By Tripper Harrison
We’re pretty safe from Bigfoot sightings here. Some Islanders have reported experiences around Western Washington, but I don’t know of an example on Vashon. If anybody saw a Bigfoot here, one of the first comments would be, “Did it take the North End or South End ferry? You know they can cut the line and ride for free.”
Living as we do in the Pacific Northwest, you can hardly avoid taking some kind of stand on the theme. “Squatch” was the mascot for the Supersonics until the team ditched the KeyArena for Oklahoma in 2009. Even if you think it’s a bunch of kids making fake footprints in the woods, plenty of people take the opposite side, saying it’s only a matter of time before a trail cam provides definitive proof or a body is found.
Despite the lack of official evidence, some of the biggest believers are cops, scientists, and it seems like most park rangers. I always steered clear, thinking, well, maybe it’s real, and maybe it’s not. They must be seeing something out there, it’s just not my battle. And it still isn’t, but one night several years ago pried my mind open a lot wider.
Out on the back porch about a half-hour before midnight, I was looking at how to rebuild or replace a transmission. There were a couple good knocks of wood on a tree from the other side of the stream bed, probably 10 seconds apart. If you take a small-diameter log and give it a good swing onto a cedar’s trunk, that was the sound. Our neighbors had teenagers, so I figured it must be one of them and went back to reading.
Five or ten minutes later there was another knock, this time further to the right and a little closer. So, he was wandering in the woods a good way from their house, not normal for them in the night, but still fine. A good thing for a kid to do.
Then not long later, closer to midnight I heard him starting up the hundred-foot deep bank. Coming up sideways towards our place.
It was at this point I knew something wasn’t right. Nobody goes down to that stream, even during the day, because the banks are so steep. And if you did start up the bank in the pitch darkness, you’d need a flashlight to look for handholds. There wasn’t one, so I wondered if it was a big deer that had gone down looking for a drink. I had heard similar sounds when I watched a buck picking its way down a mountainside to avoid hunters. Except this was up, it was summer, and the stream was dry.
As it came closer, the snaps of twigs started to be mixed in with the occasional branch breaking in two. Too big to be a deer. More in the elk category, or maybe a really huge and clumsy drunken renegade stumbling around in the night. In either case, it was loud and getting close to the top, only 40 or so yards away. The hair on my neck was standing up, so I stood up too, intending to go get my bird gun. Here is where things got weird.
A feeling, coming through in real words, popped into my head: “That would be a bad idea.” I stopped where I was, taken by surprise. Then, I thought something back along these lines: “Okay. I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” The movement stopped and I stood there for awhile, listening hard.
After what might’ve been a few minutes or ten, I went back to the deck chair. Then a series of louder pops and deep cracks started a little further down the embankment. It was a tree falling, tall enough that it took a long time to hit, setting every dog in a mile barking.
Trees fall down all the time here, especially down steep banks. Have to admit, it could just be coincidence. But what the &%*!#$ just happened here? It was like someone, or something, had pushed it over to make an impression. As if some Old Man of the Forest was walking his territory.
I stood there for awhile, more or less in awe. Shaking my head as I came back inside, I went to get the laptop and Googled, “Can Bigfoot swim?” From what came up there, you might want to do the same.
