thefourthbrother: the average one

The Legend of Bigfoot, or, How to scare yourself silly when you’re nine years old. January 22, 2012

In 1972 I was nine years old. I remember this age not because of any significant happening like a meteor striking our milk-barn and turning our cows into mutant brain sucking aliens, but because of Bigfoot. You see, me and my family were living on a farm in Oklahoma at that time and our place was HUGE. At least it was to a nine year old boy and his older brother. I’m probably wrong but I believe the farm was somewhere around 150 acres or roughly the size of  Ohio – not that I had ever been to Ohio, or even really knew what Ohio was, but if I did know what Ohio was I’m pretty sure our farm was that big.

At least it was big enough for me, at that age, to have no clue to how big it really was because in all my wanderings and exploring I don’t think I ever found the property lines, unless you count those long fence rows of barbed wire I kept getting my clothes snagged on. We had 3 ponds on the place and one really cool scary creek that ran down below our house. That was where all the trees on our farm that could be considered “woods” were located. Right along the creek.

That was also where Bigfoot lived.

I don’t really know this for sure because I never saw Bigfoot, but if he lived anywhere, my nine year old mind knew it was right down there on the creek.

Prior to 1972 I don’t remember ever knowing about Bigfoot. I learned about him from a movie. It was called “The Legend of Boggy Creek“. And it scared the  pee-waddling-soup out of me. It was so long ago that I don’t even remember anything about the movie except one scene where some people were trapped in a trailer house that Bigfoot was attacking and I also remember the hideous screeching howl that Bigfoot used in the movie to scar me for life. Even today, at my age, whenever I hear a hideous screeching howl, like sometimes is heard at Democratic conventions, I’m instantly taken back to 1972 and my childhood fears of being eaten by Bigfoot.

The movie never really showed Bigfoot; after all, he is really elusive and I am sure the movie crew had fits trying to capture him on film for the movie. But in some ways, not seeing him was even scarier than if he showed up in all his mangy moss covered stinking glory. If that had happened I probably would still be a patient in a mental ward.

It also didn’t help that when I saw this movie we were living on that farm with the really cool scary creek that we explored and fished on all the time that contained Alligator Gar the size of our school bus and Alligator Snapping turtles the size of my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Blanche Moodwart. That creek was scary enough during the day so we never ventured down there at night (we may have been in grade school and stupid but we weren’t morons). My bedroom window faced that wood lined creek and many a night I heard hideous noises down there along its banks; probably one of the reasons I peed the bed so much as a youngster.

The movie left me and my brother obsessed with Bigfoot for a long time. We were constantly on the look-out for him and never went down to the creek alone. We just knew he would kill us if we weren’t careful. One day my brother, the third brother, had the brilliant idea of trying to mimic that hideous screeching howl for the sole purpose of calling Bigfoot up out of the woods. Of course, being  nine years old I had not a clue how to do this but No. 3 was four years older and wiser than I and he already had a plan. He knew how to make the sound because he had heard it before.

Our farm was a dairy farm. We had a large herd of Holstein cows that were milked twice a day in a cinder block building that served as our milk barn. There were two rooms in this barn; one housed the huge stainless steel tank that received the milk and kept it chilled and stirred until removed by the AMPI milk truck that came to our farm daily to buy our milk; the other held the stalls where the cows were milked. The whole barn was made out of concrete and echoed every little sound. Some of my fondest memories are of that barn. Some of my worst as well.

One of the worst was when I learned about frozen pipes and tongues. This was wayyyyyy before I ever saw A Christmas Story. I don’t know what it is about frozen pipes and kids but it seems there are a great number that get stuck this way. In my case I was always fascinated by how the stainless steel tank worked. Every morning one of us boys had to go to the tank with a pitcher and fill it with milk straight from the tank. I had no knowledge of pasteurization and apparently neither did my parents because that is where we got our milk for our morning bowl of Crispy Critters cereal. There were copper lines running to the tank and these were always covered in frost. It wasn’t until later I learned about freon so these frosty pipes were a mystery to me. So naturally, like any red-blooded American boy who has not grown a brain yet, I thought it would be a good idea to put my tongue on these frosty pipes.

