The Great American Eclipse
In the woods with Sasquatch and the Red-Haired Dancer
Who is engineering the weather?
Sundown, you better take care, if I find you been creeping ’round my back-stairs
My friend Ashlea Stinnett invited me to a Bigfoot campout in Washington State. I brought the Red-Haired Dancer with me, fully aware of our interloper status. We were among a crew of true believers, mostly older women with a knack for kindness and the telling of a good yarn, who spent their days noticing twigs arranged into meaningful hieroglyphics, felled trees in impossible arrangements, a pack of Honeybuns gone missing and empty wrappers carefully returned to the base of a tree. Sasquatch left a knife near Ashlea’s tent the day after I mentioned she was the kind of woman to carry a knife on her belt. Sasquatch evaded me however, probably because I am a writer. The truth is that I was the one evading Sasquatch because I can barely make sense of this world, let alone an interdimensional one. I came because I wanted to reconnect with Ashlea, who I met in a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, during my first book tour. She was working a job as a prison guard at the time. Soon after she would be …
