I grew up in a very small town at the top end of Morgan County, Alabama.
Back in the 70s, I knew just about everyone in our small town.
We had exactly two stoplights on the main street going through town.
We had one grocery store and one catch-all kind of hardware store.
There was one post office and a couple very tiny miscellaneous shops, but that was all.
Down there, the hot summer seemed to stretch on forever, which as kids was paradise.
All of us kids had bikes, a pocket knife, maybe a cane pole, and for us, that was all
the freedom we needed.
My best buddy was Ronnie.
And Ronnie and me, well, we figured out real quick that Crooked Creek was the place to
catch catfish.
They weren't out in the open of the creek, mind you.
No, the good ones stacked up in the deep holes right under that old wooden bridge.
Now you gotta picture it.
That bridge was older than my granddaddy.
Planks were all gray and soft with rot in many places.
The creek water was black and was slow flowing underneath it.
At night you could smell the mud from that creek before you were near enough to hear the
water trickling.
And we always went at night because that's when the catfish were hungry.
One July evening, the summer night air was so thick with humidity, it was more like trying
to breathe through syrup than air.
The bullfrogs were thumping out on the bank.
Many nudged me and said, "Hey, let's sneak out, hit the bridge.
I bet we haul in a messa catfish."
I didn't even think.
I said, "Yeah, let's do that."
We grabbed our rods, a couple jars of stink bait, and sneaked out long after our folks had
gone to bed.
The moon wasn't all the way up yet.
But the world was very dark.
I mean real dark.
He was that kind where the trees all seemed to lean in over the road, like they're listening
to you, like out of some old scary cartoon.
It was that kind of dark, and that, of course, is the best kind of night to get yourself
a mess of catfish.
By the time we made it down to the bridge, I noticed the crickets were all hushed up.
I did notice it, but I didn't say anything.
I thought they hushed up because we were traipsing through, though that had never hushed
them up before.
Mostly I didn't want Ronnie calling me chicken.
Over the creek the sky above was open and clear.
We could see stars in the sliver of a pale crescent moon.
The light coming down was faint, but enough that we could make out shapes in the shadows,
and it bounced up off the creek waters.
We settled under the bridge and got set up for fishing.
In every other way it was a perfect, idyllic summer night.
It was Alabama hot and sticky with no air movement, yes.
But the water lapping on the banks in a steady rhythm?
That's something I can still hear in my mind to this very day.
And all the while tree frogs and cicadas were making a solid background of noise for us.
And the mosquitoes?
Well, those weren't part of a perfect summer night, but there's no having a summer without
them is there.
And all the while the old boards of the bridge above us would pop and creek.
My daddy told me once it was from the changing temperatures in the humidity at night, kind
of the way a house would move and settle every night.
I don't know if that's exactly right, but it made me less jumpy as a boy when I thought
about it that way.
It was a good and normal hot summer night.
Well, for about 10 or 15 minutes anyway.
Then we heard it, a splash, not a small splash like a fish splashing around or a bull frog
jumping in the water.
This was big, heavy.
Then I heard the swishing in the water, and I somehow knew something was waiting in the
shallow just upstream.
It was dark, but I saw the shadow of Ronnie's head turn towards me.
Then he whispered, "Dear?"
"Nah, I thought.
Dear don't wade slow and loud like that."
That swish-swish sound was more like a two-legged person walking through the water.
I'm thinking that, and then there was this strange grunting noise.
Not real loud, but more like an involuntary grunt, like when you're old and you try to get
up off the floor.
It's like that.
And I know dear blow and snort, but I've never heard them grunt, not like that.
Me and Ronnie both were looking upstream, even though it was too dark to see anything clearly.
Many figured we were about to get caught out by somebody who would then write us out to
our parents.
And that would mean daddy would have to make a show a tan in my hide with a belt, just
to make mama happy.
And that's when the smell hit us, with our heads turned right towards it, and then we got
our snooze full of it.
"Lordy, I'll never forget it."
Like rotten eggs and wet dog left out in the sun on an Alabama summer day.
It turned my stomach right over.
Ronnie gagged a little and whispered, "What is that?"
I couldn't answer.
Not only did I not have an answer, I could barely breathe in enough to get a word out.
The smell was that bad.
The waiter started to come closer and closer.
That's when I knew for certain the waiter was walking on two legs, which meant they were
not any of the animals around there.
You could hear it in the cadence.
Step, splash, drag.
