Hey Gang! I’m making headway on the Untitled Action Thriller Project. Not only that, But I have a special surprise coming soon. In the mean time, here is the shocking true story of the time I saw… something in the woods.
January 1998.
Au Sable Forks, New York. (Just outside of the Adirondack High Peaks.)
It was the sort of town they wrote ballads about in the 80s. We lived two miles beyond the city limits, up a county road at the foot of the Jay Range.
I was thirteen that winter. Our closest neighbor, a tenth of a mile away, was an old widow named Mrs. Brown. Her house sat back a ways from the road, in a small clearing among tall, fragrant pines.
Well, we had an ice storm. Big enough to warrant a Wikipedia article.
Two-plus inches of ice knocked down trees and power lines. The power was out, and the roads were blocked. For three nights, my family camped in the living room, warmed by our wood fireplace.
Dad checked up on Mrs. Brown. She had food and drinking water, but was running low on firewood. Dad didn't want her to cross the yard for more wood, so he sent us boys back to fetch wood from her shed.
So, under a gray sky, my younger brother and I half-walked, half-slid down the ice-slicked road to her house. As we made our way up her drive, I saw something strange.
Beneath a two-inch sheet of ice, preserved in the earlier snow: bare, human-looking footprints. From heel to toe as big as my snow boot. Three distinct ones, with more obscured. They were heading down from the mountains, across her driveway, toward the river valley below. Well, I got excited. After obeying Dad and refilling Mrs. Brown's firewood box, I ran and slid back home and grabbed the disposable camera I'd gotten in my stocking that Christmas.
What daylight there was was dying as I returned. I looked all around the area where I had seen the prints. At first I couldn't find them. Then I got lucky and found a track—not the three good ones, but a single track, on its own. I snapped a picture. This picture.
We didn't make those prints, and I know Mrs. Brown didn't make those prints. If someone was pulling a prank, they wouldn't pull it on an old woman who doesn't go outside during inclement weather.
~~~
True story. A few years later, me and my neighbor Cody had a series ofwould have hair raising adventures in the deep woods nearby. Hunting for footprints, riding bikes and generally ranging wild and free in the foothills of the Jay Range. We never saw bigfoot, but I think he may have seen us.