Just Get Over It Already!

     Earlier this week, my book club ladies and I were discussing a novel about a vet returning from Afghanistan and the struggles she had to face. One lady wanted to know more about what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is exactly. 

(Disclaimer, I have been diagnosed with PTSD by several health professionals.)

     What is PTSD?  You can get it from living through a war, fighting in a war, experiencing any trauma as a civilian - or you might not. The same violent experience shared by any number of individuals might cause anxiety afterwards -- or it may not.

     For instance: you live in a neighborhood. Most of the people are great but you have that one guy down the street that regularly speeds past your home and blows through the school bus stop. Then there's the neighbor who has a pitbull. It's constantly digging in your yard. It ate another neighbor's cat-- alive. One day "Speedy" is floor-boarding it when Brutus jumps out between the garbage cans he was snacking from.  Even though he swerves his vehicle, the driver hits the dog with an audible thud and then strikes a tree. The man hits his head on the steering wheel on impact. Parts of Brutus go EVERYWHERE. Speedy gets out, checks his grill, curses & picks some fur out. He begins to rub his forehead. He’s not even sure whose blood he’s seeing when he pauses and looks at his hands! Realization hits the young man --what he thought was garbage in the street is actually a dog.

    Some people go on mowing their lawns. Other neighbors run to the driver. His mom gets to the crash. She's screaming. The dog's owners start arguing. Love them or hate them, at the scene there's two obvious victims, and unseen, maybe more!

     Some citizens are noticeably bothered, but in days, they are breathing easy. Some people go on for weeks and months, though, reliving the shared trauma. Every other night, Speedy wakes up screaming because he and Brutus were best buds even though the dog lived several homes away. Night after night he relives the moment he discovers what he thought was garbage knocked over was actually the dog he saw grow from a puppy to a goofball of a canine. Some neighbors are happy because the guy's driving slower since the crash & the pitbull that was allowed to run lose is gone. One or two homeowners, although relieved, are triggered by the sound of screeching tires in the market parking lot, or the sight of an animal dead on the roadside.

                                                   ***   Just Get Over It Already!  ***

     Some people down the street tell them to just get over it, but it's not that easy. My friends, that is PTSD. It is mental, physical and sadly, by extension, social. There is NO SHAME in it. We who actually suffer from PTSD put on a brave face in many cases because we’re told to “just get over it,” and to move on. Inside we are in turmoil struggling not to relive the trauma that is trapped in our souls; desperately trying to avoid triggers. In many cases we self-medicate along with therapy and medical intervention. Years of therapy. Years of doctor visits--

                                                           IT DOES NOT GET BETTER!

     We don’t need judgement. We need prayers and hugs. We need guidance, not shunning. We need programs that we paid taxes for to NOT be diverted to other programs, many of which are fraudulent.

 

     Thank you for your time.

A Blizzard of Memories

     Over the weekend, meteorologist Ryan Hall predicted heavy snow and high winds for the Great Lakes. I thought to myself if it doesn’t equal the Great Blizzard of 1978, it’s not such a big deal. I took into consideration that modern meteorologists can predict weather down to the hour, it seems, but predictions don’t lessen the power and impact of storms – it’s just that we are better prepared these days. Better preparation means warnings to stay off the roads (often unheeded). It also means salt trucks are ready, more emergency personnel may be scheduled, and hospitals can call in more staff.  I didn’t fear this storm. I didn’t believe for a minute it would compare to the event that nearly crippled the Great Lakes Region in 1978.

     My memory takes me to other blizzards, like the one when I was nine or ten. My family and I were coming back from Virginia. We were almost to the Michigan border when Ohio State Troopers blocked the highway and told us to get off Interstate 75. Traffic was diverted to the closest ramp. We followed a line of cars into Toledo. My mom, dad and I sat in a McDonalds that generously stayed open long past closing. The manager and staff started cooking more food and giving it away for free. The manager brought out board games, some of which were McDonalds themed. More people trickled in, seeing that the lights were still on. My dad went on a walk. He came back and quietly hustled my mother and I out of the little burger place and put us in our station wagon. My mother said she’d heard the interstate was still closed, after all, people were still gathering. My dad proudly proclaimed that he’d found the last vacant room at a truck stop. We went down a block, pulled in, went inside and then my dad got donuts and milk and a few other supplies from a gas station. My mother worried that the milk would spoil, but my dad assured her that it would keep just fine hidden in the bushes under the window. In fact, we had to thaw it for a couple mornings until the roads were opened up again.

