My immediate need was a nap, a streamside drowse disturbed only briefly by a truly foul odor wafting through from somewhere. Was it something dead? Or something alive?
−−
When I went into the Dark Divide, I hoped to enter the mind of the monster. I wasn’t sure if that meant the working brain of a beast, the ethos of a fairy-tale phenomenon, or the intellect of the land itself. Maybe all three. At times I felt I succeeded. It would have been good to write about it then and there, when the feeling was fresh. But it always passed, and then there were the miles to be covered, the texture of the trip to record, the camp chores, the ten thousand personal preoccupations. When I made my field notes, I usually found myself trapped by the rusty steel jaws of my own brain pan.
Much later I tried to evoke the sensation of oneness with my subject in full-blown prose. The results convinced no one, least of all me. In one draft I emulated the high-flown language of Gardner’s Grendel, at once blithe and profoundly sad. Another attempt took an Abbey-esque crack at a flip and profane worldview, excoriating loggers and mountain bikers alike for invading the territory of my speaker. One version told a short story involving Indians and Bigfoot hunters and ending with my animal on the door of the nearest tavern, ready for his date with a modern Beowulf in plaid shirt and pegged jeans. Yet another dropped the pretense of language as much as possible while still conveying the basic facts of a day in the life of the beast in a concrete litany of hard, monosyllabic words like shards of the stones themselves: “walk ridge crack rock scrape bark walk.”
My friend and gentle critic Jenelle Varila, after hearing one of these labors in our writing group, got it just right. She said that I had entered Bigfoot, but then had taken over his mind instead of allowing him to overtake mine. “Bob Pyle’s mind,” she wrote me, “turned the crank in the mind of Bigfoot.” She went on to pinpoint the challenge precisely: “It’s incredibly difficult to release one’s self, to allow the infiltration of another mind to drown the passion of our own.” Indeed it is.
Others have written narratives from the standpoint of Yeti or Sasquatch with engaging results, but you know the author is still in charge; the creature might as well be Howdy Doody. Even the invention of a language or syntax, as some fantasy and science fiction writers have done, just serves to further screen an authorial voice that is, if anything, even more manipulative. The best fiction writers make you believe that their characters are in charge of their own minds and voices; but to me as a reader, the more transparent the magic, the more embedded I feel in the mind of the writer, though I may frequently forget it. Besides, most fictional characters are able to speak, so the challenge is not entirely comparable. As I found, it is damnably difficult to convey words, thoughts, actions, and perceptions for a creature that is, as far as we know, without language or speech.
What about animal fiction? Some fully engaging novels without people in significant roles, such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down, simply endow animals with speech, as Gardner did with Grendel. Henry Williamson’s classic Tarka the Otter and Daniel Mannix’s The Fox and the Hound come as close as any books I know to placing the reader inside the skins of their characters without anthropomorphizing. But these third-person stories, masterfully steeped as they are in lutrine and canine sensibilities, are still drawn from the human intellect and conveyed with human conceits, tropes, and tools. Vladimir Nabokov, in an interview with Jacob Bronowski, said, “We should all remember that a lepidopterist reverts in a sense to the ancient ape-man who actually fed on butterflies and learned to distinguish the edible from the poisonous kinds.” So I should have had a leg up on the process. If never quite reverting, at least I stepped inside the ape-suit—and, being there, found it ineffable. I don’t know if anyone can give voice to the voiceless and stay out of it. As Jenelle said, “You must pull the shade of your own reasoning and peer deeply into the new territory.” For most (if not all) writers, I suspect that shade is as stuck as mine.
Yet I did peer deeply into the territory. And at certain times I believe that I did intuit the Sasquatchness of the scene, that I left myself behind and climbed inside that great hairy headgear and felt the flapping of my massive feet against the rough pumice paths.
This happened at the mouth of Yellowjacket Creek when I imagined hiding out at the old hidden cedar stump as a hunted primate. It came to me again at Yellowjacket Pass when I peered into the meadow pool at efts and saw tracks in the mud that might have been made by my kind . . . and for a moment my kind was the clan of the big feet. And on the dusky heaths of Juniper Ridge I was truly (if briefly) cohabitant of the ghost moths.
