"The Big Thing in the Woods (A True Story)"

what can brown do for you? 


"Just a path, hard dried mud, leaves, fallen and upright trees, an old bridge made of wood and iron, about 300 yards in that direction," I complained to my wife as we walked together down the narrow path, neither of us even smoking a cigarette or chewing gum, with rapidly plummeting expectations.

"I mean, I appreciate the fact that it's nature, the woods, but it's so, I don't know, it's so tedious."

We had wandered from the main site of her company picnic to go for our daily walk, which today would be conducted in Julifee State Park, about 10 miles north of our hometown.

"We need the exercise," Olivia said in a playfully stern tone of voice. "Quit complaining."

"It's the fact that it's late autumn," I continued. "The worst time for the woods. Barren, plain, without the frostings of winter snow to make it shimmer. It should be ashamed of itself for it's lack of glamour, for being so jejune."

"Hush," she retorted briskly. "Try to enjoy it anyway."

A bicyclist whizzed by, making a ringing sound with his levered bell attached to the handlebar. I can speak in such rich technical terms, because I once wrote a book on bicycle history, called Bicycle Fever.

To digress a moment, please forgive me, I've been reading Proust, and you surely are all familiar with his inspired tangents and lengthy asides, but I must swerve a bit from this narrative and mention the fact that, since I claim this to be non-fiction, I need to throw in a detail or two to lend unquestionable credibility to my truth claim.

If I were Marcel Proust, in fact, I would by now have launched into seemingly interminable and painfully detailed descriptions of the hollyhocks and jasper weeds, the creeping Charley and poison oak, the sawgrass and pimento vines, the cripsodaisica and elongglibells that surrounded us.

However, I'm not Proust, and I have never claimed to be Proust, nor have I ever claimed to be Maurice Blanchot, though it's possible that I might someday wish I were Blanchot, or his book The Last Man.

The bridge was okay. I tossed a stone into the stream below.

I couldn't wait to get back home.

I had several new books on digital marketing, internet history, and webometrics that I was anxious to curl up on the couch with and read. I like books a lot. New ones even smell good.

We decided to head back to the picnic area. As we backtracked up the path, I noticed some odd, darkish orange mushrooms on the ground.

"Well, there's probably the most exciting thing we're going to see on this little safari," I declared as I pointed to the fungi.

"Nice colors," my wife said.

I was beyond bored. No snakes. No skunks. No wolves. No mountain lions. No box turtles. No salamanders. No dragonflies. Nothing. It was like we were all alone, except for the bicyclist fellow who passed us, as we stepped to the side of the path, a few minutes ago.

As we walked on, a strange high pitched squeal abruptly shot forth from under some brush a few feet from us.

We looked at each other and laughed.

I wondered when she had bought the dark gray sweater she was wearing. I had never seen it before. I was sure she had never worn it around me. This was troubling me, but then I remembered the little guy who had squealed at us, obviously not happy with our approach. Perhaps it had been dozing off, feeling safely sleepy, until we showed up.

The thing had startled us, but we knew that the little critter, whatever it was, was more scard of us, though it probably, whatever it was, had sharp teeth, pointed claws, and maybe even rabies. It might have snuck up on us, if we were camping in a tent, at night, and tore our eyeballs right out of our sockets, just to prove it could.

"A little, albeit short-lived, excitement," I announced, happy to be able to use an archaic, dimly understood, rarely used word, which, for those who are curious, could be deconstructed as "al (though) it be".

What a strange contortion to which we subject the phrase "although it be", almost a circus performance, switching "it" and "be" around, making them trade places, to form the partial seme "be it", then removing unceremoniously the "though" (and no one knows what happens to it when we do that), and, after all these verbal gymnastics, ending up with a word that perforce (i.e., of necessity) contains more syllables, thus is less efficient than "although", which is what we mean when we say "albeit".

And, to make matters worse, the spoken word "albeit" sounds similar to the personal commital lingual train "I'll be it."

I had no idea what it was that made that peculiar sound. Obviously a frightened little mammal of some sort. It would be useless to even speculate on what it was, it could've been any of a number of small furry animals.

