Everything Was An Exclamation

Long years ago that seem short to me, we lived on the heights overlooking the meanders of the Columbia River. I walked down the hill every day past the barbed wire fence that acted as my safety net on my first Western Flyer test flight. It took four years, three grades and earned trust to walk the short cut through the farmer’s field and tree’s forest to Francis Marion Elementary. When I told my best friend, David Palmer that Francis Marion was the Swamp Fox, he told me no girls ever fought in the Revolutionary war. “What about Molly Pitcher Molly?” I asked. He told me that was a man’s name but that Francis was definitely not. We saw a mule deer one September morning while cutting through the tree’s forest to school. It bolted away from us in springy leaps like a four legged pogo stick on the pine needled ground. Locomotive clouds of steam left an ellipsis dissipating in front of our stunned expressions. “That was bigfoot, man!!!” David stamped out in shouts of words and flurry of baseball t-shirt arms. “That was bigfoot and we saw him… and here’s the track!!!” He pointed to a barren spot on the short cut trail and frantically commanded me to gather branches and weeds to hide the footprint. “We’ll come back after school and make a cast!!” When David got excited about something, he would talk really fast and move his arms about like he was making a snow angel in the air. I always imagined he was casting a net to draw you into his new thing, his new obsession. “We’ve got to start a bigfoot club and try to catch him!” He exclaimed. Everything was an exclamation with David Palmer. At that instant, I knew that the UFO club was taken off chalkboard.