     Then there was a great snowstorm in1982. The drifts were so high that there was maybe four inches of fence in spots. Our collies went right up to it but never went over the exposed chain-link. It was so cold that an arctic owl flew down to our neighborhood, looking and sounding like a ghost in the trees.

     Those were major blizzards, but the greatest of all, in my opinion, was the storm that paralyzed the Great Lakes in late January of 1978. I was thirteen. The flakes started, no different than most snowstorms.

     We’d recently got our first color television. It had a twenty-inch screen, laughable by today’s standards. This was a second-hand purchase from family friends who had recently upgraded.

     I had just gotten home from school and turned on channel 50, which was full of after-school shows geared towards family and children. Soon, my mother switched channels to watch the local news. Weatherman Sonny Eliot was saying something about sneezy weather, since it was going to be snowing and breezy. 

    The doorbell rang and my mother answered it. I looked out onto Allen Road in Taylor, Michigan thinking how pretty the flakes were; traffic was slow on our usually busy road, a major north-south five lane street if you counted the turn lane. I could hear the swish, swish of tires on wet pavement. I didn’t pay attention to whomever was at the door. I figured if it was a neighbor, they’d have been ushered inside. I saw beautiful big flakes and the evergreen bushes by our porch covered in white, their little red berries exposed. It was a month past Christmas, but it looked like a Holiday scene. A most beautiful feeling came over me. There was no foreboding whatsoever. My mother closed the front door. I turned back to the electric magic that danced in rainbow colors across our “new” TV. 

     The next day, I awoke to silence. Not one vehicle passed. The nearby Detroit Metro Airport was also silent. There were no locomotive sounds from the tracks just west of our home; not one. School was cancelled. My father did not go to work. Our long driveway had chest-deep drifts.

     My dad went out to the barn.  I watched from the back porch door. He had to dig out a set of barn doors to feed my horse. Sunshine took a step, arching a front leg forward, then another. She got both her hind legs past the dug out part and into the cold, white fluff and stood there belly deep for a moment. She promptly turned around and refused to go back outside for a few days.

     Our power went out. I don’t even remember getting one phone call during those couple days. I played a little tune here and there on our piano. During daylight we put a puzzle together and played some games. My mother had some cold cuts and fruit, but there was no real way to cook. We only had an electric range. At some point, my dad walked to a corner gas station for a gallon of milk. I assume the stranded employee just sheltered in place.  In the evenings we used candles for light.

     For days there were no ambulances, motorcycles, cars, trucks, planes, trains nor laughter of neighbors. The dogs, sheltering in the big red barn with the other animals, didn’t even bark. Our usually busy neighborhood was enveloped in an eerie, ominous stillness. Somehow, I do remember streetlights though.  I sat upstairs looking out the window one night. I gazed southward on Allen, drifting flakes swirling under the beams.

     In the distance came a roaring sound, motorized, but unlike a car engine. The low-toned buzz crept closer, still unfamiliar. A queer trepidation shook me from deep inside. Before long, I saw headlights and riders, but realized these were not motorcycles. Down the middle of our street coursed two snowmobiles which under normal circumstances would have found no actual snow on our street to function and even if they had, a car or truck would have collided with them. They made their way past our home and I ran to the north-facing window. I watched them travel toward Eureka. Once past all our trees, I could only hear them. Then silence returned. Perhaps twenty minutes later I heard the roaring engines again, but this time the riders in their snowsuits clutched bags or boxes of milk, beer, or food, on their way south.

     One morning, my horse was out stretching her legs, watching our collies and the neighbor dogs snarling and running up and down the fenceline. At some point our street was plowed and the din of traffic returned. The woosh of airplanes flying overhead left vaporized streaks in a new blue sky. Freight trains once again chugged on the trestle over Eureka Road. The next week, I went back to school and my dad was back to work.

     Here I sit, thinking about that storm and its overwhelming SILENCE! Our everyday commerce came to a standstill for a little less than a week. The snow, as high as a horse’s belly, the drifts up past her shoulders. For me there was no other way to measure.

     For several days, we've had heavy snow and fierce wind gusts. and I've heard we'll have this weather until at least Tuesday, with high drifts, possible. It's unlikely to rival that blizzard of 1978, but our gates are already blocked. We must be vigilant in taking water out to our animals -- it freezes so fast! 

