Road Trip to the Everglades: The Man. The Moth. The Legend.

By Fred Piwko, Contributor

On the final day of a 3,000 mile road trip, a weary band of traveling Griffs made the fateful decision to stop in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I was one of those travelers, and I lived to tell the tale of an encounter which has permanently altered the course of our lives. Readers should be advised to proceed with caution and keep their lamps close. 

It all started innocently enough. Wil Worrall, Jamie Kosten and I began our trek to attend the Ecology & Self: Everglades course offered by Canisius’ own Dr. Jenn Lodi-Smith and Professor Jon Roth. It was to be a week of camping in tents in the balmy Florida Everglades – the perfect way to close out winter break. All we had to do was get ourselves there with our camping gear. 

We set out from Buffalo on the morning of Dec. 30, and after a day of driving we had traded the dreary landscape of the snowy New York interstate for the palm tree-lined highways of the Carolinas. Over the next few days we experienced the southern charm of Charleston, South Carolina, as well as the hospitality of some friends along the way (shoutout to Jordan Spencer). Once we arrived in the one and only Everglades National Park, I continued to be amazed by the diversity of wildlife and otherworldly landscapes. As Jamie wrote in another article in this edition, we paddled next to manatees in a canal lined with mangroves, snorkeled in the coral reefs of the Florida Keys and slogged through acres of cypress swamps to hunt for gator holes in an ecosystem that strongly resembles the swamps of Dagobah. The whole trip was amazing – so amazing, in fact, that we were nearly lulled into a false sense of security. 

The day was Jan. 11. The class was dismissed, the campsite packed up and the GPS was set to home. It was then that we decided to make our pilgrimage to Point Pleasant, the home of an American cryptid whose name is whispered only in the shadows – a cryptid first seen by two couples at a TNT plant outside the small isolated town. Some locals say that those first witnesses were crazy. Some skeptics believe that the creature those two couples saw that night was a stray sandhill crane or a heron. The experts know that a cryptid is a mix between a moth and a man: a harbinger of doom, or at least missing catalytic converters. 

We had decided to drive through the night from the Everglades and brave an ominous blizzard in the mountains of West Virginia. By the time we crossed over the bridge to Point Pleasant in the early hours of the morning, the town was deserted and most of the local buildings (including the Mothman Museum) were closed due to the blizzard, or at least that’s what the authorities wanted us to think. Still, a dark presence lurked in the center of that small town: a monument to that dreaded creature – the Mothman. 

You may say that I am crazy, but I know what I saw. And I know that on that day, like many travelers before us and many that will come after us, we were all personally touched by Mothman. We escaped nearly unscathed, except for the mark of the moth left on Jamie – a testament to our harrowing adventure, and a lasting reminder for all to beware of the man, the moth, the legend.