It was like it had legs that were too long for the water that it was in, and feet so big
and heavy they were getting sucked down in the muddy bottom on every step.
We pressed back against the bridge piling, our hearts hammering.
I had my pocket knife out.
Like that would do a lick of good, but you used what you've got.
Then out of the shadowed darkness, it appeared.
At first I thought a man was out there.
I saw they were very tall, broad shoulders with arms at hung low.
But then they bent down.
I saw the thin shine of moonlight on the water roll off hair, not skin.
Like black hair clinging to it like wet carpet.
It was no mistaking it.
Definitely not skin or some kind of clothing.
Unless someone was wearing a fur coat on a hot summer night in Alabama.
A very, very big someone that is.
It leaned into the current, arm swinging out.
And in just a couple seconds it scooped up a catfish, roughly the size of my leg.
Then it lifted it, like it was nothing.
And it looked like it was holding it just right, not touching either the pectoral or the
dorsal fins.
People think a catfish stings you with its whiskers.
But that's not it.
It's the fins that will get you.
So this thing, or this being, knew how to handle a catfish.
I saw it repositioned the wriggling fish so it was belly up, still avoiding the fins.
It brought its belly up to the mouth and took a large bite out of the middle of the fish,
biting straight clean through it.
I couldn't believe it.
I thought I'm seeing this wrong.
Because maybe it's so dark.
But at the same time I know I didn't see it wrong.
I know what I saw.
And the sound of that wet squishy bite echoed under the bridge.
And it matched what I saw.
A low night breeze came just then against our backs.
I felt it cooling my sweat.
I felt it, but I didn't process it.
I was in a stupor at what I was seeing, I guess.
The thing chewed, swallowed, and started to take another bite when the breeze reached it.
It was the breeze that carried our scent.
It suddenly lifted its head and sniffed the air like some blood-hound.
And then its head turned in a snap, right at us.
Now from the moonlight I could see two amber eyes that glowed in the dark, catching just
enough star and moonlight to show what they were.
They weren't round like a deer or narrow like a man's.
But they were big and set wide apart.
Those eyes locked on us like it had been out there hunting for us all night.
Next to me Ronnie made some kind of noise in his throat.
It wasn't loud, but that tiny sound was all it took.
The creature rose up to its full height out of the water.
The water pouring off its body dropped the two halves of the catfish, and it let out a growl
that I could feel in my ribs.
I don't even remember standing up.
One second I was crouched down.
The next I was running full tilt, smacking my shins on roots, busting through brush, going
blindly at full speed.
It's a wonder I didn't run smack into a tree and knocked myself out.
Ronnie was right behind me.
Both of us too scared to do anything but run.
We weren't yelling or anything, but we were breathing hard and running.
We didn't stop until we hit the county road.
We were all bent over gasping for air.
Our rods and all of our equipment were left down at the creek.
Shakey legs got us home, and along the way there was a promise made.
We weren't telling anyone about this.
And that bridge?
Well, I went back there plenty of times.
Just never alone and never at night.
But I rode the bridge on my bike more than a few times that summer.
I would look over and I would see fish heads and bones scattered all over the rocks below.
Picked clean.
I told myself, raccoon did that.
Or maybe it was some weird homeless person eating raw fish.
But I didn't believe any of that myself.
First time I rode over that bridge again was two days later after we saw it.
And Ronnie went out there together.
I stopped and got off my bike and looked over the bridge, right where our stuff should
have been.
But there was nothing there.
Of course, anyone else could have come along and seen all of our stuff and went down and
got it.
But if you asked me and Ronnie, we thought that creature got rid of our stuff.
Well, that's what our young minds thought at the time anyway.
Today, I don't know.
Maybe it was some weird homeless person after all.
Maybe they were down there eating raw fish and that's what we saw that night.
We really didn't have a homeless population in our little town back then, but we did have
a couple crazy people and they did walk down to the creek sometimes to wash and wash their
clothes as best they could.
I never heard of them though going at night.
And the few that I knew of, well, they weren't the kind to have fur coats of any kind.
And they sure wouldn't have worn them in the summer, crazy though they might have been.
But we didn't really believe for one second that it was a homeless person or one of the
crazies or even a person at all.
I know what I saw standing knee deep in that creek eating catfish under the moonlight.
And it wasn't any man.
There's only one word for it.
Bigfoot.
And yeah, we got them in our area.
I didn't know it then, but I do now.
I don't live there anymore.
But even if I did, you wouldn't catch me going down there on dark nights, not even as a grown
man.
[ pause ]