Bigfoot and the Best “F”

Sometimes we have to start looking for proof before we believe our own dream.

“Is that true? Did that really happen?”

I was taking my seat, after reading an essay aloud to my ninth-grade English class. I turned, and every set of eyes in the room was watching me, listening for the answer. Mrs. Robinson was one of them. I could see the same excited glint in her eyes.

The assignment was to write an essay about something that happened to you, something you experienced with family. I wrote about the time that my grandfather and I were camping in the woods in Louisiana, on a hunting trip in a patch of forest in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from Wild Peach, Texas, where we called home.

Young Kevin tagged along with PaPa, spending the day cutting through thick brush, tracking deer by their trails in patches of mud, wet leaves hodgepodged to the sticky terrain. A cold and foggy morning, dew gathering on my face and clothes as we pushed through the brambles. A loaded rifle in my hands, pointed at the ground, just like I was taught.

No luck, that morning. No deer in sight. And we trudged back to camp, where tents and trucks and ice chests waited.

We emerged from the woods, stepped into the clearing where we’d made camp, and PaPa halted. So did I.

The camp was destroyed. The tent lay in a crumpled tangle at the tree line. The ice chest was overturned and its contents were shredded and spread in all directions, like it had detonated, like it was some blue and white grenade.  The camp chairs and the little stand with the camp stove had all been tossed in different directions.

It could have been a hog. Or maybe raccoons. Or maybe a bear.

But there was that footprint.

Huge. Deep. It looked like the kind of prints I left as I chronically ran around barefoot in life. Heel, pad, toes, mashed into the mud. But my footprint was a speck. The period at the end of a sentence.

This one was a whole page.

And it was just one of dozens.

And now we saw that more than our camp gear had been disturbed. The large boulders that had served as seats around a campfire pit had been unearthed, relocated to the far edges of the clearing, as if they’d been tossed there. And the truck—PaPa’s beat up blue-and-white and rust-patched Ford—it had been moved.

Not driven. Not rolled and repositioned. The rear of the truck had been pushed and moved, leaving a skid of mud, a shallow trench made by its tires.

Within the hour we were packed up, everything tossed in the back of the pickup, and the two of us rumbled out of the woods and onto the highway at the highest speed we could manage, and all the way back to Wild Peach.

“Did that really happen?” Mrs. Robinson asked, her eyes flashing, her pulse practically visible in her throat.

“Nah,” I said. Unashamed. Unbothered. Unaffected by the groans of disappointment.

I got an “F” on the essay.

“Very well written!” a note in red ink said, cursive praise across the top of the page. “But the assignment was to tell us a TRUE story!”

Best “F” I ever earned.

A NOTE AT THE END

I wish I’d kept that story. In fact, there were tons of stories and essays from that point in my life that are now lost to time, and sometimes I remember snatches of them. I did start keeping things somewhere around 10th grade, though not quite everything. Many things. Enough, at least, to show me that, yes, I really was a writer from the beginning.

It’s funny how I didn’t quite click to it, though. I mean, I always told everyone I was going to be a writer, that I was going to write books. Someday. That was always something I talked about. But for some reason, I didn’t really believe it until later. Until I’d done it. Until I’d finally stopped to think about it, one day after ten or twenty or thirty books had been published. “I guess I was a writer the whole time.”

Dreams and passions can be like that.

Sometimes we have to start looking for proof before we see proof.