The senses of Sasquatch came at random moments. How a pawful of huckleberries slaked my hunger and thirst at once with their feral juices; how the sun glanced off the fir boughs when it broke through Pahto’s cloud cap, like the day’s own promise of warmth; how the coyotes sounded Bigfoot’s helpless rage, howling by day, when our—our!—territory was invaded by the screaming fighters ripping the air just above treetop level. But nowhere did I feel the heart of the hairy ape leap in my breast more sharply than at Snagtooth, where all signs of change washed away in the waters of the canyon and the shadows of the old trees, and the odor I smelled might have been the musk of my own mate.
At these times I felt the joy of life that any superbly at-home animal of middling intellect must sense in its surroundings. I palped the tastes and textures and smells and sounds that make up the existence of a beast abroad on the land. And I perceived at least a spark of the short circuit animals operate on, when stimulus drives right into the base of the brain and from there to the limbs and the gut and the heart, wasting no time on needless thought. In these flickers of feeling I passed through the hide and into the mind and bones of the giant.
But I also sensed something of the confusion, fear, and outrage that a sentient creature must suffer when its providence—its habitat—is being overwhelmed by forces foreign to its ken. When these sensations came, Jekyll-like, I lapse-dissolved back into myself, for my own prejudices were showing through. Maybe Squirrel doesn’t know about change, perhaps Puma doesn’t care, and Sasquatch is immune. Yet I (now firmly back in my own brain) believe that if monsters walk, they need wildness to do it in. And after looking out at the forest from its red eyes, I see Bigfoot fading away like Tinker Bell. Dozing there by Snagtooth, I dreamed a great shape dissolving into the dim mosslight, trailing its fetid perfume behind it, diminishing, diminishing.
−−
I awoke, chilled and stiff and hungry, to a vague emptiness. After losing her love, Edna Saint Vincent Millay described a place of sadness as that “where never fell his foot.” That’s how I felt awakening here. What if that big fat foot once fell but shall no more? Or, worse, has never fallen here or anywhere else and my private myth is just a public dream after all?
Now the sun was sinking, and melancholy was a mood I could not afford if I wanted to get out of the forest by dark. So I said good-bye to Snagtooth. Wren song warbled far off; a woodpecker rattled like a voice inside. Then, as I rounded a bend, Quartz Creek muffled, the silence was palpable. A big downed log spanned eighty feet of the gorge, rising thirty feet to gain the far side. I declined to cross it. Would Bigfoot? Has Bigfoot?
This is so deep, I thought as I walked, so wild—no place to hide, my foot! After all, D. B. Cooper parachuted into these woods and was never found. And he didn’t even know his way around. Nor did I, apparently. I lost the trail in the dimming green light after detouring around a massive log. All I had to do was work my way downstream to find the trail eventually. Even so, I felt a rare little sense of alarm. One could get lost in the big bush—and who wants to go orienteering in the dark?
A fly finished its day’s flight. Quartz Creek glistened far below a bluff, cedar foliage far above, both colored Eliot Porter golds by the last sun. I passed the pika rocks, but the animals did not show; maybe they thought I was Grendel come to eat their heads
off. Then the fern swale, smelling of good, sweet tea, erasing the memory of the putrid odor at Snagtooth. And so to the clear-cut and into the open again.
Then, discovering that I had lost the sweet-scented fern I’d collected for identification, I returned happily to the swale for more. Emerging again, I gasped, like a fish coming up for the second time, drowning in the open air. I didn’t dare go back inside once more, or I might never have left the forest again.
11
Whistling with Bigfoot
The literature and art of nature and the myths of Indians are the wellsprings of environmental sanity, leading back into the earth itself.
—Ted Levin, Blood Brook
On the first day of autumn I traveled up the Lewis River once again, then south, beyond the Dark Divide, to the highlands where Indians have gathered berries for thousands of years.
My brief time out had been hot and clear at Gray’s River, but with the equinox came the clouds. Fall expressed itself in the early reds of maples and poison oak along the Kalama Bluffs. East of Woodland I paused at the site of the Finn Hall, where in 1916 Finnish pioneers founded a literary association (Kirjallisuus Seura) and a lending library. A grove of skinny cottonwoods surrounded the site of the old hall, where all sorts of cultural events took place in the early days. Only an interpretive sign reminds us of the rich Finnish culture that so briefly flowered here. The generalized American mix absorbed it in no time. In turn, and almost as rapidly, the mongrel European advance displaced the native civilization that went before. Aided by disease, the white wave swept over the Yakamas and Klickitats, the Chinookan peoples, and the rest with a speed that must have seemed miraculous to all.
