Sightings
Sam Aurelius Milam III
When
I was a child, Grandma told me that she'd once seen a star shining through
the dark part of a crescent moon. She was sure that the star had
been within the circle of the moon, and not outside of its circumference.
I doubt that it was actually a star shining through the moon but I don't
doubt that she gave an honest account of what she saw, using the best description
that she could. It seems likely to me that, sometime during the early
1900s, something made a very bright light on the surface of the moon.
My
Aunt Isabelle told me of something that she saw, many years ago.
She said that she was young at the time, so I'm guessing that it was in
the late 1950s. As part of the story, I need to explain the configuration
of some of the roads in southern Louisiana, back then. They were
built through swamps. They were straight and level, and several feet
above water level. On either side, there was nothing but swamp, for
miles, occasionally interrupted by oil refineries. Isabelle told
me that, one day, she was driving along such a road and, ahead of her,
she saw a telephone pole laying across the road. She took her foot
off of the gas pedal and coasted to a stop near the telephone pole.
To her distress, she saw that it wasn't a telephone pole. It was
a snake. It was moving slowly across the road. It's head was
out of sight, in the swamp, on one side of the road. Its tail was
out of sight, in the swamp, on the other side of the road. Isabelle
was afraid to move. She sat as still as possible, and tried to be
really quiet, until the snake had crawled out of sight, into the swamp.
I
measured the width of the street in front of the house were I currently
live. I'm not saying that it's exactly the same width as the road
where Isabelle saw the snake, but it's probably close. Based on that,
the snake that Isabelle saw must have been at least 35 feet long.
It was alive in Louisiana 60 or so years ago, long before the current scare
about invasive species. A johnny-come-lately Burmese Python would
make a mere snack for the snake that Isabelle saw.
Poppa
told me a story about a large doglike animal that he saw. His sighting
was from sometime during the early 1960s. His story was that, late
one night, he was sitting alone in the kitchen, doing nothing. He
heard a noise out back, got up, picked up the BB gun, and walked out through
the back porch and into the back yard. He said that, just as he stepped
around the corner, behind the porch, he found himself face-to-face with
what he described as a very large white dog. He said that it's back
was at about the same level as his waist. Even if its perceived size
was exaggerated somewhat by the dark of night, it was still a large animal.
He said that he'd have been scared if he hadn't been so busy feeling stupid
for walking out into the back yard to investigate a strange noise, in the
dark, on crutches, with just a BB gun. The animal turned around and
strolled away.
My
brother Tommy saw the same animal, or a similar one. According to
his best guess, he was about 10 or 12 years old at the time, placing
his story also in the early 1960s. Poppa had built a large storage
box, against the wall, in the bedroom that Tommy and I shared at the time.
The top surface of the box was large enough to sleep on, somewhat comparable
in size to that of a folding cot. With the help of a foam mattress,
Tommy was using the box as a bed. The top surface of the box was
at the same level as the bottom of the window, so Tommy could easily see
out the window, from the bed, without moving.
One
night, Tommy was awakened by what appeared to be a large white dog, laying
on the ground and chewing on a giant bone. It was quite noisy, with
a lot of crunching. It was late at night, during the summer, so the
window was open, with only the screen between Tommy and the animal. It
was large enough that he could see it clearly in the starlight.
At
first, Tommy thought that the animal was one of our dogs, that had gotten
loose. Just as he took a breath to yell at it, the animal stood up.
It was only about 8 feet away from him, with only a window screen between
them. When it stood up, it's head and the bone were as high as Tommy
was, on the box. Since the floor level in the house was a little
higher than ground level, outside, it was quite a large animal. After it
stood up, it walked away across the front of the house, toward the driveway.
Tommy
and I, alone or together, spent many hours hiking around on a large piece
of land northeast of our home. In years gone by, it had been pasture,
farmland, homesteads, and so forth. By the 1960s, it was, essentially,
a kind of wilderness. It was bounded on one side by a country highway
and on the other three sides by farm roads. It was probably more
than 10,000 acres in size, and occupied only along the edges, at the roads.
Beyond those boundaries, there was more of the same, for miles. During
the years that Tommy and I explored that piece of land, we never saw any
wolves but, in retrospect, I suppose that the wolves probably saw us, plenty
of times.![10x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/10x5_Page_Background.gif)
February 2018 |
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