THERE'S THIS ONE PARTICULAR HARBOR…

I’ve been trying to find a link to the article that supports what I’m about to say but you folks can google as easily as I can.

The largest screech owl in the world lived in the woods behind my house. I saw it take the neighbor’s yappy dog one night. The damn thing terrified me for a whole summer. I could see it perched on an old telephone pole as I peeked out at it thru the slats of our trailer’s window. And I was sure it could see me. Damn it was big. I don’t know why it bothered me so much, my brothers never seemed awakened by its screeches. I guess I’ve always been highly sensitive to noise in the wood, in the hills. But let me tell you when this monster took wing it only took one screeching call to silence the whole hollow.

I often found myself walking home after dark. Usually because I’d detoured on the way home from school to my friend Triplett’s house. I would hang out there watching Star Trek or Twilight Zone, or maybe even working on some electronic project he’d cooked up. I once saw him take live electrixc current from the wall and not get hurt. We wer into that weird edge of possibility stuff. But eventually evening would fall and I’d know my dad would be getting home at some point and expect to see me already there.

The walk wasn’t too bad at first. Goodwill road wasn’t lit by streetlights but there would still be enough evening sun to see with. Then it met the road that paralleled Twelve Pole and I’d have to walk in the opposite direction from my house down to where the bridge was, cross that by the ANR rubber plant and start up Airport road. By that point people had put on lights against the dusk but you had to watch yourself walking. The sidewalk ended right where Airport road passed thru the floodgates. So by the time I’d walked back to the spot across the river from where Triplett’s house was, it was full on dark and you were walking on the road as much as possible.

You had to have good hearing; one ear turned for approaching cars, not too hard in an area where even the newest car was a big loud gas guzzler, and more likely it was an old battered pickup truck that caught you in its headlights. I always worried that the headlights were from my dad’s truck and he would slow down and cuff me on the head without even getting out of the truck, set me to running the rest of the way home double time just to receieve the proper beating that awaited me for not being home when he got there.

You’d think that would be enough to start me home earlier, but my visits to Tripplet’s house, and to Kretzar’s just a little further in town, were the only slices of ‘normal’ life I was ever exposed to. I kept hoping that some of that normalcy would rub on on me. That somehow I could take the atmosphere of respect and love back to the dingy white trailer on Airport road and it would somehow dilute the stain of anger and self loathing that permeated the fake wood paneling inside.

There was a nursing home somewhere along the way and the building manager had long ago made his mind up that “some damn kids” were trying to steal stuff from the property. The one time I saw him in daylight he was shouting at the Peterman brothers who were up on the railroad tracks throwing rocks and cinders over the whitewashed walls and into the tiny swimming pool they had for what would later become known as ‘hydro therapy.” I felt he was cut from a similar cloth as my father and I didn’t linger around. It didn’t matter to him that we didn’t like or even know the Petermans, he threatened to release his dogs on the lot of us if we didn’t clear off. And that’s what he did every night.

Most people’s dogs don’t get to sleep indoors in the country. They are just put out for the night and expected to amuse themselves till breakfast. Almost the same strategy used on us boys during the hottest days of the summer. And the one thing that amused those dogs more than anything was nipping at the heels of any lone traveler who happened by their property. You had to keep an ear out for them cause if you heard them anywhere near the front yard of the nursing home you had to divert up the hillside and follow the tracks till you were past their place. There weren’t any permanent paths thru there so you just had to guess where to walk or bushwack your way thru. Which usually made too much noise anyway.

There was no going to the other side of the road. You were pretty much trapped against the river. The other side of the road offered a few inches of berm, less than a foot really, and then a drop of 15, 20 feet to the riverside. The banks of Twelvepole were always muddy and covered in thin scraggly trees and whatever bits of detritus that had washed up there during spring flooding. There was no light down there and no way you could find your way along without stepping off the bank where a drainage ditch cut thru or into mud a foot or more deep or even stumbling into a refuse pile someone had started by abandoning a broken washing machine or some rusty farm equipment. It looked as if the darkness on your left was solid and you no more wanted to walk into that unknown shadow than you wanted to walk straight into the river itself.

