Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  For this reason Marjorie Halpin, convener of the 1978 “Sasquatch and Related Phenomena” symposium, suggested “enlarging the context within which the Sasquatch phenomena are considered. Specifically . . . we should examine the full context within which the creature is seen, rather than continue to dwell almost exclusively on what is seen, on the object as a thing in itself.” Or, as anthropologist Wayne Suttles said at the same conference, “While Sasquatch-like creatures may inhabit the real world of the Indians, this may not be relevant to the question of whether they inhabit the real world of Western science.”

  Once, on a horseback ride in Monument Valley, a Navajo wrangler named Harold charged our group of nature writers to “take your imagination out of your back pocket.” That is good advice for all of us who spend too much time locked in a box we call reality. However, as Thoreau said about the imagination, “Give it the least license, [it] dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.” I have no doubt that many Bigfoot encounters flow from soaring imaginations loosed from the back pocket or any other bounds.

  As we confront questions that we expect to have answers, we are left perched awkwardly on a two-horned dilemma: do we accept the Indians’ relative universe, where beaver and Bigfoot, magic and muscle, are all expressions of the same thing? Or do we stick with our own material tradition and demand an answer devoid of metaphysical paradox? You can take your pick. But if the stone heads and plaster casts of footprints are as solid as they seem, the day might come when we no longer have to choose—when the fur and the campfire smoke coalesce into something we all can call real.

  −−

  Apes, demons, or great hairy humans, there have always been devils in Indian Heaven according to the stories. Now, as the river fish decline to the vanishing point and the competition for berries exceeds the provisions of the Handshake Agreement of 1932; as white affluence expands and Indian poverty just stays the same; and as the government in its wisdom parses the future of the forest that once was theirs, the Indians have cause to revise the stories. It becomes as clear as mountain meltwater just who the devils are: another tribe, all right, but not the giant ones. I don’t doubt that the tribes would take Seeahtlks and Dzonoqua back in troops, if they could only erase the tracks of the manlike apes from over the sea.

  12

  “Bigfoot Baby Found in Watermelon, Has Elvis’s Sneer”

  “A mysterious creature—that’s news, Ishmael. The fact that people see it—that’s news.”

  —David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

  The Logs is a fine old country tavern, a blend of modern tack and old wood and the reek of burgers and beer and smoke. Covered in creeper and striped with old mortar, it is built of green vines and conversation as much as the logs of its name.

  Driving on a vanishing road that led dimly in the dusk to the forest of Monte Cristo, I turned back and dropped down to BZ Corner for a burger and a beer. Inside the tavern, piny walls held up Mount Rainier in a beer ad with illuminated animal figurines. Jolly photos of the regular patrons leered from laminated tabletops. As their neon logos promised, Bud and Rainier were on tap, but also Full Sail Ale from the sailboard town of Hood River, across the Columbia Gorge. A stuffed iguana and bowling trophies on the mantel of the great stone fireplace rounded out the decor.

  At the bar, attempting a jocular tone, I asked about local Bigfoot reports. Most of the drinkers laughed it off. But one man, Hank, had grown up around Spirit Lake, where he’d heard many stories. A friend of his in Longview, a grandson of one of the 1924 Ape Canyon survivors, claimed to possess his grandfather’s rifle, which was “twisted like licorice.” “I know another guy,” he told me, warming to it, “who came to work on a logging show and found fifty-gallon oil drums tossed off the landing like bushel baskets.” He spoke of a Bigfoot sighting by a busload of people near Bellingham. “I won’t discount it,” said Hank. “After all—who’s gonna call bullshit on it?”

  Who indeed? No one can prove that Bigfoot isn’t there. Perhaps we can say with some confidence that the last dusky seaside sparrow has dropped out and confirm to our satisfaction that there are no more passenger pigeons. Yet black-footed ferrets were found when all were thought to be gone, and ivory-billed woodpeckers are now known to survive in Cuba. Extinction, or absolute absence, is difficult to demonstrate. We can proclaim with confidence that there is no elephant in a given room at a given time. Lacking any likely fossils, we agree that Minotaurs and unicorns probably did not walk the earth in the way that bulls and horses do. But proving the nonexistence of an animal with adequate fossil precursors in an immense area of wild and tangled character is a centaur of a different color.

  The world at large might consider Bigfoot an intriguing possibility rather than a nutso folly if it weren’t for the creature’s enthusiastic adoption by the trashy tabloids. Whatever their entertainment value for bored shoppers queuing in supermarkets, these pulp purveyors of putty for drafty brains ensure that anything they embrace wholeheartedly (itself a dubious proposition) is sure to be regarded, by those who consider themselves sensible, as absolute codswallop.