It cheered me up to think that our presence was detected by some other form of life. Up to this point, I had not seen even a bird. Just trees and jungle type vines, the kind Tarzan might've swung on, going from tree to tree like a Communist.

Suddenly my wife put out her hand with stiff arm, to stop me.

"Shh. Wait. What's that?" she quietly questioned me. "See? Over there?" Pointed to a huge brown object to my right.

I had pulled out my buck knife and was ready, I thought, to take on any smallish creature that dared to cross my path and confront me.

As I stood gazing in the direction she indicated, I could make out what looked to me like a big rusted tub or bin about four or five car lengths into the woods.

What was weird was the fact that, even though the woods at this time of the year were skeletal, permitting easy sight into it, I would have never noticed the thing if my wife hadn't said something.

I idiotically suggested it might be another, more expansive, patch of those orangish brown mushrooms we saw earlier.

Olivia was perturbed at my highly facetious guess. "No" was all she said.

I kept peering at it.

"Well. I don't know. More likely a rusted tub or bin," I asserted. Yes. That is what it certainly seemed to be.

We both remained still. Gazing and pondering for about 20 seconds.

Feeling bored with this tactic, I decided to move toward it and find out what it was. I was always the more adventurous one, whilst she was consistently more observant and intelligent in her analysis.

I took three steps toward it...and it began to stand or rear itself up.

Whatever it was, it was alive, and it had been bending over something. And it must have heard me begin to approach it.

It erected itself to an upright position, but did not move in any other direction. It remained anchored to its spot. Later that evening I speculated that it had no intention of leaving whatever it had been hunching over. It had something and it wanted to continue to attend to it.

We quickly turned away from it, not even getting a glimpse of whatever head it may have had, which would have told us a lot, may have enabled us to identify it, and ran in a panic up the path that dangerously ran parallel to it.

We didn't have too far to go before we emerged from the woods into a grassy meadow.

A little further on, we saw a park employee, a ranger in uniform and badge. I wondered if park rangers carried weapons on their person.

We asked if there were any bears in Julifee State Park.

"Bears?" The ranger smiled in that smug way authorities have when they think they know tons more than you do. "No, not in this park. They're found up north another 30 or 40 miles, but I've never heard of any reports of bear sitings in this park."

I could tell he wanted to laugh his ass off at us, but was too self-controlled to do so. He'd wait until he and his buddies were at the bar slugging down some beers.

We explained what we saw, as vague as it was.

"Might have been a deer or elk," he conjectured with an arrogant air. "They get mighty big around here. That's probably what it was."

He seemed mighty anxious to dispel any rumors that a bear might be roaming the woods of his precious little state park.

After all, if such a report did circulate abroad, it could make other companies shy away from holding their picnics here. It was all about money and business, not about truth or scientific method.

As we discussed the event with family members later, it was agreed by all that no deer or elk would have been bent over something, stood up, and not dashed off deeper into the woods when it heard me approaching it. Deer and elk are skittish, jumpy. They fear humans.

And, as my wise wife says, it had a big rump, no tail that we could see. It was broad and bulky, like a massive bear type creature, something that could stand upright like a man, something that was not alarmed or threatened by our presence. As if it knew exactly what it would do to deal decisively with us.

Stupidly, we had not brought our camera along. If we would have had the camera, and the nerves of steel required to take a photo of whatever it was, risking the distinct possibility of angering it with the light flash, we might have been able to discover and prove what it was we saw that afternoon.

I wonder if that bicyclist tasted good.

Do animals devour a person's clothes along with their flesh and bones? Or do they rip off all the cloth and metal first? Or do they eat the whole package, but spit out the garments and jewelry as they munch? I had never posed these macabre questions to myself before.

Why are you looking at me like that? So puzzled.

Oh. I see. I'm sorry. My fault.

I forgot to tell you that as we high-tailed it up the path to exit the woods, I noticed a bicycle gleaming in the thickets near where the creature was feeding.


HISTORICAL NOTE: I affirm that this is a true tale of an actual event that really happened. I changed the name of the park, slightly, to avoid causing a panic. I will not venture to state that the creature was a bear, or gorilla, or Bigfoot/Yeti/Sasquatch. All I know is it was big, brown, and hungry for human flesh.

[signed]

Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate