Monsters of the Week

You Won't Believe The Footage From This One National Park's Hidden Camera

(originally published as "You Won't Believe The Shocking Footage From This One National Park's Hidden Camera")

It was a normal late summer day like you get out here at the end of the season; the sun hanging high up straight overhead with no particular warmth, the air stirring a little off the sea with no particular breeze, shorts and shirtsleeves weather if, like the couple of tourists slowly sliding past up on the empty road, you were just pedaling out along Finley's Neck to the lighthouse, no particular aim except to enjoy life passing a little slower than usual. Not so much, maybe, if you were hip deep in smashed up bracken trying to re-seat a marsh birdhouse.

The vireos weren't nesting now, of course; the chicks from the spring had already grown enough to move around on their own and get ready to migrate come the winter, but they'd need it next year, and if we left it knocked over at a crazy angle, the tourists might complain about it messing up their pictures. This slice of National Seashore isn't exactly Yellowstone for either visitor volume or wildlife, but you get the kind of people who try to take selfies with bears everywhere, and if their lack of understanding that nature is not always put there exclusively for their convenience does not get them mauled, it just encourages them. Just like every server's got some kind of story about a customer who can't explain what a "normal" coffee ought to be, but won't stop flipping out at them for not being able to read their mind, every park ranger's got a story about a tourist who can't process the idea that this part of the world isn't able to be exactly the way they preconceived it, probably based on a postcard painting of somewhere else entirely, somewhere that the artist moved the mountains around or left out a gas station in order to make the composition work better, and who's decided that the inability of nature to live up to their ideal is somehow a problem the parks service needs to fix.

Fortunately, the post wasn't broken, just pushed over in the soft marsh mud, so while it had been a waste lugging the post-hole digger down from the truck, at least I didn't have to dig a brand-new hole and wrestle the box and cut-down post into it. I moved some of the muck out of the way with the shovel, enough to settle the post back up almost to true, then braced the box with the post-hole digger while I filled back in around it and stomped a little to tamp it down. Maybe we ought to put the boxes on tripods and avoid digging into the ground entirely, but when they were put in, it was posts, so posts it remains – especially since pretty much nothing out here is able to knock one over.

I looked around a little after the hole around the post was filled in, trying to make out what had messed up this one. The marsh grass was flattened, and the scrub bushes around it were all broken up, in a strange curve across a little knuckle of land that poked out from the neck into the sea. I drove the shovel and the digger head into the muck by the post and took a few careful steps out through the marsh to look closer. Where the ground fell and the fingers of the estuary trickled out through the mucky side of the beach, the mud and sand was just as disturbed as the vegetation in the marsh, long sworls whipped into the soft ground. They ran off into the water rather than continuing along the beach, and as I craned around to check the other end of the track, it didn't seem any different. So something had come out of the sea on one end, smashed up a marsh and one of our birdhouses on the way, and then gone back. What it was, though, no idea. Whales deciding the sea was bullcrap and coming back on land? Some idiot with a new kind of hoverboat? Either way, I hadn't heard anything about it, but then again, we were always the last to know.

Coming back into town, I had to pull over into the other lane to get around someone's Buick double-parked in front of one of the antique stores, and saw Charlotte Holman carefully stapling what looked like a lost-cat flier onto the telephone pole across from her ice-cream shop. There had been a lot of lost pets lately – that was at least the third flier on that one pole alone, and the town cops were really strict about getting local fliers cleaned up around the big tourist weekends. Fortunately, this wasn't one of them, not yet and not coming up, so maybe someone would see it and let her know if they saw the cat – and in the meantime, there was an actual free parking space in front of the office, never a guarantee with three places selling taffy and sea glass and postcards on the same block. Ethan was on the phone when I came in, barely raising an eyebrow as I tossed the truck key into the basket; Maritza, though, had heard the door open and waved me into her office. She seemed excited about something, which could be a good thing or a bad thing – you could never tell what would get her hyped up, and when your boss is excited about something, it usually turns into something you have to work on.