Vic's View: Big Foot goes lake-home shopping.
Today’s commentary is not original with me. It comes via Otis Driftwood on Facebook: Big Foot is shopping for a Lake Greenwood house.
Otis and two buddies were trying out the fishing - shark fishing, apparently, from another post - and photographed from the sand bar, Big Foot tromping around on the shoreline. To me, it looks like a bear, and that would not be improbable. It wasn’t too long ago that the Grizzly traveled through Clinton - no, it really wasn’t a Grizzly, I confess; those things are mean.
Bears around here really just want to be left alone, in the proximity to easy opening trash cans. They’re more afraid of you, than you are of them (although face-to-face that would be hard to believe). Most of what we get is deer - I saw a doe with two babies just Thursday morning near AB Jacks Road. Rumors are rampant, also, that there are alligators in Lake Greenwood, even though the water is too cold for them. They like the warm, stagnant waters of the I-95 Corridor swamps, just like The Swamp Fox.
Funny thing is, in my 45 years as a community journalist in South Carolina, I have been in the neighborhood of exotic creatures.
I was in Bishopville for a while, and people were all agog about The Lizard Man. It wasn’t too improbable, either, because Bishopville is on the way to the swamp, and it just made sense that a lizard-man would come a little more inland to get away from the alligators. Which he would catch barehanded and eat for lunch; but when the gators got tired of that and ganged up together, “he” would be no match for in a fair fight.
Lizard Man sightings would spike up around the Fourth of July, when people’s dogs would mysteriously go missing.
The Lizard Man is the Southeastern United States equivalent of Big Foot - the ape-like creature that has lived in the Pacific Northwest for many, many years. And, being Scottish, of course I read everything I can about the Loch Ness monster - even though it’s not really a monster at all, just a wayward dinosaur fighting off meteor-extinction.
Which brings me back to alligators, in kind of a makes-no-sense round-about fashion. I lived in Summerton for a while, and got it in my head to adventure into the nature preserve there. It is a beautiful, exotic drive up until ...
You see the alligators sunning themselves on swamp-islands or the lake banks beside the road. They look like something out of another world. Oh, they appear peaceful enough - but then you realize, walk too close to a mother and her eggs and they’ll all go Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on you.
Those of you of a certain age will remember the black and white Tarzan movies, and his “alligator roll” (oh, I guess those were crocodiles).
In any event, now we proof positive that - in addition to Lizard Men, Nessie, Big Feet, UFOs & Congress, gators in the lake, sharks near shore, yogi-bears, gila monsters, mega-rats in the sewers, and all manner of snakes in toilets - now we have a Lake Greenwood upright-walking, really hairy looking person-thing out there scouting lakeshore houses. Now, do not go looking for “him” - that will just drive him up to Hartwell. He’s ours, let’s be hospitable.
(Vic MacDonald is editor of The Clinton Chronicle. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chronicle. MacDonald can be reached at 833-1900.)
