Three days after graduating from high school (class of ‘69) in Kearney, Neb., I packed up my parent’s Ford Fairlane and headed for California. Nebraska was not the “happening” place to be that fateful summer; California was, and I was determined to “make the scene” (a little hippie lingo there) in San Francisco.

I started out solo, but after three or four days on the road, my gregarious nature desired companionship, so when, somewhere in Utah, I spotted a fellow long-haired hitchhiker, I stopped the car and Jim climbed aboard.

We quickly became bosom buddies. Jim, it turned out, lived in Redding, Calif., 300 or so miles from Frisco, and managed to persuade me to alter my travel plans and drive him home. After that, he assured me, he would personally show me around Haight-Ashbury, the ultimate destination of every hippie wannabe of that time period.

It wasn’t meant to happen. We were tooling along through the northern California woods somewhere around Eureka when we were halted by an official-looking roadblock. Shortly, a forest ranger stuck his head into the car and asked us if we were healthy and able-bodied. When we answered with an affirmative, he congratulated us on becoming firefighter trainees; apparently there were lots of fires in the area and the authorities were hustling manpower wherever they could find it, even among citizens of Woodstock Nation.

So Jim and I became firefighters, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was hot, dangerous, utterly exhausting work in some of the roughest terrain in America.

The heart of Bigfoot Country, U.S.A. — land of the menacing and mysterious Sasquatch — was ultimately the setting for a decidedly unsettling encounter between myself and something that briefly and eerily seemed to inhabit the night just beyond the fire’s glow.

But I get ahead of myself. After a few weeks of slave labor, the fires were under control and Jim and I got a weekend off. We headed up to his parent’s house in Redding to collect camping and fishing gear for a quick backpacking trip to a secluded trout-filled river one of our co-workers had told us about. After hours of hard hiking along a barely-discernible trail, we arrived at our destination — a pristine beauty of a stream burbling noisily through a rocky lowland, bordered on either side by dense woods.

It was almost sundown, just time to pitch our tent, gather firewood and have our way with some of the feisty, skillet-sized trout that crowded the stream. Later, sitting around the campfire in the gathering darkness, I made the mistake of asking Jim, a native of the area, about the truth of the Bigfoot stories I’d heard. “It’s just a story isn’t it? Just something to draw tourists, right?” I asked.

“On no,” he replied. “Bigfoot is very real and there’s way more than just one of them. There’s whole families of them roaming these mountains, and they can get pretty nasty if they think you’re trespassing on their territory or threatening them.” He then proceeded to tell me two harrowing stories of locals who had come to a bad end via encounters with the creatures. Space doesn’t allow elaboration here, but suffice it to say they weren’t your typical bedtime stories.

Jim then fell noisily asleep within five minutes, but the sandman wasn’t working my sleeping bag. The grisly stories Jim had so generously shared with me prevented anything even resembling sleep. The fact that I was miles from civilization, camped out in prime Bigfoot country during one of the darkest nights in my memory probably didn’t help things either.

Nor did the fact that I became convinced after awhile that there was definitely something big walking around outside the tent. Yes, there were the normal night sounds, but fevered imagination aside, I was also hearing something shuffling around in the darkness.

“Wake up, Jim,” I whispered. “Listen!” He awoke, he listened and naturally the noise I had been hearing abruptly ceased. “I don’t hear anything. Go to sleep.”

Which he quickly did. And, 30 seconds after his snoring resumed, so did the footpads outside. It was as though someone (or something?) was walking around the tent, almost patrolling the area.

The fear factor now increased and became almost unbearable. To unzip or not unzip the tent flap became the existential question of the century for me at that moment. I could continue to lay inside the tent terrified and helplessly awaiting my fate, or I could summon forth the courage to stick my head outside and confront whatever was out there. Was the creature waiting to decapitate me when my head cleared the tent? If I stayed inside, would my friend and I become the meat in a canvas sandwich? Good questions.

I opted to confront. Never did a steel zipper make more noise than the one I now undid with trembling fingers. Task finally completed, I stuck my head out into the darkness and peered around. The campfire had subsided to a bed of glowing embers, barely providing enough light to distinguish individual objects in the vast blackness, but as my eyes adjusted themselves, I seemed to be looking at a hazy, shaggy hulk outlined darkly against the tree line 50 feet away. I stared at the indistinct, bulky mass, too terror-stricken to summon my sleeping tent mate; then, as a nightmare dissipates with the morning light, so the image seemed to melt back into the forest.

No, we didn’t discover size 36 tracks the next morning, but the ground was rocky and then heavily forested, so none were really expected. I told numerous locals about my experience in the following days, and they just nodded sagely and affirmed a feeling that had been growing within me; the world in truth was and is a big, mysterious place with a creature or two still crouching somewhere beyond the firelight in the great dark places of this earth, just waiting to pounce should we ever totally deny them their right to exist.