boom swagger swagger boom boom

25May09

I am pretty sure I have told some of this story before, but it totally bears repeating. When I was in the third grade, I started school at Maywood Hills Elementary. We had moved to Bothell a few months prior to the school year’s beginning, and lived in an apartment building on Ross Road.

My Aunt Cak and Uncle Ron lived nearby, and it was fun to be so close to my cousins Rhonda and Aaron. My mom tended bar at an old school Italian joint, and Timmi and I had matching Raggedy Ann sheets on our beds.

Being new at school wasn’t so great and, to make matters worse, there was already a kid in my class with the same name. Plus, he was a boy. Cary. Cary Crook. His mom drove our school bus, and that always intrigued me. How weird that must have been, having your mom drive the school bus.

I don’t remember very much about her, but I do remember that Cary wasn’t one of the popular kids, nor was he one of the rich kids. He wasn’t a troublemaker, and he was never mean to me. He was not like that kid Joel, who made fun of me all the time, and one day came up to me with something in his palm. Joel opened his grubby little hand to reveal a little piece of hardware.

“Wanna screw?” he asked, a sneer across his face.

Years later, when we were in junior high, Joel blew his head off with his dad’s gun. The local newspaper tried to link his suicide to rock and roll. It caused me to write my very first letter to the editor, decrying such nonsense.

I felt bad for Joel’s little sister, who had the misfortune of finding her brother’s body. But, quite honestly, I hated that kid’s guts.

Sometime during the four years I spent at Maywood Hills, Cary’s dad came to school, to talk to our class. I’m pretty sure it was the fifth grade, when Mr. Baker always had a lot of action going on in our classroom. By then, I wasn’t new anymore, and I was popular enough to be the President of our class. I loved fifth grade.

Even though I know that other kids had their dads come visit the class, to talk about their jobs, I can’t remember anyone other than Cary’s father. For one thing, those days were kind of a bummer. How come moms couldn’t come talk to the class? I didn’t have a dad to come in and try to joke with my friends, and tell us all about his boring job.

My dad had not seen me since I was two years old. I wouldn’t end up meeting him until I was twenty three.

Cary’s dad was super interesting, and a total mystery. Why? BECAUSE HE WAS A BIGFOOT HUNTER. Swear to god. He stood in front of our class and totally blew my mind with his crazy talk. He had pictures, and evidence, and all kinds of stories about tracking the elusive sasquatch.

It was seriously one of the best days ever at Maywood Hills. A BIGFOOT HUNTER?! That was his JOB? It still blows my mind.

I think about it every Memorial Day weekend, when Sasquatch! at the Gorge rolls around. I wonder if Cary and his dad are amused by a music festival named after their dude. And, then, I think about Maury, the OTHER bigfoot hunter I knew when I was a kid.

What kind of luck is that? Two bigfoot hunters in one town? Although, considering the fact that Bothell was once home to an old dive bar called The Bigfoot, it probably isn’t that unusual. They had a giant statue of Bigfoot outside the bar, right on the old Bothell-Everett Highway.

It’s not there anymore.

Maury isn’t there anymore, either. He actually wasn’t a professional bigfoot hunter. Maury had been an avid hang gliding enthusiast, and a real kid favorite in the neighborhood. He lived a couple of doors down the street from my aunt and uncle and, on Halloween, he would drop cans of soda pop into our trick-or-treat bags.

He drove an El Camino and wasn’t married. Sometimes, he’d let all the kids jump in the back, so he could drive us down the hill to 7-11 for Slurpees. He wasn’t creepy, at all. A totally nice man, just doing his thing and being fun.

The hang gliding accident changed all that. Maury suffered severe brain damage and, once he was out of the hospital and back living in his modest home, he was never the same. The bad kids at the end of the street would get Maury to buy them booze, and they would break into his house and steal his weed.

Sometimes, late at night, there would be terrible noises coming from Maury’s backyard. Howling, and shrieking, and all sorts of scary sounds. Maury became convinced that bigfoot lived in the patch of woods in the old dairy field that lined the block. He spent hours welding together a giant cage, big enough to hold the sasquatch.

Maury’s family had to intervene shortly after the cage was dragged out to the woods, another hot spot for the bad teenagers on the block. Maury had hung a giant slab of raw meat in the cage, hoping to catch that hairy ape man. It didn’t work. I’m sure that professional bigfoot hunters would have scoffed at the effort.

I escaped from Bothell as soon as I could. I moved far away, to London, and would always laugh when the Loch Ness Monster would make the news. It reminded me of bigfoot, and the mighty Pacific Northwest.

I didn’t go to Sasquatch! this year and, although I didn’t miss the long drive and hordes of humans, I regret not seeing the Murder City Devils. It sounds like Spencer went wild, and I’m sorry I missed it. I wish he would have been wearing his gorilla costume.

I Googled my old classmate Cary today, before writing this. I was completely unsurprised to find his father online. He runs Bigfoot Central. I admire the dedication to his craft, and can hardly wait to tell Merchbot that the Crook family assisted with the movie Harry And The Hendersons.

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