  I enjoy scanning the tabloids. Sometimes I pick a longer line (or ask Thea to take care of the checkout) so I can surreptitiously skim the more outrageous contents—the many resurrections of JFK, the omnipresence of Elvis, the obesities that make me look like a beanpole, the babies born with alligator eyes, the endless possibilities of impregnation. But as much as I enjoy the aliens (“Martians Take Over Wall Street”), the unlikely couplings (“Toddler Weds Great-grandmother”), and the wild hybrids (“Cat Gives Birth to Furred Frog”), I find myself wondering who really buys these things. Some sales go to sneering disbelievers drawn to the lurid headlines for their entertainment value. But many readers of straight prose must share my blend of fascination and horror that there are enough gullible or mindless people to keep these cynical serials afloat.

  This is now the habitat of Bigfoot in the popular mind: the pages of sensational rags that trade on people’s foolish hopes, real fears, and profound ignorance. How are we to consider Sasquatch seriously when his cohabitants are dead presidents, revivified rock stars, and pregnant pumpkins?

  One rock “star” who is very much alive gave me some insights on Bigfoot and the tabloids. I’d enjoyed the songs of Mojo Nixon that I’d heard on the radio, such as “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-headed Love Child.” One summer while teaching in Vermont, I met a singer and teacher named Bobby Parker, who is a good friend of Mojo’s. The two had taken a cross-country bicycle ride some years before, during which, Bobby said, “Mojo found his name and his vision.”

  That vision is a sublimely twisted one of warm beer and love in old Impalas out beneath the power lines, no lost love for malls and banks, and rude romance (“My Baby Is Vibrator Dependent”). Mojo is not for everyone. But he has a remarkable handle on what makes people tick, especially people who buy the tabloids—like Don Henley’s lyric in the song “If Dirt Were Dollars”: “I was flyin back from Lubbock, I saw Jesus on the plane . . . or maybe it was Elvis. You know, they kinda look the same.”

  When Mojo performed in Seattle, I went backstage afterward to meet him and to mention having met Bobby. But Bobby had beaten me to it; Mojo said, “Oh, yeah—you’re the butterfly guy!” I wanted to ask him about Bigfoot. One of his songs, “The A-mazing Bigfoot Diet,” deals with the co-option of the big fella by the tabloids. It begins “I married a Bigfoot, gave birth to my mother.” Credulousness is one of Mojo’s big topics. After his success with “Elvis Is Everywhere” (“You know what’s going on down in that Bermuda Triangle?” asks the lyric. “Elvis needs boats!”), he installed a 1-800-Elvis line, at his own expense, to hear people’s Elvis sightings and insights. Hundreds of people called in to relate their experiences with the King, exceeding even Mojo’s expectations of the lowest common denominator.

  “Yeah,” he told me, “I figure a lot o
f the Bigfoot people must be like these Elvis cats.”

  “How’s that, Mojo?” I asked.

  “Well, with these folks,” he replied, “it’s not a matter of not having both oars in the water. They don’t even have a boat!”

  −−

  For a while now I’ve been collecting tabloid articles about Yeti-like phenomena. This not only gives me a chance to purchase the execrable items (a delicious act of virtuous slumming), but also expands my sense of how Bigfoot is viewed in these circles.

  Many of the stories appear in the Sun, such as “I Am the Mother of Bigfoot Baby: Woman’s amazing tale of survival in the wilderness.” Debbie Bates was kidnapped and raped by an eight-foot Bigfoot, then escaped when he got in a fight with a grizzly. Debbie, described by writer John Coffin as being “ugly as sin,” was shown happily bottle-feeding a young chimp. She shared the front-page headlines with a Civil War hero found alive in the South Carolina woods and an obsessive Presleyana collector who named his son Elvis and his home Graceland Too.

  The Sun also revealed “Proof in Bible: Bigfoot Exists.” John Coffin, something of a Sasquatch authority by now, reported on a biblical scholar’s conclusion that the giants referred to in Genesis were the ancestors of Bigfoot. When the offspring of Cain bred with women, they begat the Neandertals. (This is actually not so far from Beowulf’s way of accounting for Grendel.) If you turned the page you got the Terror Truck, a ghostly trucker who plays chicken with motorists on the highways of Tennessee; a dog-faced baby, and “Happy Hubby Makes 2 Sisters Pregnant 11 Times.”

  Another issue gave us the “First Ever Photos of Bigfoot: Mountain drama as brave climber meets 700 pounds of fighting fury,” by William Rock. Climbing in Oregon, Leonard Morton came across a particularly fat, pear-shaped Bigfoot, with a head as big as its torso, and caught the image on his camcorder. Then “the crazed creature from hell chased the brave adventurer into a small cave, where it kept him pinned for a terrifying eight hours.” Just for fun, Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Research Project analyzed the photographs. He showed that two shots, supposedly taken some distance apart in space and time, were merely reverse views of the same pose. No surprise. The story appeared along with the genetic bonanza of a leopard girl who got a new face, a baby who glowed in the dark, a runaway boy who had a sex-change operation, and a woman who gave birth to triplets of three races.