Passing through, you could be forgiven for imagining that nothing whatever remained of the native culture—or for not imagining it at all. Yet up the Lewis from Woodland, near the village of Ariel, a pocket of the past resides in the compound of Chief Lelooska and his family. Don Smith is a Cherokee who received the name Lelooska in a Nez Perce adoption at age thirteen. Later he was also adopted by a Kwakiutl clan. Don’s studies of Kwakiutl ways go back forty years, and for the past thirty-three he has worked to convey the traditional ways of story and dance to those who would know and respect them. When the dancers enter the cedar longhouse through a scrim of alder smoke, you might as well be in Alert Bay, British Columbia, before the British, before Columbia.
The winter ceremonies that Chief Lelooska performs for visitors mimic the old ways that were the mastic of Kwakiutl society. The villages occupied many green invaginations in the long coastline, abutting yet culturally separate from the many other native groups of the maritime Northwest. People came together in winter to perform and watch the Hamatsa dances, the youth-becoming-chief ceremonies that reaffirmed the lineages and myths on which their rainy salmon-and-cedar world was based.
Different families possess varying versions of the Hamatsa stories, but in many the cannibal spirit of the wild, Bakbakwalanooksiwae, was central to the rites of passage. Familiars of the cannibal spirit might be the giant, Dzonoqua, and the ghost chief, Bukwus. Dzonoqua is Lelooska’s chief crest, and he takes his three-part mask to potlatches to represent his family’s history. To him Dzonoqua is a race of giants, certainly not all female, as one of his adoptive family’s ancestors was said to have been seduced by a male Dzonoqua. Other clans think of Dzonoqua as the Wild Woman of the woods and Bukwus as the Wild Man of the woods, and they equate them with what we now call Sasquatch (from the Salish saskehavas).
On my way home from the coast of Vancouver Island after a long backpack one March, I visited the totem park in Victoria. There, in front of a cedar longhouse of the old kind, I came face-to-face with Dzonoqua in the bottom figure on a huge house pole of yellow cedar. As if emanating from her pursed lips, the winds whistled over the nearby sea cliff like the hoots and cries of the land and its spirit. I felt as Emily Carr, the noted painter of Northwest Indian land and culture, might have when she first came upon Dzonoqua on a Haida totem. In Klee Wyck she described this encounter in a remote village in the Queen Charlotte Islands:
Her head and trunk were carved out of, or rather into, the bole of a great red cedar. She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood so that you could see her . . . The eyes were two rounds of black, set in wider rounds of white, and placed in deep sockets under wide, black eyebrows. Their fixed stare bored into me as if the very life of the old cedar looked out, and it seemed that the voice of the tree itself might have burst from that great round cavity, with projecting lips, that was her mouth . . . I stood looking at her for a long, long time.
Looking into Dzonoqua’s huge ovoid eyes, I remembered the magical lectures given by Professor Bill Holm at the University of Washington the previous spring, when I first learned of the winter Hamatsa dances and the role of the Wild Man and Wild Woman of the woods. Holm, of Scandinavian–Native American descent, was adopted by the Kwakiutl through the Hamatsa ceremony. He brought the color, life, and drama of the coastal dances to the receptive imaginations of his fortunate students. I will never forget Bill donning the heavy, yard-long black-and-white mask of the Raven dancer, its cedar-bark fringe shaking as he emulated the footwork of the crouched dancer’s exertions; or the jumpy black-and-white films he showed by Franz Boas of long-ago Hamatsas; and the foamberry whip, smoked salmon, and vile oil of the candlefish, called eulachon, at the end-of-course feast.