     Monday afternoon an actual warning blared on my phone: A one hundred plus vehicle pile-up in Ottawa County, where I now live, was in progress. Then just north of my home another couple multi-vehicular crashes took place. Whether this January blizzard will be as significant as the one from forty-eight years ago, I do not know – but it does bring back memories.

 

What do you remember about the January 1978 blizzard that brought the Great Lakes region to its knees?

#Snow #Blizzard #Blizzardof1978 #collies #TaylorMichigan #Downriver #Toledo #ToledoOhio #Mcdonalds #Interstae75 #RyanHallYall #SonnyEliot #Horses #Barns #Detroit #OttawaCounty #AllenRoad #EurekaRoad

Michigan Dogman

 

     This year, along with family history, I’m going to include a few interesting tales and some Michigan lore. I hope these stories will make you ponder and question what you are so very sure about.

     Several years ago, I penned a blog entry called, “A Matter of Perspective.” In a way, this is an extension of that post. I’ll be putting myself in the first person as the character Debbie, but this is not my account. It was originally conceived as a Halloween Story based on actual witness testimony, but I never entered it on this blog since at that time, I was helping my boss close out her business.

 

 

In college, I used to live west of Grand Rapids. My friend Jean and I often walked before twilight. Some evenings we’d go to the edge of the state park so our friend Pat could join us. Pat was one of the security guards for the golf course that bordered the park and would routinely take a smoke break right about 8:30 pm. In autumn that was full dark.

     Jean and Pat and I were well acquainted with the path, rain or snow or dry conditions. The only time we wouldn’t walk it was during a windstorm because a branch could blow down and cause one of us to trip.

     This night Pat was about to light up when we heard a cracking sound, kind of like a pick-up truck driving through cornfields, but we were far from the road and nobody was allowed to drive in the woods. The only alternative was someone tearing up the turf at the course, but we could see no headlights. We heard no engine gunning for us.

     Then silence. Too quiet. Pat lit a cigarette.

     Jean joked that the sound might be the Michigan Dogman lurking nearby, and told a story about someone’s great grandfather seeing a dogman at his uncle’s hunting camp. Family lore said that the natives had reported them to the French and British all the way back a couple hundred years. Then Jean started talking about skinwalkers. The conversation faded since Pat and I were not buying it.

     We walked for another five minutes, maybe less, in silence. Then we heard an exhale. Loud. So powerful that it made the leaves and small branches beside us rattle!

     Pat hastily shone a flashlight where the state park and golf course fence met, about fifteen feet from us. Expecting a dog, maybe even a bear, at first the light was pointed close to the ground. We saw, long spindly legs, like a Barbie Doll’s, skinny but covered in dark brown fur. Pat’s beam traveled upwards to what could have been a hairy chest. The direct light illuminated what might have appeared to be a canine face, partially hidden behind pine boughs. Its hands, if you could call them that, were raised above its head, the fingers spread.

     Jean and I muttered, “Bigfoot,” under our breath but this beast was taller, maybe ten feet. Again it made a whooshing sound, exhaling at us menacingly.

     Pat dropped the cigarette and we high-tailed it to the guard building the moment the creature charged toward us. We could hear the monster’s footfalls on the pavement behind our backsides, gaining ground on our human bodies, weak compared to the lean, muscular, upright animal that we were now fleeing.

     We made it to the structure. Jean tripped over some decorative pumpkins left over from an earlier activity, falling hard on the inclined drive. I helped my friend up and we stumbled in through the doorway after Pat. Once inside the other guard, an older man close to retirement, yelled, “You’re late, where—”

     The man’s voice trailed off when he saw two more people with Pat. The old man looked angrier as we slammed the door behind us. “What the devil is going on?!”

     “It’s after us!” whispered Jean. We crouched down, the old man hunching over as he saw how visibly frightened we were.

     “What is after you? A coyote?” The old man sounded doubtful that this was anything more than college-aged students terrified of a puppy. Despite the radio being tuned into music from like thirty years ago, we heard heavy footsteps as something or someone brushed against the hedges near the front windows, crunching, chewing, and snorting its way around to the back as it searched for weaknesses in the shack’s clapboard walls. The old guard, no longer “the tough-guy,” suddenly realized the serious nature of our narrow escape, clutched his little transistor radio from another era, and fell into a chair in the corner.

