This week, we're pulling off the road for a little while.
The Backwoods Cryptid road trip isn't going anywhere.
The map's still on the dash and the next stop's already circled.
But the mailbag's been piling up, and a good part of what's in it lately isn't about the upright thing in the woods that this show usually covers.
It's about something else that walks on two legs.
Something with a longer face and a different set of ears, and a way of moving that the people who've written to me keep describing with the same word, which is wrong.
So that's what we're doing this week.
Six emails.
Six people who were going about an ordinary night and the thing that showed up in it.
People have been calling it the Dog Man for a long time.
But the letters I've gotten come from a lot farther than that.
Nobody who wrote in used the word werewolf.
A couple of them went out of their way to say they wish there was a better name for it.
We'll use the one we've got.
We'll start in the cornfield because that's the one that came in first.
Garrett was running a 12 row head on his father-in-law's combine in the fall of 2012 on a quarter section outside of town in East Central Iowa that he asked me not to name.
And he'd been in the cab since a little afternoon.
It was the kind of October they'd been waiting for, dry and still and cold at night.
And when the weather's like that in corn country, you don't stop for supper and you don't stop for dark.
You run until the dew comes up and the moisture in the grain climbs too high to keep going, and some nights that's two in the morning, and some nights it's never.
His father-in-law, Dennis, was running the grain cart with the tractor, meeting him at the end rows to unload, and the two of them had been trading radio chatter all evening about the Hawkeyes and the price of propane.
The field had a wet corner on the north end where a drainage ditch cut through, and a line of old Osage orange trees ran along the west fence that nobody had ever gotten around to bulldozing.
Other than that, it was flat, open corn, standing about eight feet tall, and the combine lights lit up a wedge of it ahead of the head and a little to either side, and everything past that was black.
That's normal.
This week, we're pulling off the road for a little while.
The Backwoods Cryptid road trip isn't going anywhere.
The map's still on the dash and the next stop's already circled.
But the mailbag's been piling up, and a good part of what's in it lately isn't about the upright thing in the woods that this show usually covers.
It's about something else that walks on two legs.
Something with a longer face and a different set of ears, and a way of moving that the people who've written to me keep describing with the same word, which is wrong.
So that's what we're doing this week.
Six emails.
Six people who were going about an ordinary night and the thing that showed up in it.
People have been calling it the Dog Man for a long time.
But the letters I've gotten come from a lot farther than that.
Nobody who wrote in used the word werewolf.
A couple of them went out of their way to say they wish there was a better name for it.
We'll use the one we've got.
We'll start in the cornfield because that's the one that came in first.
Garrett was running a 12 row head on his father-in-law's combine in the fall of 2012 on a quarter section outside of town in East Central Iowa that he asked me not to name.
And he'd been in the cab since a little afternoon.
It was the kind of October they'd been waiting for, dry and still and cold at night.
And when the weather's like that in corn country, you don't stop for supper and you don't stop for dark.
You run until the dew comes up and the moisture in the grain climbs too high to keep going, and some nights that's two in the morning, and some nights it's never.
His father-in-law, Dennis, was running the grain cart with the tractor, meeting him at the end rows to unload, and the two of them had been trading radio chatter all evening about the Hawkeyes and the price of propane.
The field had a wet corner on the north end where a drainage ditch cut through, and a line of old Osage orange trees ran along the west fence that nobody had ever gotten around to bulldozing.
Other than that, it was flat, open corn, standing about eight feet tall, and the combine lights lit up a wedge of it ahead of the head and a little to either side, and everything past that was black.
That's normal.
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