But my sharpest recollection was what Holm had to say about Bigfoot. Other figures, he told us, such as Sisiutl, the two-headed sea serpent (and thunderbird’s harpoon, according to Lelooska), have been subsumed into the metaphor of symbolic myth. Yet among the people he knows in the many bands, especially those who still live on the coast or in the forest and who have contact with the wild, belief in Dzonoqua and Bukwus is still literal: they accept Bigfoot as they accept bear, wolf, and raven. Anthropologist Wayne Suttles, in a paper entitled “Sasquatch: The Testimony of Tradition,” which he delivered at a major Bigfoot conference, suggests that the Indian zoology might be so different from ours that conclusions regarding literal belief are overstated. Even so, he says it is a mistake to consign native myths to the supernatural: “For the Coast Salish the Sasquatch is part of the natural world.”
−−
Halfway between Ariel and Cougar, at Speelyai Creek near Yale, I stopped at Reese’s Store. This was where, in 1969, a hairball of students from the University of Washington met the Reeses, a pioneer family who had agreed to guide us to the huge lava tube known as Ape Cave on the south slopes of Mount St. Helens. Harry Reese had come to the upper Lewis River Valley in 1933 and had been studying the caves and other natural features of the area ever since. The Reeses warmly welcomed this band of naifs, who knew little of their way of life and disapproved of what they thought they did know. Judgmental about logging and hunting, fans of federal set-asides and gun control, war resisters all, we must have seemed pretty alien to these men of the hills. But we were harmless—this was logging’s heyday, long before the eruption, the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, the listing of the spotted owl. Reese was his own brand of conservationist, who taught the local Boy Scouts to respect the world and to live by its tenets.
As he often had with the Scouts, Harry led us up into the elfin lichen-and-lodgepole forest around Ape Cave. His gangly young sons, Len, Bill, and Bob, came along. One of them pointed out a number of tree casts—holes and channels in the ground made when lava cooled around trees and roots that then burned or decayed. These cavelets led into the underworld like tunnels; some continued for many feet or yards underground or intersected with lava tubes, where magma flowed away beneath lithified roofs. During their painstaking exploration of the lavalands of St. Helens, the Reese boys had actually crawled through the casts as far as they could before backing out. We were horrified and excited to hear of these rabbit-hole rambles in the dark squee
ze of the rock. None of us would have done it.
The main object of our field trip with the Reeses, Ape Cave, is one of the longest lava tubes in the world, more than two miles in length. According to speleologist William R. Halliday, lava tubes are roofed-over feeder channels that conduct fluid lava (pahoehoe) to the advancing front of the lava flow. This one formed over a streambed during a lava flow from Mount St. Helens’s summit some nineteen hundred years ago. As our eyes adjusted to the black hole in the black rock, we could see (if nothing else) how it might be the lair of creatures beyond our ken. Ape Cave had been named by Harry’s Scouts, who were dubbed Mount St. Helens Apes once they had toured the cave and undergone a ceremony under their leader’s guidance. Harry didn’t share the procedure with us, but he did tell Bigfoot stories in the dark. We felt duly initiated once we emerged into the sun. My interest in Bigfoot dates from that day.
Now, twenty years later, I found Reese’s Store closed, with roses twining over the rusted tin roof. An old register of Mount Saint Helens climbers was still on the crumbly porch; tree-cast crawling was presumably never popular enough to require a register.
−−
All the ape monikers came from the 1924 report of the miners’ encounter with “giant hairy apes” in what came to be called Ape Canyon, seven miles to the northeast. Yet Mount St. Helens’s connection with Bigfoot goes much further back. In his 1854 memoir, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, Paul Kane wrote of St. Helens, “Indians . . . assert that it is inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals, and whom they hold in great dread.”
William Halliday, director of the Western Speleological Survey, claimed in his 1983 pamphlet Ape Cave and the Mount St. Helens Apes that the miners’ attackers were actually local youths, one of whom came clean in 1982. That made the third confession of would-be hoaxers, each with a different account, that I have heard. The incident inspired a fascinating response from a Native American writer. Jorg Totsgi, editor of the Real American of Hoquiam, Washington, and a member of the Clallam tribe, wrote in the Oregonian of July 16, 1924, that “the big apes reported to have bombarded a shack of prospectors at Mount St. Helens are recognized by northwestern Indians as none other than the Seeahtlk tribe of Indians. [We] have long kept the history of the Seeahtlk tribe a secret, because the tribe is the skeleton in [our] closet.”
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 15
