CALL ME SNAKE

After negotiating miles of icy roads in the rugged "Northeast Kingdom," my wife and I arrived in Greensboro, Vermont late one night, ready for a rustic weekend in the country. We pulled into the secluded driveway of my friend Nick's house, unpacked our DVDs and other wilderness gear, settling in for what we hoped would be several days of concerted relaxation. Before I had the chance to polish off my first martini, our host took me aside and murmured something about "some strange things..." I tried to ignore him, as Nick has a tendency to advance the most far-fetched explanations for ordinary occurrences. He grabbed my arm and guided me to the sliding glass door. Turning on the floodlight, he pointed to several unusual footprints in the snow, all uncommonly large. "Bigfoot?" he said with a devilish grin. I laughed, as we all did, at his crazy suggestion. The Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, was a well-known mythic creature of the Pacific Northwest--twelve feet tall, or so they say. With a shoe size of 20 or bigger, these outsized creatures would be hard-pressed to find appropriate outerwear even at a Big and Tall Men's Store. What would have brought them all the way to northern Vermont, and how would they have made the cross-country journey? Was there an unknown Northern Passage--the Sasquatch equivalent of the Lewis & Clark Trail--blazed, perhaps, by Bigfoot & Hugepaw or some such duo? Of course not. The whole notion was preposterous. Still, I wondered as I peered beyond the patio, something made that impression in the snow, and if it was a foot, well, that was one very large foot. Nick abruptly ushered me outside, through the snowdrifts, pointing to a trail of what looked like urine leading from the alleged prints. I was unimpressed. "Can we go back now?" I asked. "My drink is patient, but it won't wait forever." I returned to my martini and E-Z chair, dimmed the lights, and popped in the first installment of the "Scream" trilogy. After two gruesome murders, things were looking up. I leaned back into the chair, just as my wife, Blinkie, begged me to join her on a midnight cross-country ski outing. "We'll go by the lake," she said. "It'll only take a minute." Skiing was the farthest thing from my mind, but I was reluctant to have her clomping around in the woods alone, in the middle of the night, especially with hairy Sasquatches on the loose. And as we didn't have too many opportunties for such excursions in Boston, I turned off the TV, applied some wax to my skis, and followed her down the windy path to Caspian Lake. Standing on the shores, we gazed at the snowy expanse, meditating under the slimmest of crescent moons. Then I saw it: a dark figure standing in the middle of the lake. Actually it wasn't standing but moving in a strange way as if spinning or dancing. Could it be a deranged human? A bear? Nah..., too big, even for a grizzly, which certainly wouldn't be caught dead within a thousand miles of Vermont. Could it be, I was embarrassed even to think, a Dancing Sasquatch? Blinkie saw it too, whatever "it" was. "We should do something," she said. "Make sure he's all right." "I'm not sure it is a 'HE,'" I replied. "Hello!" Blinkie yelled. "Anybody there?" There was no response, as might be expected in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with nobody around but us and the stars. I told her there was a perfectly logical explanation for all this, and once I figured it out, she'd be the first to know. Even though I believed what I'd said about the "logical explanation," I still found the episode a bit unnerving. While completing the last stretch of our circuit through the woods, I couldn't get the image of that mad, gyrating figure out of my head. First thing in the morning, I set out to deconstruct the myth--kill the beast, so to speak. I strapped on my skis and retraced our course. Finding our vantage point from the shore, I turned to the lake and saw an ice-fishing shack in roughly the same spot I imagined seeing the disco phantom. Aha, so it was an optical illusion, just as I suspected. Something was dancing all right, but it was an ice house, not a disco. The way I figured it, photons had come intermittently under that pitch-black sky, causing the object to flicker, and that apparent motion sent our minds wandering down some pretty strange paths. In the light of day, however, the scene looked quite mundane. So much for that mystery. But what of the giant footprints and urine trail? I dismissed that as a joke staged by Nick, a prankster credited with installing a giant breast on MIT's main dome during his undergraduate days. What's more, I knew for a fact he was not shy about micturating in public--a product, no doubt, of his European upbringing. Later that night, while the rest of our party slept, I was suddenly gripped with terror. According to a rumor cited in Variety (yes, I try to keep up with the industry, despite living in Boston), more Scream sequels were in the works. This was shocking to me because the original production team had promised to quit at three. Moreover, the audience that made the first three movies a hit had moved on and were now refinancing their mortgages. My main fear was that I'd never get through the Scream series--one of those goals that overachievers like me set for themselves--if they kept churning out new installments. There was only one hope--to get cracking now. Midway through "Scream 2," at a critical juncture between stabbings and dismemberments (though that description could aptly pertain to 99.9 percent of the picture), I got the unexpected urge to grab my skis and glide atop the snow one more time. Arriving at the lake's edge, I squinted toward the hut, trying to view the whirling dervish through the lens of my newly acquired understanding. Sure enough, the shack did a little jig, right on cue. And then I'll be damned if the thing didn't wave at me.