You could hear bullfrogs along the river that were loud and incessant. I never saw one in person but everyone believed they were as big as your spread out hand. They made a helluva noise trying to out croak the other frogs but they would get quiet if you moved near them. There was no way to sneak up on one. Somehow in the dark it KNEW you were there. The same went for the carp. The noise the carp made terrified me till someone explained to me what it was I was hearing. I didn’t know it was carp at first, all I knew was that you could hear something splashing down by the water’s edge. Sometimes here, sometimes further down, and just when you thought it was gone entirely, that something would make a splash right beside you. Hearing the commotion at the water’s edge I almost believed the local legend of ‘mud gators’ in Twelvepole. I mean, alligators didn’t *need* salt water to live right? They *could* swim up stream and take up shop in some tributary of the Ohio, couldn’t they? So what the hell was making that noise if it wasn’t a big crock freeing itself from its muddy cave each night to hunt unsuspecting kids who were all alone on a country lane where there was no where to run?

Well it was carp. Or at least that’s the story I’m going forward with so I can sleep nights. Not crocks, carp. Carp feed on rotten plants and whatever small fish or other creature it can fit in its mouth. They were already growing to three or four feet long in that area long before the chinese variety came along. These big fish would suck up all the goo and loose food lodged among the tree roots just at the water’s edge, and when they finished all they could reach they would slap their tails against the roots making a big wave to wash food out to where they could get at it.

This was a noisy enterprise for a fish to be involved in but it made a kind of sense and honestly I was looking for any explanation that was better than a resident crocodile population in Huntington, West Virginia. On one of those occasions where I didn’t get home before my dad I came home to find he had somehow caught one of these big carp and then deposited it in the bath tub. It was longer than the flat bottom of the tub and he had water running over it to keep it alive. He said that was to wash out any crap that might be inside the fish. I had an sudden, painfully cold spot in my stomach when I realized he meant to eat that fish. And that he meant for us to eat it too. It had to be full of flukes and parasites and Lord knows what if it had lived in twelvepole long enough to become over 4 feet long. I remember shuddering as I stared at it on its side, mouth moving and its eye following me around the tiny bathroom in our trailer. I added this to my mental list of things my father had done that qualified as ‘bat shit crazy.’ This was right up there with his crop dusting method of concrete pouring and his almost too clever method of selling moonshine right from our doorstep.

I knew there was no taking a shower in the morning and I hoped to God I didn’t have to kill and clean it AND cook it AND eat it. I turned out the light and closed the door on it hoping somehow it would disappear during the night. But every so often I would hear it thrash and thump against the sides of the tub and knew it was probably as unhappy about its plight as I was.

And that’s what woke me when the owl–remember the owl? When the owl decided to perch right outside the rear window of our trailer. That was my bedroom window and I scrunched up against the wall below it so I couldn’t be seen from outside. I covered my ears and tried to go back to sleep but I would startle each time a shadow passed across the shaft of moonlight opposite the window. I knew owls didn’t make any noise when they flew, that there would be no warning flap of wings before the attack just a sudden change in air pressure and before your curiosity would increase enough to turn around you’d feel the claws of a night bird in your back in your scalp, tearing and rending until you went down. Then then the beak would stab and tear and a cry of triumph would echo thru the valley and no one, no one would believe that an owl had hunted down and killed a teenaged boy.

Oh yeah I slept well that night.

On top of the random thumping of the fish in our tub and the call of the owl which was sometimes far off and sometimes really really near, the neighbor’s dog was out and barking yip! yip! yip! nonstop. It just wouldn’t shut up. I looked out and saw it in the bit of side yard between our property and theirs, running along the fence line and barking its fool head off. Then I looked up along the hillside and saw the silhouette of this huge huge owl sitting on the telephone pole. Later it would be found that the owl was over 4 feet in height with a 6 foot wingspan. This was no ordinary screech owl. It turned its head and looked in my direction. I didn’t see it move so much as catch the glint of moonlight from its eyes. I ducked down and hid for a moment and then the barking was replaced by a sudden yelp of pain. I looked back out and saw the owl flapping hard to clear the fence opposite, something heavy and struggling in its claws.

