Stomp Bigfoot eats toe donuts in the quiet piney snow at Thanksgiving
A wintry honeycomb of woodland warmth.
Much of Stomp’s world is threaded with loss and heartache and addiction. This is not that. This is a snow globe moment of calm and banter surrounded by the scent of woodsmoke and soft clumps of heavy snow. An outlaw at rest.
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Pennsylvania state forest, undisclosed location, Thanksgiving day
Deep in a grove of stoic Pennsylvania hemlocks, bramble thick and heavy with mute November snow, is an abandoned school bus. The paint is faded to white and plump snowflakes settle on the roof and accent the evergreen. A woodpecker presses its beak to a tree, like a violinist prepares their bow, and drills the bark.
The trill echoes in the wet quiet. A clump of snow plumpfs to the floor. In the forest branches, curled up from a bent bus chimney, is a low cloud of scented woodsmoke. Movement inside and—
“So this is where you’re hiding from the pitchforks and the police?”
I asked as I sat sideways on a bus seat bedded with wool blankets and watched the snow fall. Where a bus seat had been once, now a crudely implanted 1940s woodstove crackled. The windows fogged. Stomp Freedomfoot, the seven-foot sasquatch in buckskin pants with federal arrest warrants dating back two centuries, sat in a brown junkyard recliner and ate a double chocolate donut from his furry big toe.
“Such tasty toe donuts.” He bent forward and nibbled a donut chunk from his foot. Crumbs tumbled down his flowing chin scruff and he reached for a plain cardboard pastry box. “They dip them in chocolate once, and then they dip them twice—” he counted up on his fingers, “—so that means there’s two times the chocolate. One, two,” he counted. “Two chocolates.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to eat them with your toes.”
“Then why do they put the holes in them?”
“It’s just how they’re made. How you’re eating them is like a child raised by monkeys in a Dunkin Donuts kitchen. If you have opposable thumbs, you don’t need to eat like that.”
“But they fit so good on the big toe.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
“Except when my toes get all stung up by bees. Then they can’t fit no donuts no good.”
“Nope. No more talking.”
Stomp leaned back in his recliner and closed his 270-year-old eyes. The bus interior was like an inverted bird’s nest. The window cracks were stuffed with bits of straw. Candy wrappers were tucked in ceiling rivets, like shiny tinsel. The floor was stuffed with bits of straw. And candy wrappers. The bed was a crumpled hay bale that had fully submitted to the body of a large furred creature, and slowly melted into a pile of sad limp straw, bereft of willpower.
“This is a nice hole for you.” I gazed out into the thicket and the snow. “You could stay here. I could keep this out of the stories when I write about you.”
Stomp opened one eye, then closed it. “Too quiet. I remember too much.”
“You know it’s Thanksgiving. It feels right to be out here on Thanksgiving.” I leaned over and held my hands near the woodstove. “It’s warmth.”
Stomp extended his feet onto an aged German blanket chest, the type immigrants would haul behind them with all their worldly belongings as they traveled west. He kept his eyes closed.
“I spent one Thanksgiving in a field in Chattanooga. We couldn’t have a fire. We ate hard bread and salt pork.”
“Mm,” I nodded. “What year was that?”
“1863.”
Snow plumpfed down on the bus roof. A log threw sparks. The bus was a cocoon, the inside of a winter frosted honeycomb.
“You know,” I said, “you’ve experienced so much conflict and loss. Some murder.”
“Mmm, tasty murder.” He licked donut chocolate from his paws. “I mean, mmm, tasty chocolate.”
“It seems unfair to go through life anticipating that something bad is about to happen. We are alive. We are full of breath. Here, now.”
“Yes.” Stomp stretched his great arms and bits of straw fell from his winter coat. “During times like these, I like to make things.”
“Oh yeah? So you like to create in these snow globe moments?”
Stomp gazed wistfully out the window into the snowy forest. “I sometimes dream that I could one day be a great autist.”
