You’d think, on a TV show called “Finding Bigfoot,” that maybe just once in a while, if only to mollify the habitual channel-changers, the cast would actually find, well, a Bigfoot.

And I mean a real Bigfoot.

Not that CGI beast that roars before and after each commercial break.

The cast members from The Animal Planet program, which recently started its second season, frequently imply that they’re practically surrounded by unidentified, but apparently quite elusive, primates.

Michael Hendriks doesn’t mind admitting that he was about as scared as he’s ever been while driving.

Scared enough, at any rate, to stop by the Herald office and tell me his tale.

I’m glad he did.

Hendriks’ story belongs to that category of precautions which, as the cliche goes, can’t be repeated too often.

Notice anything about the appearance of today's issue of the Herald that seemed, well, unusual?

I suspect, if you've given the paper more than a cursory glance, that your answer is "yes."

Some of these differences probably were intentional.

Others, perhaps not.

The explanation, in a word: computers.

I had of late been lamenting the “islands” of public land east of Baker City — those chunks of ground, some measuring in the hundreds of acres, that are surrounded by private property.

“Public,” as applied to these places, is a misleading adjective.

Because there is no general easement across the intervening private parcels, the public can’t get to these islands without trespassing.

This seems to me an awful waste.

(Except, perhaps, for the owners of the adjacent private property.)

Some cretin has illegally killed a bighorn sheep ram near Brownlee Reservoir.

This is like walking outside and shooting the neighbor’s cat.

Except there are too many cats as it is, whereas bighorn sheep are not so abundant around here that we can afford, biologically speaking, to sacrifice any to scofflaws.

My first paycheck was stained with a slime made of strawberry juice and Willamette Valley mud.

These ingredients were not combined in equal parts, though.

If the slime were, say, a martini, then the mud was the gin and the strawberry juice the vermouth.

I’m not sure where the olive and the swizzle stick fit here, but the analogy was of questionable taste anyway, so no matter.

At the end of the berry-picking season I had accumulated a stack of these tickets that seemed, to a 10-year-old, of impressive thickness.

The book is Nancy Langston’s “Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West.”

Langston’s ambitious goal with the 1995 volume is to explain how the national forests in the Blue Mountains — the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur — got as messed up, ecologically speaking, as they were then.

And pretty much still are today.

Langston succeeded.

Her book is the most comprehensive, and cogent, examination of this complicated topic that I’ve read.

I’ll bet you could make a pile by reviving those do-it-yourself, nuke-proof bunkers that were briefly popular early in the Cold War.

There is, it seems, much to fear these days, and myriad reasons for citizens to construct stout shelter.

It is the fashion to alert your ill-informed fellow citizens regarding certain of their sacred rights which are soon to be wrest from their apathetic hands.

You can detect in these warnings the low rumble of distant jackboots, glimpse the flash of brown shirts through a keyhole.

I’m intrigued by this propaganda campaign — not least because the purveyors seem to me to be distributed fairly equally across the political spectrum.

My son Max has reached that stage when his mother and I dearly wish everything were made of foam.

I suppose we could lay in a goodly supply of Nerf footballs.

But those things are the very devil to stack.

And Max, though he stands barely two feet tall, has a considerable reach.

But stand he does.

Which is a problem.

I have risked, and possibly have suffered, complete emasculation.

I went to see the latest cinematic installment in the “Twilight” series.

But that wasn’t the real danger.

I didn’t trudge into the Eltrym looking glum, a reluctant prisoner shackled to my wife’s affinity for saccharine love stories.

I wanted to be there.