I think at that moment I knew how stories about Mothman got started. I told people at school about this big owl that carried off the neighbor’s dog but I couldn’t find anyone who believed me or didn’t think I was exaggerating. It wasn’t until an article appeared in the local paper about an owl flying into the landing lights of a small plane at the Tri-state airport that anyone gave me any credence. Next to the article was a picture of two men holding the wings of the owl out alongside the wing of the plane and its wingspan was nearly the same length as one of the wings on the Cessna.
True story. Here was my proof but the most sympathetic response I got from anyone was “Well, its dead now, so why waste your time worrying about it?” But they didn’t know, they didn’t have to live out there, they didn’t wake in the middle of the night wondering if it had a mate? If it hadn’t already hatched young and taught them to hunt terriers in the middle of the night?

I don’t think I can communicate to you how just seeing something that’s larger than it should be can increase its threat level in an almost logistical curve. That owl wasn’t only large creature I saw in that area. The carp were already known to get big and really, how could they not with all that stuff that washed into the slow green waters of Twelvepole? And there was all the talk about the huge catfish that were found near the Silver Bridge when it went down. Catfish are way worse than carp in my estimation.

The next summer we had a class assignment to do for Biology class. We had to make an insect collection of 25 different insects and mount them in a cigar box or something similar. I wasn’t sure how I was going to achieve this without funds to buy the net and the killing jar, not to mention where I was going to get wax, pins and a cigar box? A few insects were easy to find, there were always dead wasps or yellow jackets in some window sill around the house. I avoided spiders alive or dead, just didn’t like how they looked. They didn’t seem natural to me, like they hadn’t evolved the same way as most other insects with their extra legs and their extra eyes. I was certain that someday Science would prove they weren’t from Earth at all. That some geological record would prove they were thrown off some primordial visitor’s ship and found a plentiful hunting ground here among the slower 6-legged earth bugs. But enough about that.

I checked a field guide to insects out of the public library and was a bit surprised at all the different species of bugs native to our area. Mostly you see flies, wasps, spiders, ants and a stink bug every now and then. Roaches I don’t think counted and I wasn’t going to put one of them in my collection anyhow. I got enough grief at school without trying to fend off the rumor that roaches were sharing that crowded little trailer with the 4 of us. They weren’ but there were places not too far away where I could get one if I wanted to. And I didn’t want to. Ticks were off the list as being too close to spiders, and with the history my family had with tick bites I wasn’t going to get anywhere near one live or dead. Lightning bugs were OK and easily caught. That was still only about 6 specimens, it was going to take some doing to find 25 different kind of bugs, catch them and kill them while keeping them intact enough to be identifiable once they were pinned down in a cigar box.

My uncle Bill came helped me out a bit by stopping by with a cigar box and a 6 inch long bug already pinned down inside it. He told me that one evening they were watching TV with the door open and a ‘walking stick’ crawled up the screen. He caught it and killed it by putting it in a mason jar with a mothball. I thanked him profusely and started searching around for my own killing jar. I found a nearly empty jelly jar in the fridge which I washed out and decided it would do. Though it was too small for bugs the size of the walking stick. Unsure if they bit or stung I was glad he had dispatched that one for me. I didn’t have a mothball to put in the jelly jar, the most toxic thing I could find that wasn’t going to make me sick as well was nail polish remover left behind when my step mom moved out. I soaked a bit of cotton in it and went out looking for a bug to test it on. I flipped a board over near the back fence and found some pill bugs, some earthworms and something that looked a bit like a cotton weevil. According to the book those weren’t common in my area, most likely due to a lack of cotton plants to eat. That was probably why it was underneath that board in the first place. I didn’t have a net so I just sort of flicked it into the jar using the lid. I wanted something to protect my hands from stinging insects but the only gloves in the house were my dad’s welding gloves and I wasn’t going to risk his wrath by using them.

The weevil didn’t like the smell of nail polish remover, but it didn’t die very quickly either. By the time it stopped moving I felt sick to my stomach too. To this day I can’t stand the smell of nail polish remover. I’m sure before this project was over I had breathed as much of it as some of those unfortunate bugs did.

