Casualties of a Misspent Youth

When I was a young man, I remember sitting with my father. I was 17 at the time and he was 65. He was a man of unusual stature, with the posture of a question mark and heavily worn hands that looked like tanned leather but felt like shark's skin.

"Son," he said. His tone was solemn, and I could tell something was wrong. We didn't have talks like this often. "There comes a time in a young man's life where he needs to see the world, to make an indelible mark on life so that when he is old, and crippled, he can point mightily and say that he achieved something. Some day when you are old like me, you'll understand the point of all this. Just remember: one day, you'll be an old man, and you'll say to your kids 'That was the high water mark,' and you'll be filled with the same degree of pride."

"What pride," I inquired, my voice squeaky and timid.

"The same pride I have when I talk about old cars that I have and all the times I fucked your mother!"

My father was cranky sometimes. I tried not to take it personally. But I knew what I had to do: I had to go out there and take life by the balls, to really do something so that when I died my legacy would live on.

It was a big task for a young man like me, back then. Some would say insurmountable. But, I am not one of those "some". I am a go-getter, and I was even then.

I thought for weeks about what to do. One day, while sledding with friends, I had the idea. I remembered a place my father had taken me in the winters as a kid. My father had a cabin in the Poconos for years when I was younger. We used to go there all the time and go skiing and hiking around in the snow. It burned down 7 years ago and he never rebuilt it.

I couldn't remember exactly where the cabin was but my father gave me an old hand-written note with the driving directions. He let me borrow the family sedan and out I went. There were some isolated flurries and a wintry mix of weather but it was nothing bad enough to make the roads impassable. After a few hours of driving I arrived at the ruins of the cabin, partially covered in snow. The sun was setting, and I got my flashlight out of the car.

The cabin burned down because of faulty wiring. The old man always considered himself to be a bit of an electrician, but the reality was that he had no more business wiring a home than he did flying to the moon. Because of that, nobody thought anything of it when the house burned down. Neither did I.

There was a cave behind the house that we used to hike out to. I figured I would check it out for old times' sake while I figured out just how I was going to rebuild the cabin to impress the old man. I walked and walked for about 35 minutes until I arrived at the cave. The weather was starting to turn for the worse, but I wore a large goose down jacket and thermal underwear because I was anticipated being outside for a long time. I wasn't hot by any means but I wasn't freezing to death, either.

The cave was in a large thicket of pine trees. I used to call it christmas thicket. The cave was offset and at the back of the thicket, and had a large entrance, with about double overhead clearance for an average man.

I walked to the mouth of the cave and then walked in, shining the flashlight so as not to trip and fall. The cave was remote enough that getting a twisted ankle could be a real nuisance for the trip back in the snow. Even in the cold of that winter day, the cave had a strong, musty smell. It reminded me of elephants at the zoo. And there was the strange, wafting odor of maple syrup.

As I crept in deeper, I thought of the old days of going in the cave and feeling like a real explorer, finding the uncharted interior for the first time. "How naive," I thought to myself. While I was thinking I scraped the edge of the wall with my shoulder and ripped my jacket, exposing some goose feathers.

The wind was howling around the entrance of the cave and it could clearly be heard even towards the back where I was. At this point I was about 200 paces from the entrance, and the area around me was illuminated only by the narrow beam of the flashlight. I heard something. Something different. Not the wind.

It sounded like snoring, but mixed with laughing. I quickly swung the flashlight around the cave looking for the source of the sound. That is when I saw him. The cave was now home to a massive beast, double my height and easily four times my weight. He was covered in long white fur, except for a bald spot at his belly, and muscular. The beast began to wake up and I began to panic.

As the beast came to and stood up, I could see plainly that he was a yeti. The yeti was massive, and he was too big for me to get around him in this narrow part of the cave. I was cornered. His breathing was deep, and the breaths he expelled were hot and smelled like spoiled meat. I knew the yeti would make a meal of me if I did not act quickly.

With the grace of a fetishist many times my age, I reached into the rip in my jacket and pulled out a single, long goose feather. And I tickled that yeti like no man has tickled a yeti before. The yeti bellowed deeply with laughter, shaking the cave and the ground. After several hours, the yeti pushed me aside, probably to go back to hibernating.

I walked back to the car, feeling dirty and wondering if this is what my father had wanted all along.

These days I wonder if the house burning down was really a wiring problem or something else. And I think about that yeti. What a weird yeti.