     Muffled between the man's fingers, we hears the radio. A disc jockey asked listeners to call in to make a request or to share how their evening was coming along. He repeated the studio's number twice. I couldn’t remember my mother’s phone number. I couldn’t dial simple numbers like 911 or even zero! Despite my shaking hands and fingers that felt like deep-fried smelt, I grabbed the shack’s old yellow rotary phone and began to dial 2 3 1. . .

     “Hello, you are on the air, who am I speaking to?”

     “Dah, Duh,” I took a deep breath. “Debbie!”

     “. . . and how is your night, Debbie—are you spending this evening with your lover, or getting ready for Hal—”

     “We’re calling because, I think we just saw the Michigan Dogman!” I passed the phone around to my friends as we huddled beside the desk, telling him why we were calling.

     The DJ asked us a few questions and went along with us for a while, but then said, “You kids are great, you sure can tell a great Halloween story—”

     Jean fumbled for a PallMall in the almost empty pack, and flicked a lighter.

     “—Before I hang up, is there a song you’d like to request?”

     I dropped the phone on the floor. We all screamed. In the glow of Jean’s Bic, out the back window of the shed, on the low side that dropped off away from the parking lot, the dog-faced creature’s eyes glowed. It was tall enough to look into what could arguably be considered a second story! It was drooling.

     One of the dogman’s raised hands brushed the window as if to shatter it. Jean dropped the lighter. Its flame extinguished.

     The old man in the corner sobbed. “I seen it! I seen it! I seen it!”

     We waited in the darkness for the shattering of glass. After a couple songs, other listeners were calling in, saying what we saw was no joke, that the dogman was in some tales of the Odawa and from journals of old French traders in Ontario, Wisconsin and here in Michigan. One caller said that dogmen hadn’t been seen in nearly a hundred years but since the mid-90s more people were reporting them again in increasing numbers.

     The large footsteps crunched on the fallen leaves and gravel, fading farther and farther away. That’s when Pat screamed, “Run for the car!”

     The three of us scrambled for the door, shot out onto the drive, and dashed to the lot adjacent to the shack. Without looking back, we drove off, deserting the old guard. I think we busted a gate on the way out. Pat did not collect the last paycheck and we never spoke of it again. In fact, we never even went walking again, and within the year life took us down diverging paths.

     Decades later, after I moved to Indiana and married, then divorced and moved back, I took my kids and some of their cousins to the Upper Peninsula to camp. I told this story to my family around the campfire just as the sun went down. My oldest kid’s face was buried in his cell phone. Branches snapped in the woods behind me, dredging up that night from my memories.

     “Yeah, it was tall, and thin. Not like Bigfoot. Some say Sasquatch is maybe seven or eight feet tall. This dogman was maybe ten to twelve feet tall. It had upraised arms and its fingers spread out, like it wanted to grab one of us.”  I demonstrated with my arms in the air.

     My oldest let out a big sigh and turned his phone slightly toward the woods, “You mean something like this?” I figured he was going to show me his hasty Google search. Instead, his flashlight app was on and the beam shot toward the trees where more branches were crunching under the weight of something heavy.

     We all saw it: a tall, long legged, lean snarling beast, drooling as if it wanted to taste our blood; it’s arms, outstretched  in the dim light. My son sat still. I clutched my young daughter to my chest and she whimpered. My other children and their cousins began to cry and scream, and the dogman turned. It shifted before our eyes. The spindly, grasping man became a large, long, horizontal-presenting body, maybe six feet in length as it lumbered away from our fire.

     I know what my children and their cousins and I saw was exactly what my friends and I faced close to thirty-some years ago.

     Later in the month, I contacted Jean on Facebook and I was informed that Pat had died in Afghanistan. When I talked about old times and what happened the last time we took a walk together, Jean swore what we saw was a dogman, refusing to believe what else I wanted to say. Unsatisfied, I contacted the old guard. He was still alive. As it turns out, he’d co-authored a book about Michigan’s Dogman (which is how I located and identified him). He also confirmed Jean’s words, and said what we saw was not what I now speculated the brute to be.

     You see, that night around the fire, as the brown creature turned to amble off, my son told me something that changed my perspective. “Mom, what you saw was a moose.” He repeated his words, “A MOOSE!”

#Odawa #MichiganLore #Dogman #MichiganDogman

 

(This post is a compilation of witness narratives from encounters with the Michigan Dogman. At the end, my theory of the creature actually being a moose is revealed. Royalty free images have been used purely for demonstrational purposes.)