Move Over Bigfoot, Here Comes Sheepsquatch

[sofa king]

6. And I think I have.

One of the weirdest things that ever happened to me was deep in West Virginia. I was on deserted a one-lane "highway" (Rte 72, the "Cheat Valley Highway, which becomes the "Dry Fork Road&quot in a deep, deep river gorge, limping a moped overloaded with camping gear up a steep incline at about 8 mph, when the bike started to run out of fuel. It was between rainstorms and I was soaked to the skin, and the road was still wet.

I stopped the bike and filled it with my last gallon of gas, when I noticed a rivulet of blood in the road, and farther up, a small pool of blood and a bloody knife just sitting in the middle of the road. I stopped the bike there, and peered over the no-guardrail cliffside where it looked like a body had been dragged and dumped, but it was straight down and all I could hear was the far-distant roar of the angry creek far below.

I hadn't seen a vehicle in at least half an hour, and it couldn't have stopped raining much earlier than that (the rain would have washed away the blood). So, I told myself calmly, someone must have hit a deer coming down the hill, got out and put the creature out of its misery, set the knife on top of his truck, dragged the deer over to the cliff and dumped it, and left without picking up the knife.

Yeah, that's what happened, I said. But just in case I carefully put the knife in a ziploc bag and got the hell out of there--at eight excruciatingly slow miles per hour, certain that some creepy highwayman was going to run me down and fillet me like a sunfish. But I'm pretty sure I never saw a single vehicle along that stretch of road, and scarcely a place wide enough for a car to pull over, and it was raining again within minutes. Creepy.

I was less than halfway home on a truly insane ride which I shall never again attempt, and I'd been adding to a "list of things that can kill me in the road" the whole way out and back, much of which I still remember: walnuts, squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, juvenile box turtles, carcasses and the vultures (and an eagle) feeding on them, oil, vehicle parts, rain, gravel, a fogged helmet, deer, 18-wheelers, people on cell phones, potholes and eroding roadsides, floods, falling rocks, people standing in the road on cell phones, and then the bloody knife and then the shiny bear eyes at the bend of the mountain pass, in the dark and rain, out of gas and hoping to make it past the top so I could dead-stick it into Franklin. Wild and wonderful that week was.