Well, needless to say, I didn’t have any firemen around to get me off the pipe – I had to do that all by myself. I also didn’t tell anybody I did it so I suffered in silence until my tongue grew its tip back. Probably the main reason that today I only speak one language and poorly at that. Maybe I should run for congress.

Where was I? Oh yeah…

This barn echoed. My brother had to help clean the barn after all the cows were milked and he learned while hosing it down with water that if you hit certain objects with a jet stream of water it would make crazy sounds in the barn. Occasionally I would have to help clean the barn but mostly I just tried to shoot my brother with a BB gun. So I never learned about the hose trick.

We waited until dark (in my memory it was dark. It was probably during broad day light because we were actually big chickens – but to make the story and my memory legitimate – it was dark, so there.) and then No. 3 dragged me to the barn to call Bigfoot out of the woods. I think I peed the bed four times that night.

We found an old metal feed bucket and then we went down into the pit. The pit was where our step-dad, or older brother, the first brother, stood while milking the cows. It was probably 4 feet deep, below the level of the stalls where the cows stood. This was a convenient depth, placing the farmer at eye level with the cows udder, making it easy to clean the teats and attach the suction cups as well as offering a prime target to razor sharp cloven hooves. I never realized at that age how deadly that could be. Thankfully no one ever got kicked in head, just all over the arms. We had a large pair of Inquisition-looking “kickers”; a wishbone shaped clamp that slipped down over the hips of the milk cow and could be cranked tight, pushing the tips of the wishbone into the sides, just in front of the back legs, of the cow thereby preventing her from kicking the person yanking on her teats. But like most of these type inventions nobody told the cows. It didn’t matter what you did – if they were in the mood you were going to get clobbered.

Anyway, we put this metal feed bucket in a cornier of the pit with the mouth of the bucket facing the concrete corner and the bottom facing us.  While I nearly wet my britches my brother blasted the bottom of the bucket with a full stream of water from the spray handle. I almost fainted.

It was like Bigfoot was in the barn with us and he was on a rampage! The crashing sound went up and down as No. 3 changed the angle of the stream against the bucket and it made a ululating screech that I just knew was calling every Bigfoot within a ten mile radius and they were all at that moment coming to our barn.

It was deliciously terrifying.

It was the prime reason why, years later when I had to temporarily stay with some friends on a hog farm while my parents moved us to the city, I couldn’t sleep at night. The hogs on that farm squealed and screeched and squalled  all night every night, and my bedroom window faced the dark woods.

Every night I lay terrified that Bigfoot was coming to kill me, angry still over the milk barn incident. But our plan failed and the screeching bucket didn’t call one Bigfoot out of the woods.

This was probably a good thing.

It wasn’t until I grew into an adult and saw the movie “Harry and the Henderson’s” that I realized that Bigfoot was really the victim of bad press. He wasn’t some terrifying beast out looking for blood. He was really just some kind and misunderstood nature lover with good intentions, like Grizzly Adams or Yule Gibbons. Harry and the Henderson’s finally set the record straight.

Now I know what you are thinking, “you must be a idiot! Bigfoot ain’t real!”  Oh yeah? Then why did George Lucas use him in Star Wars? All he did was change his name a little. If old Georgie can start his very own religion of Jedi, then he can be trusted with keeping the real identity of Bigfoot secret through clever movie magic and making the world think he’s just a Wookie.

Yeah – Bigfoot’s real alright. I know. Sometimes, late at night I can still hear his lonely mournful terrifying howl even though I live in the city now. He’s had to adapt. Just like a coyote adapts and can live around cities, Bigfoot has had to adapt to his changing environment. He’s not out for blood, he’s just lonesome. And sad.

Looking back on 1972 I realize I really had nothing to fear. There was no blood thirsty beast lurking along our creek waiting for us to slip up so he could tear us to shreds and eat us. What I really should have been concerned with was Chupacabra! Now there’s one terrifying beast. He gives me the willies.

In fact, I think I saw one just the other day…