Looking for Bigfoot (excerpt)

So, this is an excerpt of an informative/experiential essay that i’ve been working on for the past 3 weeks. If you would like a PDF of the entire article, please let me know either by email or comment. I will gladly send it to you.

Without further ado, here it be…

We were standing in the kitchen of the Turtle Man’s house. He could be seen, surrounded by six big stud-dogs all of which were as fat as ticks. The man and all his puffy dogs were excitedly greeting a pickup truck in the driveway.

“No! I am not a believer,” laughed Linda. “I have better things to do than run around and believe in Bigfoot.”

Linda, the Turtle Man’s girlfriend from Arizona, lovingly pushed an old, arthritic dog out of her way in order to peer out the dusty window, through an extensive bird-feeding contraption and over a turtle pond to the driveway. The door of the pickup was now opened and two men stood in the midst of six excited yellow labs, looking like a Carhart advertisement. Both wearing smiles under their hats, the two were shaking hands with gusto.

“I wonder who that is now,” she said. “He’s got a lot of friends. Did he tell you he was the Mayor of Bel Air for years? People are always dropping by to get trees or see turtles or ask about the Bigfoot.”

Linda and I were soon feeling like we had known each other forever, or at least as long as the dusty photos had been stapled to the wall next to the snapper shell. We stood and chatted for quite some time. The rickety old kitchen was full of artifacts from one man’s long life spent traveling the globe.

She brushed the dust off of a photograph of a much younger Turtle Man in short shorts posing for a picture with a remote tribe in East Africa. Countless artifacts cram every bit of horizontal space and a good deal of the vertical portions of that old house as well.

“We went to Quito before. He’s been to the Galapagos Islands…. That’s the kind of thing that makes me think that he is not totally crazy to believe the Sasquatch. You know, Island diversity. Ecosystems. Anyone who knows anything about biology and life aught to know that a species existing one place is not a crazy idea.”

The Turtle Man is a lot of things that most people are not, but he is not crazy. He loves trees and traveling and turtles and cryptozoology. I had met him once before. This past week, I drove out to his neck of the woods to ask what he knows about hominids in the area.

[...]

So, yep, that’s page one. I’ll send you the seven subsequent pages if you would like.

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