The weevil and a pillbug brought my total up to 10. I set out along the railroad track behind our trailer studying the ground and after a few attempts caught a grasshopper as well. I was sure I could find a cricket once dark started to set in, but I was still half way from the needed number. I wanted to do this project right. I wanted not to just complete it but to find something really interesting to put in it. Mr. Plymale, our biology teacher, had inferred that he would give extra points for something rare or different and I was hoping that if I could just find something strange or just unusual I might be able to get a passing grade if I came in with less than 25 different bugs.

The railroad tracks cut their way thru the hillside about half a mile from my house and there were ditches with standing water on both sides. I had been inspired to look here by a drawing in the field guide showing the life cycle of the dragonfly from water-based nymph to flying adult and I was hoping to find a dragonfly or a damselfly to place in the center of the box. My mother called damselflies “the Devil’s darnin’ needle” but I would use no colloquial names in my collection. This was Science I was attempting and I thought I was pretty good at Science stuff.

I crouched down next to the tracks, sitting my jar down on a railroad tie and began my search for signs of life. There were lots of flying bugs, gnats and midges too small to mount on a pin and wasps buzzing nosily thru. I wasn’t going to try and catch one of them alive anyway. There were butterflies around; at least three different kinds but without a net I wasn’t agile enough to even swat them into the water. As I sat there in the quiet I realized there were plenty of bugs in the wilds of West Virginia but most were beyond my ability to capture. Damn that evolution!

I noticed there were salamanders living in the water and they seemed to be feeding off tiny waterbugs and that led me to look closer and I noticed that along the wet border of the ditch there were these tiny tiny frogs. They hopped away when I came near but once I settled down quiet like to watch they returned. There was something odd about them and my mind drifted away from catching bugs to catching frogs. There wasn’t one among them more than an inch long and they were fast but unable to hop very far. Trying to avoid falling into the water and still catch one took the better part of an hour. Once I had one and was able to examine it up close I noticed it had 6 legs instead of 4. Another mutant species in my own back yard! I was at once excited and horrified. WHAT was it that was causing all these strange creatures to appear in this backwoods corner of the world? I caught a few more certain that six legged frogs would trump any number of bugs and carried them home proudly. Eventually the flush of discovery wore off and I started to suspect something was not that unusual about my 6 legged frogs. I didn’t have a magnifying glass to look at them really close up or I would have noticed sooner that they had antennae as well as 6 legs. Clearly something with 6 legs and antennae underneath was not a frog at all but just another bug I had never heard of. Consulting the field guide (which I hadn’t actually taken into the field with me to keep it clean) solved the riddle for me. I’d found what was commonly known as ‘toad bugs.’ This was still an unusual bug for my collection but it was clear I wasn’t going to get a new species of frog named after myself anyway soon.

(I should add that these days frogs with extra legs aren’t totally unheard of. Its sad, but it happens all too commonly in today’s more toxic environment. If I HAD found a 6 legged frog back then it would have been more likely caused by a chemical spill instead of alien contact.)went back to get a few more the next day. There was a whole grey market economy forming around insects that summer as people tried to fill out their collections. In the process I caught a large green and brown preying mantis. I had a beetle of some sort already in the killing jar but I couldn’t let this beauty get away. I put it in the jar and was amazed to see that it caught and ate the beetle even while both were dying from the slightly toxic fumes inside the jar. I felt really bad that they weren’t dying quickly, or that I had to do this project at all when there was no money to spend on it and nothing in the house worse than shaving cream or Draino maybe. Nothing that would fit the term “quick kill.” When we wanted to get rid of bugs, we swatted them down and stepped on them, a crude but effective method that was insecticide free. Mostly though, the lack of a butterfly net was seriously slowing down my collecting. I tried fashioning a diamond-shaped wand from a coat hanger and a lone nylon, another artifact of the departed Norma Jean. It didn’t really work as a butterfly net but it did extend my reach a bit and I could toss it on a bug once it had landed. Sometimes it pinned down my target and sometimes it was just too light and would bounce off a plant or rock and be worse than useless.

