Oh, where to begin? My writing, much like my brain, follows no set rules and just sort of spills out on the page whenever it feels like it. It won't be controlled and any attempt to write within the lines only frustrates me. But, feeling comfortably alone, I will give it a go...

My initial ideas for this endeavor are three small, but true stories that make up a part of my early years. The first is my heroic effort in the US military, where for eight days I labored through boot camp before it was decided that I probably belonged somewhere else. I was locked up at hard labor for almost six months.

This is not a sad story though, because I had an absolute riot of fun and eventually pulled all of my "keepers" over to my side. (They even got over the fact that I wore a borrowed officers uniform to my Captain's Mast and had everyone saluting before they realized it was me.)

I might write about how Ted Bundy (Yes, that Ted Bundy) grabbed me by my long hair and put a knife to my throat when I was camping at St Mary's Glacier. When I woke up, he realized that I was a guy and hilarity did not ensue. It would have made for an interesting trial in Colorado, but Florida had other plans.

Or I might write about walking for thirty days, covering more than two hundred and fifty miles, across the desert with no food, water or shoes as a part of a primitive survival class. I've never suffered that much before or since, but I never thought the same way again.

I will choose one of these to begin with and we'll see how it goes...

I can't wait to find out whether or not you came out of this encounter alive

Ted Bundy sounds like a real dick.

Subscribing to find out if those stories are real.

I want the Bundy story.

get on with it

lol he's teasing us!

I'm poised and ready to call bull **** on this Bundy story, that's for sure.

Geez, I just finished my lift and training. I will write the Bundy story in the morning.

I'm poised, that's all. No eating words will be involved. Color me skeptical. Win me over with your sincerity and charm.

Don't I always? It's funny, because that's the story that got me into training all those years ago. I was 124 pounds with hair nearly to my waist and probably the wimpiest guy on earth, lol.

I still remember so many weird things from that night. The first thing that I remember was being awake. Not half awake and groggy, which is how I usually wake up, but completely, absolutely awake. From the second that the knife touched my throat and I heard that voice say, "Don't make a sound or I will cut your throat", I was awake.

I was in a sleeping bag, camping on Fall River Road, just below St. Mary's Glacier with four of my friends. We spent the day messing around on the glacier and after doing the usual cooking over the campfire and getting a little stoned, we fell asleep around the fire.

The year was about 1975 or 1976 and like all of my friends, I had very long hair. It was cold that night so my head was inside the sleeping bag and my hair was spilling out the top. I'm not sure how long I had been sleeping when someone grabbed my hair and put a knife to my throat. When I opened my eyes, the person repeated that they would kill me if I made a sound. It was the most angry voice that I had ever heard. (which, having heard many an angry voice in my life, sounds like hyperbole, but it's the truth...)

At first I thought it was one of my friends pulling a prank, but I looked over and I could see them all still in their sleeping bags. Without thinking I said, "What's going on here?"

It was then that the another weird thing happened. The voice changed completely and whispered, "You're a guy?" As mean as the initial voice sounded, this voice almost sounded "nice". I was confused at first and I said, "Of course I'm a guy. What do you want?" I could see his face in the firelight and I could tell that he was as confused as I was.

I was definitely not a tough guy in my younger years, so I wasn't really sure what to do at that point. I wanted to call out to my friends, but I was afraid that he would slit my throat and run off into the woods. He was right in my face, so I had seen him well enough to identify him, but my only goal was to somehow get out of the situation without being injured.

It was then that I began talking. Being the wimpy little "arty" guy, I had always used my mouth to get me out of jams. I had run into minor problems hitchhiking around the country, so I felt that I could handle most problems with words. I began putting up a very quiet wall of words that I hoped would convince him to let me get out of my sleeping bag and enable me to reach a staff that was leaning next to me or even to just call to my friends.

When people talk about doing something as if their life depended on it, that's how I felt at the time. I don't remember feeling all that scared, even though I was, as much as I was focused on getting out of that situation using every convincing argument that I knew. I talked and talked and talked.

I told him that he should just let me go and we could forget the whole thing. It still didn't dawn on me why he was surprised that I was a guy and what his plans might have been if I hadn't been. I guess I just thought he was trying to rob me, but I thought that was pretty stupid with five guys in a camp.

He asked me about one friend sleeping across from the fire who is very large (and was in fact my bodyguard in junior high, lol) and I told him that he was very tough and very mean. I made up stories about how two of my friends who were with me had guns and we had come up to the glacier to target practice (We were hippies, we didn't have guns...). Every minute that went by I was surprised that he didn't just run off into the woods, but instead he stayed talking, sitting in the middle of a group of guys who could wake up at any time.

