Banner photo of Larry Eugene Meredith, Ronald Tipton and Patrick Flynn, 2017.

The good times are memories
In the drinking of elder men...

-- Larry E.
Time II

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Thing on the Trail

I admit this one is a bit strange and has me baffled. 

Three years or so ago I took a number of videos of trails I walked in the area. Several of these were in Brandywine Creek State Park. I narrated these treks, sometimes added music and put them up on YouTube. They were taken with my old digital camera, which did not do videos well.

One of those films was along a trail I call the Piken Creek Trail West. It runs from Thompson's Bridge Road, where the park entrance is, to Ramsey Road. It exits onto Ramsey Road not too far from where my church, Iron Faith Fellowship, does baptisms in the Brandywine.

I received a message on YouTube this morning from someone called "constructionofsoul". This is what they wrote"

"Is that a baby Squatch????  I mean wtf larry C'mon  it looks like a child sized evil entity of times past thets chillin in the woods  creepin on you!!!  I know I'm probably the only one to notice this in 3 years but I can't stop watching the clip ITS WEIRD!!!

"looks like a shadow figure crossing the path ahead of you right after your camera looks at the two boulders just wondering if you saw this?

"that sent shivers up my spine let me know what you think"

I wondered what I might think, too, so I found my video and watched it to see what they were talking about.  Here is a clip of what they were referring to. It will open on two rocks. As I move on you will see an opening toward the top in the middle that is sort of a round arch. You have to watch closely, but some creature does appear from the left, cross the path, kind of step back a bit and then forward and into the bushes on the right. I followed the sequence in regular speed with one in slow motion.




I admit it is a bit spooky. When I first looked at it I thought I had an explanation, but after watching in slow motion, I do not. The thing seems to cross the path stepping slightly in my direction, then hesitate just briefly by taking a step back and then coming forward and into the brush. It appears to enter the brush down from the back of the trail where it enters Ramsey Road. 

I took off some stills, but that camera was not primarily a video camera and the films were poor quality. My stills are like all those other paranormal stills one sees of Bigfoot or Flying Saucers and stuff, blurry. Obviously something appears to move across my path (and I do know there were no other people around when I filmed). 

Anybody have any theories?


Right after the two rocks. Slight dark object to the left of the white arch at the top center.

 Something moves into the path from the left.

 It crosses the path and hesitates slightly.


 It stepped slightly toward me when it moved again.

 It stepped off the trail and disappeared into the brush.



Thursday, January 23, 2014

Winter


It was a quarter to ten in the morning as I begin this yesterday. The temperature outside had risen…yes, risen…to 5 degrees. The wind chill was twelve below zero. The sun was out and everything was bright, because everything was covered with nine inches of white. Where my son lives, an hour away on a clear day, there was eleven inches of snow.
Kids were sent home early from school early the day before and kept home by something or other yesterday. It couldn’t be there was any snow, of course, because the Al Gore Church of Global Warming preachers told us 13 years ago that our children wouldn’t know what snow is.
Mr. I-invented-the-Internet himself told us in December 2007 that the entire north polar cap would be gone in five years. He based that on a climate scientist’s claim that the Arctic ice could totally be gone by 2013. Oops! Tell that to those 52 Russian Scientists and tourists who sailed an icebreaker to the pole over New Years and got trapped in the ice for over a week. They went to see the melting and saw the freezing, until helicopters managed to rescue them. But then, that was the South Pole.
We could use a bit of that warming around here, because it is just going to get colder and that snow out there isn’t going anywhere for a few days, apparently meaning not before near mid-February. I have taken precautions to prevent my water pipes from freezing this time. I can’t do anything about the TV channels taking everything off to have team coverage of every wind gust and degree dip. Hey, people, it is called winter!
We had half of our ten biggest snowfalls in the last five years. I heard last week the Global Warming clingers were despairing because they couldn’t convince most people to believe them. Their biggest problem is the weather doesn’t cooperate. The person yelled that “97% of scientists agreed”, a figure I sincerely doubt, but even if true science isn’t consensus, it’s what is. We must remember scientists once concurred that the world was flat and Flat-earth Deniers like Columbus would sail off the edge. They concurred that the best way to treat illness was to bleed out the bad blood, either with some knife slices or better yet, leeches. Scientists once concurred surgeons to wash their hands before operating was a silly waste of time.
When I was in grade school the scientists told me I would never see a man on the moon in my lifetime.
This winter takes me back to my boyhood when our winters were just like this in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. I wrote a story in 1961 called, “Last Cold Spring” because we were still wearing winter jackets in June. It 1958 the country got hit by a blizzard, the one that killed Elizabeth Taylor’s then husband, Mike Todd, in a plane crash. That storm closed down southern Pennsylvania, knocked out the electric for a week. We lived more country then, so we had no heat, no lights, no TV, no water and no working toilet for that time.  Hey, people, it is called winter! It isn’t new.
Yeah, it’s cold, so layer up and enjoy the briskness of the air.
Oh, this just in, there is a chance that summer may be hot.