Early one winter morning, some years ago, just before daylight, a Big Foot "loped across a gravel road" in front of a big four-wheel-drive vehicle full of Memphis duck hunters, out near the levee, a little South of the fossil town of Austin, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta,
As monsters go, for us, here, in the Deep American South, specifically in the Mississippi Delta, "change" has always been the main Boogabear in Chief.
Change was the big threat. We want our past to remain our present. Indeed, the Delta's most beloved and most useful natural resources are its darkness and the past. Yet, odd as it may sound, no deep Dixie region in America has changed more than the Mississippi Delta. You may dispute that, and I guess we can talk about it.
But, if change ruled as the invisible Godzilla, Big Foot was not threatening at all -- a welcome distraction, in fact; and, I believe, also a symbol of something like hope.
Best of all, Big Foot was not invisible. He had a shape. Big Foot was the monster, not them, the Deltans, and frankly that was a great relief.Even better, a Big Foot could be shot - stuffed, and stood up by the T.V. in the den! - with the wild turkey, a bobcat, a coyote, some wood ducks, the head and spikey antlers of an eight-point buck . . . and the barracuda from Biloxi.
Deltans are editors of the visible. Preference is the same as hope. God said: "Let there be light!" But we told him where to shine it. So, when word went out one day, here, from the Boll & Bloom Café, that a Big Foot had been sighted, all the usual Delta fears disappeared. Their importance collapsed. Curiosity was king. Obsession reigned, and . . . the "Hunters" arose.
Well, two of them did.