I talked about my new job teaching little kids and how I really didn't want to die now that I had finally found a place in the world for me, after a very long search. I'm not sure about everything that was said. I've always told people that it was about forty minutes of talking, but I really can't be sure. (As you can imagine, I've told this story many times before.) All I know for sure is that I said whatever I thought would help get me out of that sleeping bag.

Finally, I said I needed to pee and he said, "okay" and said that I could get up. When he said "okay" so suddenly after all that time, I wasn't sure that I had heard him correctly, so I didn't move at first. When he repeated it, I jumped up as fast as I could and grabbed my staff and told him that he was going to die.

He started running into the woods and I followed him for about ten feet. I realized that I couldn't see a thing, so there is no way I could have caught him and me being me, I wasn't sure I could do anything anyway. I spent the rest of the night ranting and raving about how I was going to get him, while my friends slept soundly through the entire thing.

The next morning my friends finally woke up and I told them the whole story. Of course, they thought that I'd completely lost my mind, but they reluctantly agreed to go marching into the woods to find this guy. We walked in the general direction that he had run off and we come to a tent with a guy messing around in front.

It wasn't the person who attacked me so we just stood there for a minute watching (I don't think that my friends fully believed me at that point.) and then sure enough, the guy comes out of the tent. The second I saw him I begin hollering about how he put a knife to my throat and tried to kidnap me, but of course the guy denied everything. They both looked scared because they were facing five rowdy looking long haired guys carrying clubs, but in the end there was not much we could really do.

We drove down to a State Patrol cop on I-70 and he sent us further down the mountain to the Jefferson County cops. I didn't think much would actually happen (because he hadn't really cut me or anything.), but immediately I was taken to two detectives who started asking me lots of questions.

I was shown a photo lineup of nine people who all sort of looked alike, but I was easily able to pick out the guy who had grabbed me. I didn't know what Ted Bundy looked like, so his picture didn't mean anything to me. At the time the only thing that I knew about him was that he used a yellow Volkswagon beetle, which was famous for awhile.

The detectives got all excited, but they wouldn't tell me anything. I asked if they were going to arrest the guy for attacking me and they said that they were working on it. I didn't know what that meant, I wanted them to go get him right then. I didn't know he was already wanted.

Damn.

Who was the other guy in the tent with Bundy?

After a couple of hours questioning they finally let us go. They wanted to know about the other guy (straight, meaning he had short hair), if my friends and I had seen any car they might have been in (we didn't) and lots of other things. About a week later I was called back to the Jeff Co offices and a young prosecutor told me that I had identified Ted Bundy in the line up and that fit with other information that he had been in the Golden area.

I was asked if I would testify at any future trial and of course I said I would. Nothing came of that, because he went off to Florida and committed the crimes that led to his being executed. The possibility of a trial lasted for some time and while I felt totally fine with my initial identification, (and was 100% sure that was him) I saw pictures of him later that made me not so sure.

I told the prosecutors that, because he looked so different in so many of the newspaper pictures it would be difficult for me to say for sure, but they told me not to worry about it because in person I would know it was him. Who knows?

I started Shotokan Karate a week after it happened and began weightlifting a short time later. It was an odd event in my life which served to shape it for a long time. I never felt like I had flashbacks or unusual fears or anything, it was just something that let me know that I didn't like the feeling of powerlessness, so I'd better do something about it. Life's odd that way.

(And yes, I cut my hair shortly after that and wore it short for twenty-five years, lol.)

This is the picture that I identified (without the booking card), this is the guy who attacked me. None of the other pictures look like him very much.

I have no idea, I assume he has his own story to tell. (It was weird to me that the guy didn't say anything when I was flipping out on his friend, I've always wondered what he knew.)

Tyler, do you often reflect on how lucky you were to escape the situation? Also, what were your thoughts when you found out he was Ted Bundy?

I really don't think about it, because it was so long ago. (Except every once in awhile it comes up at parties and I'm asked to retell the story to people who don't know me, lol.) The way it worked out with the police not telling me much info at the time, I didn't give the "Bundy" part that much thought.

He wasn't as famous as he got after he was given the death sentence and his whole story came out. The Colorado police were angry, because he escaped, so most of the press was about that. When he was electrocuted in Florida, people who knew about my story called and asked how I felt, but I'm not sure I felt much of anything.

I'm no longer skeptical, Tyler.