My heart was racing and I struggled to catch my breath. I was feeling pretty insane! How am I going to tell anyone about this? Yet that's exactly what I decided to do. I walked almost two miles back to the old mill by the falls where I started. (The stream was too fast to try to paddle the canoe back upstream.) I had my cell phone with me, but it was just one of those emergency ones that I was going to use to call my girlfriend when I was ready to come home and she could come get me and the canoe.
At the falls, I spotted a man in a pickup truck, whom I assumed worked for the golf course they were building there. I told him I needed a witness to what I had just seen. I didn't expect him to believe me just from my story, but I thought perhaps I could get him to at least come look. He told me to quit smokin' that stuff. I practically pleaded with him to get someone else and we'd go down there together and I would show them. He flatly refused, saying I was crazy and that he wasn't going anywhere with me.
Nearby was a cable TV repair truck; the repairman told me get away from him, too. I suspected that the guy in the pickup called the repairman on a CB radio or cell phone and told him he thought I was crazy. Between what I had seen and the reactions of these two guys, I was starting to feel a bit paranoid. I started to think: they'll call the police and have me arrested, and I sure don't need that.
I gave up on those two and decided to walk back downstream to the ditch where it all happened. I just had to look again. When I got there - I cannot explain it - it wasn't the same. There were no footprints, no sign of the little people at all. Where I slid down the bank was as clean as a whistle - no skid marks. The mud looked completely undisturbed. I was and still am absolutely positive that was the exact spot where it all took place. But there was no sign of anything.
I loaded up my gear in the canoe and got the hell out of there. About 20 miles downstream, I camped out in a hay field. That night as I lay in my tent, all of the strangeness and impossibility went through my mind of the strangest camping trip I ever had. I just could not get those little people out of my mind. They knew I was watching them, but for a little while they didn't care… and then they vanished. In my mind I can still hear them... like little kids on a playground, laughing, screaming, playing.
Was it real? Am I crazy? They were real. When I told my girlfriend the whole story, she just laughed and told me of the time she had seen a little green man under the lilac bush at her grandmother's house when she was little. She had no problem with it. Well, it's a big deal to me because I have to live with knowing what I experienced. It was just too strange! Little people - indeed!
What did Steve W. experience? Did he stumble upon real, but seldom seen creatures that inhabit this world with us? Or for a brief moment did he step into a time and place where other dimensions, other realities intersect with our own? Steve plans a return trip to the area, this time with a friend who, he hopes, will be another witness.
