West was a professor of anthropology at the University of Washington when I was a student there in the late sixties and early seventies. While many of the faculty reeled before the rising counterculture, Monty West embraced, even defined it. If his colleagues were intimidated, confused, or repelled by the coming wave, Monty West rode its crest. But he was no poseur. Naturally antiestablishment, Monty West did not have to affect hipness; his time had simply come.
Curious about this respected academician, who shared many of the values I assumed my generation possessed, I enrolled in a course of his on world folklore, imagining a pleasant romp among trolls and tales. But I quickly dropped it: I’d never encountered a reading list as intimidating or a syllabus as rigorous as his. So I never really got to know West, but I tuned in to the folklore surrounding him. Recently I tried to track him down, but he was nowhere to be found. Historian and photographer Paul Dorpat, a contemporary of mine at the University of Washington, lived near West in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford for years and used to see him frequently. Once Monty showed Dorpat a cave he had dug beneath a cherry tree in his backyard.
“I took a magnificent picture of him,” Dorpat told me. “Wild, flying hair, still lean and athletic.” Monty said he was going to live in the hole or else head up to Whidbey or San Juan Island, where he had “a place to go.” A little later Dorpat saw him, for the last time, riding a bicycle, his famous Land Rover long gone (West said its mileage was always in proportion to the price of gas).
The story that came to mind on my solitary stump was his most famous adventure: Monty West’s month-long sojourn in the wild Gifford Pinchot—in the nude. Sometime in the autumn of 1970, the story goes, West was dropped off at the edge of the wilderness. His plan was to enter the wilds entirely unequipped—no matches, sleeping bag, food, clothing, or other gear—and to live that way for a month. The point was to experience a state of mind like that of an aboriginal human being, defenseless against the wilderness. With no particular skills of woodcraft, he wanted to see whether he could survive, stay reasonably warm and nourished, and come back to tell about it. His particular desire, as an anthropologist, was to feel what primitive people everywhere must have felt as they confronted the world on its own terms.
The version I heard first, from one of West’s acolytes, had him curling at night around a tiny fire made by friction. That part is not too different from what John Muir did in the Sierra, though he wore clothes. West supposedly ate wild foods, lost weight (he was already a beanpole), and survived. Eventually he came out—wild, hairy, and naked—to a forest road, where he waved down the first car he saw.
By this account the driver stopped, picked him up, took him to a rendezvous, and never mentioned his unclad state.
Now, as I stood shivering on the stump, I thought of Monty, skinny and cold and hungry and scratched up, trying to cover ground barefoot while keeping his energy up and his fear down. When I fell into that frigid creek, I was wearing boots and was close to warmth, dryness, shelter, and food. Even if I had been injured, I probably could have made it out; my car would have tipped off a logger, hunter, or hiker before too long. We have to work pretty hard to put ourselves in real jeopardy out in the roaded forest, free climbers and gonzo archers excepted. But unless I caught an arrow in the ass from some wannabe Robin Hood who mistook it for an elk’s rump, I was at little risk. I could fall in the creek with impunity and come out laughing.
Now imagine the same scene with me nude (you can skip the details) and unshod, with no towel, heater, woollies, or food cache around the corner. Night coming, temperature dropping, in tangled and sharp-edged country. Maybe a broken bone or a bad sprain. I had a lot more insulation and stored calories than West, and those advantages might have gotten me through a few days. But humans under stress and out in the cold are notoriously susceptible to hypothermia. Essentially, if I’d been in West’s situation and had fallen into a mountain stream at dusk in the autumn at high elevation, I might have been done for.
That modest adventure gave me pause. For just a moment I sensed the fragility of the body against the hard, hard land. And I realized that if Monty West did go into the woods and return, he was a lucky man. Most of us would not be very good at such an undertaking. If we didn’t starve, freeze, or freak out, we would probably succumb to blood poisoning, tetanus, or sheer fear. If we didn’t give up and come out within a few days, we probably wouldn’t come out at all. Long, long ago we lost our adaptability. As the naked ape, we sold our ability to live unfettered in order to buy civilization. Hence the age-old fear of (and repugnance for) the wilderness. People who still know how to live well there don’t hate the wilderness, but there are few such people left.
