Strange Bigfoot Encounters

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip has been running state line to state line for a good while now, and the whole time we've been driving, the mail's been stacking up behind us.

So today, the truck's parked, the map's folded up on the dash, and we're making a pit stop so I can share some of the emails you've been sending in.

Most of the encounters that come in are pretty straightforward.

Somebody's driving home from work or sitting in a deer stand, and they see something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks off into the trees, and that's the whole story.

But they don't all go that way.

Sometimes seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist is only part of what happened, and the person writing has something even stranger to tell along with it.

The five emails in today's stack are all like that.

The first one's from Casimir.

Casimir spent 31 years as a signal maintainer for a railroad in northern Minnesota, and for most of those years, he carried a pager on his belt.

A signal maintainer looks after everything that tells a train whether the track ahead of it is clear.

That means the signals themselves and the wiring buried along the grade and the relays that sit in locked steel cases beside the track.

And when any piece of it quits in the middle of the night, the dispatcher pages whoever owns that stretch, and he gets up and goes.

In the fall of 1993, Casimir owned about 60 miles of single track through bog country.

It was black spruce and tamarack standing in water on both sides of a raised gravel grade with a road crossing every eight or ten miles and bog the rest of the way.

The page came a little before one in the morning on a Tuesday in the second week of October.

The dispatcher's board was showing a train sitting on a block of track where there wasn't any train, which meant something had gone wrong in the electrical circuit that runs through the rails.

Until somebody fixed it, he couldn't give a signal to the freight that was waiting on him 20 miles to the south.

So Casimir got dressed and drove 40 minutes to the nearest crossing, and when he got there, he put his truck on the rails.

His truck was what railroaders call a highrail, a pickup with small steel guide wheels that fold down at the front and back so it can ride the track on its own tires.

From the crossing, it was six miles north to the siding where the trouble was, and the rule for a highrail at night was 15 miles an hour.

He was about four miles in when he saw lights off to his left, out over the bog on the west side.

There were three of them, and they were low, lower than the tops of the tamaracks, and a tamarack in that country doesn't get much over 40 or 50 feet.

He wrote that they were round and that each one looked about the size a volleyball would look if somebody held it up at the far end of a football field.

The color was the color of a yard light in its first minute before it's warmed up, a weak blue-white with a little green in it.

He could see the lights, and he could see the black shapes of the trees standing in front of them, but there wasn't any glow on the branches the way there would have been from a lantern or a headlight.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip has been running state line to state line for a good while now, and the whole time we've been driving, the mail's been stacking up behind us.

So today, the truck's parked, the map's folded up on the dash, and we're making a pit stop so I can share some of the emails you've been sending in.

Most of the encounters that come in are pretty straightforward.

Somebody's driving home from work or sitting in a deer stand, and they see something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks off into the trees, and that's the whole story.

But they don't all go that way.

Sometimes seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist is only part of what happened, and the person writing has something even stranger to tell along with it.

The five emails in today's stack are all like that.

The first one's from Casimir.

Casimir spent 31 years as a signal maintainer for a railroad in northern Minnesota, and for most of those years, he carried a pager on his belt.

A signal maintainer looks after everything that tells a train whether the track ahead of it is clear.

That means the signals themselves and the wiring buried along the grade and the relays that sit in locked steel cases beside the track.

And when any piece of it quits in the middle of the night, the dispatcher pages whoever owns that stretch, and he gets up and goes.

In the fall of 1993, Casimir owned about 60 miles of single track through bog country.

It was black spruce and tamarack standing in water on both sides of a raised gravel grade with a road crossing every eight or ten miles and bog the rest of the way.

The page came a little before one in the morning on a Tuesday in the second week of October.

The dispatcher's board was showing a train sitting on a block of track where there wasn't any train, which meant something had gone wrong in the electrical circuit that runs through the rails.

Until somebody fixed it, he couldn't give a signal to the freight that was waiting on him 20 miles to the south.

So Casimir got dressed and drove 40 minutes to the nearest crossing, and when he got there, he put his truck on the rails.

His truck was what railroaders call a highrail, a pickup with small steel guide wheels that fold down at the front and back so it can ride the track on its own tires.

From the crossing, it was six miles north to the siding where the trouble was, and the rule for a highrail at night was 15 miles an hour.

He was about four miles in when he saw lights off to his left, out over the bog on the west side.

There were three of them, and they were low, lower than the tops of the tamaracks, and a tamarack in that country doesn't get much over 40 or 50 feet.

He wrote that they were round and that each one looked about the size a volleyball would look if somebody held it up at the far end of a football field.

The color was the color of a yard light in its first minute before it's warmed up, a weak blue-white with a little green in it.

He could see the lights, and he could see the black shapes of the trees standing in front of them, but there wasn't any glow on the branches the way there would have been from a lantern or a headlight.