I planned to trade a few toad bugs for butterflies so I went back to the ditch by the tracks and settled down in about the same place as before. This time the day was much warmer and mosquitos were bothering me a lot. I could have made a full collection of 25 mosquitos in short order if they hadn’t been too small to stick a pin thru. Most of the toad bugs were too small to even try or they split when I attempted it. I decided to make a small loop of tape and stick them to it, and then stick the pin thru the tape. They were harder to catch them this time. Either they were more wary because of their missing brethren, or they were just more active in the heat. I alternated trying to get other insects while the toad bugs regrouped. My makeshift net didn’t help me much in catching the damsel flies that would land on the wet clay and then fly away before I got close enough to even threaten them with my presence. Those bugs had good eyesight and it sucked that I could see at least 5 more kinds of insect on the wing than I’d ever be able to catch. And it was about to suck even more.

Late in the day when the shadow of the rock wall on one side of the railroad track crept across to the other wall and made a complete tunnel of coolness over my hunting grounds I heard a creaking clicking noise like nothing I’d heard before. I looked around to find the source and saw a huge dragonfly zipping along among the sparse reeds right beside me. It was so big I was actually hearing its wings as it flew up one side of the cut and back down the other. Once it paused near me and I guessed its wings were about 6 inches long, the body a bit longer still. IF I could catch this beauty I wouldn’t need another eight bugs I could just turn him in and be the hero of the class!

I made a toss with the bug wand that it completely ignored. I tried swatting it out of the air on its return flight, I tried sitting still and swinging out with my bug wand but it was too quick on the wing, too able to change its flight to be more than slightly annoyed by me. I stayed there till it started getting really dark and every twenty minutes or so I’d hear that distant clicking noise and pivot around slowly trying to find which direction it would come from this time. I saw it plenty, but I never even got close to catching it.

The next day at school I tried to wheel and deal my entire collection for a butterfly net. I also needed a much larger killing jar but I would worry about that once I had this king of dragonflys in my possession. I wasn’t even able to get the loan of a net without giving away why I needed one all of a sudden. Too many of my classmates had waited till the assignment was nearly over and they all were counting on the tactical advantage a net was going to give them. I went back to that spot every remaining day of the assignment. Sometimes I could see it flying among the rocks before I even got into the narrow shadowed space where it hunted. I got close a few times, I was able to get a good idea of its wingspan but might as well been chasing my own shadow as this rare creature. Defeated I gave up and returned to my perch on the railroad track watching the dragonfly till it moved off, perhaps hunting along the riverbank while I was waiting in the cut. I was tired and hot and with one day left before the assignment was due I had to settle for a dead damselfly that I found stuck in the mud on the way out.

As a last ditch effort I put my coat hanger with the nylon on it underneath the porch lamp during the night. I’m sure if my dad had come home he would have killed me for sticking something under the siding but he didn’t and after checking it a few times thru the night I had a couple of moths, a katydid and another beetle to replace the headless one the mantis had eaten. My total was 19. Before biology class Triplett traded me a dragonfly nymph for one of my toad bugs and I felt dumb that I had spent all this time waving a nylon around in the air when he had found several wonderful specimens just by lifting a few rocks in the stream behind his house.

To make things worse, Mr. Plymale didn’t believe me when I proudly introduced him to a ‘toad bug.’ He also refused to let me dash to the library and get the recently returned field guide to prove it to him. I was shocked that this assignment I’d worked so hard on didn’t seem to be all that important to him. He seemed to think I was trying to pull something over on him and just chuckled amusedly at my protestations. And I didn’t get any points for the walking stick because by this time it had dried out and fallen into a pile of unidentifiable segments before Mr. Plymale saw it. I was the only one in the class with one but it might as well have been straw by the time he got around to opening the box. Triplett vouched for me about the toad bugs and with his sterling grades and an IQ somewhere up in the 130’s it should have been enough. But no, Mr Plymale wasn’t buying it and declared that we were in ‘cahoots’ together. Triplett didn’t get credit for his toad bug either. I told Mr. Plymale about the huge dragonfly I had been stalking and he smiled indulgently and said “This reminds me of the time you said a giant owl was trying to eat you!” He did give me the weekend to try and catch it but as I recall it rained heavily that weekend and I never saw it again after that.

http://bugguide.net/node/view/158