“Art—artist. You mean ‘artist’.”
“Yes,” Stomp sighed. “The greatest autist.”
“Ah, okay. Well, I support your dreams.”
“Here, I’ll show you.”
Stomp sat up and opened the wooden blanket chest. It was inscribed with runes on the lid. I stood up to look in. Underneath a 1700s tomahawk and a musket bayonet, sheet music lay dusty. I saw a title in bold black, Silent Night. Stomp pulled out a stack of construction paper drawings.
“See,” he handed them to me.
I looked over the crude, finger-painted drawings. “Oh, so pretty. That’s a, a—”
“A ladybug.”
“Right, a ladybug. And this smeary, angry blob one with the blood on it?”
“A cute cattypillar.”
“Ah, a cute cattypillar. Of course.”
Stomp took the drawings back and tucked them into his chest. He tangled his paws in some cords and pulled loose a string of frosted white Christmas lights. He shrugged.
“I like to decorate.”
“It is the perfect time to decorate. If only we had electricity.”
“Oh.” Stomp looked at me. “These don’t run on electricity.”
He tapped a finger on a bulb. The grey dead bulb flared to life as a hibernating firefly flustered its wings and shook a tiny fist:
“Oy! I’m sleeping here!”
“Oh my goodness. And he’s got a little New York accent.”
A cacophony of tiny New Yorker firefly accents shouted in disgust as they were woken from winter slumber. The bulbs flared up in a row:
Dink. Dink. Dink. Dink.
“I feel like I’m in midday traffic in Yonkers right now.”
Stomp tickled a bulb with one finger. “I’m a business ‘squatch so I sublet these nice tenement apartments. The pandemic thingy really drew the New York crowd.”
Hibernating fireflies shook their wings to life and the glass bulbs glowed dimly. In a row, each firefly opened a little glass bulb door and oxygen flooded in. A tinny voice of a baby crying out a window carried up. A firefly husband argued with his firefly wife about burnt lasagna. The bulbs glowed up with a starburst of quiet brilliance.
“What do you do if your fireflies don’t pay rent?”
“Oh.” Stomp scratched his chin. “I like to compassionately evict them without warning. Because that way I can help them not worry about needing to pay rent no more. If they really give me trouble, I put their infants in a cookie tin and pretend to sell them to the local woodpecker. They usually pay.”
“That…sounds absolutely fair, Stomp. You are a just creature.”
Stomp placed a hand over his heart. “Please, come outside.”
We stumbled out into the snow, dulling to a dusky brightness in the falling grey light. I took one end of the bulbs and Stomp took the other. We stretched the lights along the bus. The stars awoke with the fireflies and a somber moon lay radiant under clouds that passed over like ships on a transgalactic voyage.
Stomp tossed a stretch of bulbs up over a tree branch. “You said something about wanting to talk with me for a Thanksgiving thingy. For readers.”
“We don’t have to do that, Stomp.” I gently, meticulously placed a string of illuminated bulbs over a tree branch. “I was going to write about gratefulness and whatnot.”
He clapped the palms of his hands together. “I’m grateful for mouse feet. And rats.”
“Gotcha. Sure.”
“And breakfast munchies.”
“My point was that nobody needs to know we exist tonight. I am at rest.”
The dusk fully settled. Gleaming globs of star chunk melted down through snow-layered branches and lay their glow into the frost. The snow seemed to melt beneath their touch. The woodpecker was silent, full on bark grubs. An owl came alive, as if suddenly surprised by twilight, and hooted into the night.
Stomp responded: “Hoo! Huh-hoo!”
All was calm, and all was bright.
I’m glad you came along for this Thanksgiving banter in the woods. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can restack the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
For a feature length tale of a heartbroke plow ‘squatch hired to solve a frosty mystery, read Stomp Bigfoot Drives Plow and Solves Murder in a February Nor’easter, a blizzardly murder mystery set around a mysterious designer drug called “Outrage” luring bakers to their deaths.