Those we used to call primitives, or aboriginals, knew how to derive sustenance, shelter, and security from their surrounds. It was no rare skill—everyone had it or died. But it was a great skill, and when it passed, something of eternal value was lost. Now when we go into the wilderness, as I did from time to time in the Dark Divide, we go armored in ripstop nylon and Gore-Tex, shod with Vibram soles that shield our tender feet from the very earth. We go with matches, freeze-dried food, gas stoves, water purifiers, and all manner of comforts. We follow well-traveled trails, which we reach in motor vehicles. Some even take to the trails with motors, shattering any last pretense of wilderness encounter for themselves and everyone within earshot.
And then there is Bigfoot, if there is Bigfoot. Like the American Indians or any other native people, it travels well among the rocks and trees with no thought of escape or salvation: what it knows is the world as it is. Even native people take skins from other creatures to protect themselves from cold and abrasion, make fires to cook with, and build shelters from the elements. Sasquatch does none of these things. Maybe that is one reason Indians regard Sasquatch with fear and suspicion as wild men even more self-reliant than themselves.
A little way down the road I had noticed substantial rock-cleft caves in the stony slopes above the clear-cut. Perhaps Bigfoot makes use of natural shelters such as these. Many stories tell of finding moss-and-lichen beds fashioned like those made by great apes. Only one or two reports mention deerskin capes or other adornment. Essentially, if we have a beast here at all, we have one whose needs are met entirely by its wits and its muscle in concert with its habitat.
If Bigfoot falls into a stream, it’s no big deal. If it breaks a leg, maybe it lives, maybe it doesn’t—several of the best-known tracks show signs of a healed injury. Do parasites and disease enter the life of Bukwus? Does Dzonoqua get hungry when wild foods are scarce? If this is a mortal animal, these conditions must apply. And yet here is an ape that reportedly covers ground (even nearly vertical ground) at a rapid rate, that negotiates all kinds of rugged countryside, that shirks no sort of weather. Only one set of conditions seems to deter Bigfoot from living vigorously and well in the wild, the same ones that took away our ability to do so: human civilization.
It would be a hollow indictment that failed to recognize the astonishing adaptations represented by that same civilization. The most churlish Luddite could not help but marvel at the densely acronymic toy shop that defines our comfort, ease, and entertainment: TV, VCR, PC, ROM, MTV, CNN, V8, 747, DVD, CMG, et cetera. Technology has lifted our Western lives so far from the nettles and the mire that we cannot imagine going back. To the extent that these tools enhance life and reduce mortality, they could be called adaptive.
Yet another set of initials expresses the downside of modern life: IRS, FBI, CIA, HIV, AA, CFS, PCB, PMS, STD, ICBM, et cetera. Of course, not all of these baleful conditions have arisen directly from technology. Our numbers, our mobility, and the stresses peculiar to our age certainly exacerbate their effects. I don’t know if anyone would give up the first set of initials to get rid of the second. It’s too late, anyway: as a species, we are fully wedded to our electronic assistance. There is no going back to the woods—unless under population pressure or d
isease and strife or environmental change, our systems collapse under us, thrusting us into the primitive condition once again. If that were to occur, I wouldn’t give a lot for most folks’ chances, minus their microwaves.
The high concepts now are “interactive media” and “virtual experience.” I, like others, look upon such amazing ideas with awe. What can be bad about instant communication around the globe, easy access to all the information in the world, and helmets that take the place of Yosemite or Yokohama?
Still I wonder. Take the chips away, and what have you got? When function depends upon form, and form is far removed from common experience, function ceases to be common—and surely shared experience is one field mark of civilization. It’s hard to say how many people will ever participate in the upper strata of technology. But one thing is sure: as the number grows, so does our separation from the physical world. Smartphones may be interactive, but what they interact with is not the land; in virtual reality, virtual means exactly that—it ain’t real. We see only what we need to see. When our needs are completely met by pixels on a screen, we will cease to be interactive with the world. When virtual reality does the job, who needs the real thing? And who will know what to do when the real thing appears?
