Outside Magazine

Leroy Bull was a boy who felt things other children did not. He sensed that there was something right on the edge of his reality, in rural Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s. Sometimes it sent him messages, although at the time he did not know them as such. What he knew was that in school his eye was drawn out the window and into the woods, where his world hushed.

He quickly learned not to tell the other kids that sometimes, in these moments, he thought he glimpsed the future. Once, when he was older, he called his high school sweetheart and urged her to stay home from school. She hung up, ignored his advice, and broke her ankle that afternoon in gym. As a child, kids called Bull crazy. Was he? He didn’t know. He was surer of himself when he was alone.

There was an old strip mine up the road from his home, and he liked to walk there. The floor of the mine was unnaturally flat and its walls steeply sloped, but he would pick his way down a few times a week, enter that vast space, and feel small. There, he was most aware of the hush. It was like the bottom of a deep breath. It was as if he had grown wings and flown out of this world. Going down was always like returning.