight, like it might be closing up, and for someone with asthma…well, you don’t screw around with stuff like that. After I’d shucked my pajamas, I grabbed the top tee in the bureau drawer, which happened to be my Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society shirt. It’s soft and slouchy and got a nifty drawing of Bigfoot’s face stamped across the front. It would do for a trip to Tyrone Hospital, the nearest emergency facility since the plan to reopen the one in Philipsburg had fallen through when it was discovered that the doc who was doing the reopening had a thriving home business going selling scrips.

So Mary and I drove 30 minutes down the mountain to Tyrone, a tiny, old industrial town that doesn’t seem to have a whole lot going for it, except, of course, for a hospital. Mary got checked out pretty quickly. (It was about as busy as the hospital in the original Halloween II – the one where Jamie Lee is the only patient and there’s just a single doctor in the whole place, along with two nurses and an overweight security guard who eventually gets a hammer rammed through his head.) And it turned out she was fine. She just needed a bit of extra asthma medication, news we decided to celebrate by visiting the rambling antique store we had passed on our way into town.

We wandered around the shop for awhile, and eventually I spotted two old metal wall hangings of little boys playing baseball. I deemed them perfect for my house, and although Mary called them “creepy” (I think she actually said “beyond disturbing and sure to give me and any other overnight guest in your home nightmares”), I proceeded to the cash register. Behind it sat an older fellow of indeterminate age and a guy in maybe his 40s, who was styling a plaid shirt and a baseball cap with a fishing license pinned to it. He gazed at my chest for a moment before asking, “Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, eh?”

“Uh, yes, but,” I assured him, “I’m not a member, I just wrote a story about them a couple years ago.”

“Well,” he said, “what would you say if I told you I seen something in the woods not far from here, next to that old cemetery up ‘ere on the mountain, that made a 6’6” professional wrestler curl up hiding in the footwell of his vehicle?”

I stared at him open-mouthed. He talked fast and kind of low, but I’d gotten the gist of what he’d said. “I’d say…wow…” I finished lamely, sneaking a peek at the man next to him methodically wrapping the wall hangings in tissue. He had no visible reaction to his buddy’s statement.

“Yep,” continued the fisherman. “The creature, he was huge. He was standing in a deep ditch, but his whole torso was still visible over the edge. When I stood down there, you could barely see the top of my head!” Reaching in his pocket, he added, “But here, I got a picture on my cell phone.”

Mary wandered up to us, curious what was taking so long. “What’s up?”

“He’s got a picture on his cell of Bigfoot he’s gonna show us.”

“Hmm. Really?” It takes a lot to unnerve Mary.

As he scrolled through his photos, occasionally stopping to point out to his co-worker a few images of various holiday gatherings and large fish he’d caught, he reminisced about the giant, hairy thing he’d seen. It seemed it didn’t vocalize – although, he noted, the ones he’d run across growing up in Minnesota had. They’d made a sort of grunting noise, and they smelled “pretty dang funky” though this one just smelled like “freshly dug up earth.”

“Did you see a lot in Minnesota?”

“Oh, my share I reckon. Oh, here it is!” He handed me the phone, explaining “While my buddy was crying in his truck, I was taking this. I took a bunch of pictures, but this is the only one that came out.”

I looked at the image on the cell phone. It looked like…Bigfoot – a huge, hirsute, vaguely ape-like thing standing up on two legs, staring in the direction of the camera. It didn’t look like a bear, or a guy in a costume, or, actually, fake in any way.

“Wow. I mean…wow.” Passing the phone to Mary, I asked him, “Did you report this to anybody? I mean…do you want the Bigfoot Society’s number? They’d come and investigate –“

“No, no, no thank you! In Minnesota, we were taught you don’t do that. The Indians up there, they know all about these creatures, and nobody talks about them!”

As Mary handed him back he phone, I said, “Well, thanks for sharing the picture. What’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“No, no. No, thank you. I want to keep my name right out of it.” He went on for a bit talking about Bigfoot and how he thought he’d found his lair way out in the woods once and also about a thing with glowing eyes he and his girlfriend had recently seen one late night standing on a highway median not far from town that just might have been Mothman.

By then I’d paid the older gent behind the cash register – who was still about as interested in his friend’s story as if he’d been describing a trip to the dentist – and he’d wrapped up my purchase, handing me the bag. Mary and I managed to disentangle ourselves from the still-gabby fisherman and sidled to the door, nodding and waving over our shoulders as we left.

“You know, he didn’t seem crazy,” she observed.

“No, and it didn’t seem like it was some weird joke, or like he was just lying – and that picture…”

“Yeah, it looked pretty real.”

“It did. It really did.” I opened my car door, sliding in the front seat next to Mary. “And all because I put on this shirt. God, I love Pennsylvania.”