Desmond Morris notwithstanding, we are not the naked ape. We’re seldom naked, and when we are, we are even more defenseless than usual. Bigfoot is the naked ape—clothed with hair but naked the way Monty West was naked: equipped with nothing but his own resources in the face of nature—“naked against the rain,” as Richard Rubin elegantly put it in his book by that name. I don’t know how Monty’s experiment came out. He seems to have dropped out of sight in recent years. Whether he achieved the state of mind of an aborigine is a matter of sheer conjecture. Even if he experienced the early human’s terror before the universe, I doubt that he felt the sense of mastery and confidence that must mark the competent native everywhere. But he interacted as few of us ever will; there was nothing virtual about his adventure.
Naked on my stump, I felt the flimsiness of our security in contrast to any wild animal’s perfect fitness to its situation. And I understood a truth that had been tracking me ever since I’d set foot in the Dark Divide—that Bigfoot is the better beast. When Bigfoot enthusiasts gather, they debate whether the subject of their attention is a “primitive” hominid or not. In fact, insofar as it is powerfully fit for life in the world in a way that few humans today can even imagine, I would say that Sasquatch represents the advanced condition, that of the superior ape.
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The black remains of burned logs lined the way as I drove away from Clear Creek through a cut called Backside. The timber sales, also called payment units—a frank phrase for what a forest comes down to in the end—are all named. The names exercise the imaginations, and sometimes the irony, of the Gifford Pinchot planners. I remember one called glabella, the species name of the yellow violet that was probably common there prior to the cut. “Backside” seemed appropriate, for I felt I was indeed traveling the ass-end of the world as I descended through the clear-cut into a mist like mountain-goat fur. A moss cushion as thick as a good comforter, incredibly soft and plush to the touch, lined a rivulet by the road. I felt I could fall into it and never come out.
Down at Craggy Trail I passed a stolid bunch of archers in semipermanent plastic camps, sitting around rotting in the rain. Careful—your greasepaint will run! It’s a sure thing they wouldn’t last long naked, bows or no. They paid me no heed. I rolled across a montage of different-aged cuts to where the pavement began. The light faded into a foggy, pearly dusk. At a place where erosion below the road had torn out the underpinnings of a clear-cut, some sort of yellow foam had been sprayed to hold the slope. Nothing grew there. Beargrass and bracken poked russet among the blue nobles on gentler slopes, where the soil had stayed. Logging leaves a litter-storm of tapes, tags, ribbons, and paint stripes across the countryside. But the soft scarlets of vine maples, huckleberries, and the eye of a towhee outshone all the harsh reds of the ribbons.
Dropping through the fog above Quartz Creek, I came once again to the place of the mouse. Assuming she had indeed recovered fully, I doubted that she’d traveled fifty yards that day. I’d gone well over fifty miles, yet I wondered which of us had learned more. I hoped that the mouse had learned to keep her twitchy nose out of small holes, though I knew she’d probably do it all over again. As for me, I’d learned (as Whitman said in “Song of Myself”) that “a mouse is miracle enough.” And I’d learned that I probably shouldn’t go naked into the forest.
When Monty West did just that, I wonder what he learned. An amateur among pros, a skinny, naked ape afoot in the territory of bigger hippies even hairier than he and better suited to life on the land unadorned—what miracles were vouchsafed to him?
We’re not likely to find out, since he has disappeared into the wilds of Wallingford or the San Juan Islands or somewhere. But I feel certain that one night, curled up against the cold in a moss-and-beargrass nest of his own making, his hunger dulled with berries and mushrooms and miner’s lettuce and cold water, as alone as he could ever be, Monty West discovered one pure thing: what it is to be both human and animal at once. He might be one of the very few among us to know such a thing, for we have long tried to forget how to be animals. Out where Bigfoot walks, it is the only knowledge that counts.
8
Legends of the Dark Divide
I’m still frightened of that dark divide
will I gain entrance or be denied?
—Patti Scialfa, “Spanish Dancer”
The Dark Divide is not the first range I have prospected for its stories. I’ve written of the Willapa Hills in the southern part of Washington’s Coast Range, where I live. A lumpy muddle of ridges and ravines, the Willapas plug a virtual ring of rivers above the lower Columbia. I could have plumbed these hills in search of a sense of Sasquatch. After all, why not work close to home?
I had thought of doing this, but the arguments against it prevailed. First, there’s not much Bigfoot history here: a deputy with a footprint cast at Grays Harbor, a logger/fisherman with a sighting up North River, a few tales from early Indian days near Cathlamet, a vague incident at Vader—but nothing like the rich lode of lore north of the Chehalis River in the Olympics, or east of the Cowlitz in the Cascades. It’s as if the tall tales went out early with the tall trees.
Second, the Willapas have lost their wildness, at least in the sense of what had been there. If rain-forest apes lived anywhere in the Northwest, I cannot imagine that they didn’t live in these once-dense, deeply forested hills. But now, with thousands of acres of doghair regrowth, it’s as hard to imagine Bigfoot here as in a Seattle mall. Well, not quite; a modest number of smart creatures could still hide out in these shaggy damps; I have, after all, seen a puma slinking through the algal green of the alders. But the Willapas are too diminished to easily support even my most willing suspension of disbelief and the desire to track the beast in the wilds of my own mind.
Third, I’d already “done” my home ground. Not enough, certainly not completely, and someday I shall revisit Willapa in writing. But for Bigfoot, I wanted to explore country I did not already know. I’m surprised every time I step outdoors, but if you want to be surprised every moment you’re awake, you head to fresh territory with your eyes open. I wasn’t in a position to practice Powell’s Law (Professor Jerry Powell, a Berkeley lepidopterist, contends that “no systematic entomologist voluntarily works on insects that occur within one thousand miles of his home laboratory”), but I did intend to take this investigation well away from my doorstep. And since the Himalaya, the Tien Shan, and the Amur were all out, the southern Cascades of Washington seemed a good bet.
Besides its rich tradition of Bigfoot reports, its essential wildness, and its novelty for me, the Dark Divide has another quality that never hurts when your subject is a mysterious one: mystique. This it gets from reputat
ion (word of mouth, mostly); its isolation (too many forest roads penetrate it, but they are relatively little traveled); its appearance (black, toothy knobs running crosswise to the main range of white-capped volcanoes); its deep forests (Clear Creek and Quartz Creek sustain the longest and broadest Douglas-fir old-growth corridors outside the national parks) contrasting with open slopes above, the result not of altitude as much as of historic forest fires; and its very name.
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It was a rainy night in the middle of September, somewhere beneath Dark Mountain. Instead of bedding again at a damp campsite, I took a long drive in rain and fog. My route—Forest Roads 90 and 23N—took me over Babyshoe Pass at 4,350 feet. Here the Dark Divide drops off the shoulder of Mount Adams, near the headwaters of the Lewis River. Through fog as tight as the Robert Johnson blues on the tape player, I traveled past Takhlakh Lake and Takhtakh Meadow, along the western border of the Yakama Indian Nation. Middling firs, tightly lichen-draped, crowded the narrow road—picturesque or spooky depending on your state of mind. Blue fingers of noble firs reached out to play the washboard road.
I crossed Potato Hill, a kind of Rubicon, past Trail No. 2000 (the Pacific Crest Trail), where horses slept in trailers. This is the border of the reservation—non-Indians can’t go in without a permit. I remembered a conversation with a Yakama woman about her youth, when Bigfoot figured in every berry-picking expedition to Potato Hill, a handy bogeyman to keep bored children from wandering too far.
All the books tell stories of Sasquatch sightings along back roads at night. My ramble over Potato Hill produced one mouse. Later two little deer materialized near Orr Creek. I stopped to mark some territory I was unlikely to revisit soon, along Forest Road 56. The night was so silent, only a stream’s breathing, so softly fragrant, so dark. The fog had lifted into a dove dome that broke up to show three stars to the south. Towering trees, tent poles of the night. Where Forest Roads 23 and 21 met, I found myself just east of Juniper Peak, along the Cispus River—only two miles from my campsite on the ridge of the ghost moths. A white alder wood leaned in toward the road, pulled back again where the Dark Meadows Trail took off beside three gargantuan firs.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 10