  Wilderness encounters provide much of the Sun’s grist. “Bigfoot Captured Alive—He’s Human (monster is gentle as a baby)” showed the Manitoba captive in a decidedly nongentle pose looking a lot like Lon Chaney, Jr., as Wolf Man. Of course, he escaped, so he was slightly overshadowed by the fat man who exploded after winning a pie-eating contest.

  Another capture was reported in the Weekly World News, claiming, “Scientists bag 7-foot creature in MONTANA!” Dick Donovan wrote the scoop on Dr. Leonard Owens’s bagging of the beast with a tranquilizing dart. In this version the creature had the rheumy eyes, nose, and mouth of a down-and-outer captured for a makeup session and photo op outside the Salvation Army mission in Butte. The photo was as different from the Sun’s as a mouse is from a cat. A later issue reported his inevitable escape in the Vienna Woods, where he had been flown for tests; two armed guards were found with their skulls crushed. The lead story, even with its recycled photos of the wino from Butte, had to compete with the world’s first potty-trained frog.

  The Weekly World News’s next two Bigfoot stories had to do with babies. Tucked into an issue with a wax dummy of Hitler that cried real tears, a man who ate a live bat, and Siamese twins who fought over their boyfriend was “World’s First Photo of a Bigfoot Baby.” Dutch anthropologists in southwest China kidnapped the thirty-two-pound infant with six-inch feet from its screaming eight-foot mother. The baby was hairy all over except for its humanlike face. A later issue tells Katie Martin’s story. Unlike Debbie Bates, Katie wasn’t abducted; she met Bigfoot while hiking at Mount Rainier and fell in love when he brought her flowers and berries. Later she had his baby. The mother-son portrait showed young Kelly with ordinary limbs and a furry face with a mashed nose—just the reverse of the Chinese baby. Other stories in the News told of a terrified teen who touched Bigfoot in a dark barn; a hermit trapper with a Bigfoot friend who came to visit when UFOs were in the vicinity; a pair of Yetis who were air traffic controllers for a fleet of UFOs; and Chinese soldiers who shot “the world’s last female Bigfoot.”

  Given this constant barrage of weirdness, is it any wonder that serious-minded individuals regard reports of a large, hairy humanoid with something less than openness and generosity of spirit?

  −−

  What I find particularly compelling about the relegation of Bigfoot to the dregs of journalism—or to the heights of hyperbolic print entertainment, if you prefer—is the vast distance between the myth’s honorable past and its present media purgatory. How did this universal archetype, whose likeness can be found in almost every culture and in whom great power has been vested for many centuries, become so degraded?

  It might be valuable to review the ubiquity of hairy-giant traditions. We have seen how prevalent and enduring is the hairy-devil/wild Indian figure in West Coast Native American history. But similar entities are found among Indians all over North America, ranging from the Algonkian Windigo or Witiko, a cannibal man-beast of the North Woods, to the Iroquois and Cherokee giants called Stoneclad. And the Pacific Coast Bigfoot figures continue north well into Alaska.

  Martha Demientieff, a native Alutiiq writer and teacher whose family runs a river transport company, told me of a Yukon village deserted as recently as the summer of 1992 because of the appearance of the Wood Man, sometimes known as Neginla-eh. And on a recent trip to Homer, Alaska, I became acquainted with a rich lode of Bigfoot tradition on the Kenai Peninsula. The residents of English Bay tell of many encounters with Nantiinaq, who could change from Bigfoot into any other form. Some of the stories were collected in a magazine called Fireweed Cillqaq. “They said there used to be real ones before,” wrote Kathy Kvasnikoff. “When you got close and tried to touch them like this, nothing would be there.”

  Bigfoot has several counterparts in Asia. The Yeti, or abominable snowman, is of course the best known. Yeti became international news when mountaineer Eric Shipton found a clear set of tracks near Mount Everest in 1951. The Long Walk, a 1956 memoir by Slavomir Rawicz, told of the wartime escape of five men from Siberia across the Himalaya. A close run-in with two seven-foot-tall, reddish Yeti caused them to change their route and lose a man in a crevasse. The Atlantic Monthly of November 1975 carried an account by Edward W. Cronin, Jr., of snowman history and lore. Cronin, a scientist conducting an ecological survey of the Arun Valley of far eastern Nepal, became a believer when he discovered a long trail of prints similar to those in Shipton’s photographs. The walker had appeared beside Cronin’s tent in the night, then left the camp and crossed extremely steep terrain. And Peter Matthiessen, in The Snow Leopard, wrote of “a dark shape” he saw jump behind a boulder, “much too big for a red panda, too covert for a musk deer, too dark for wolf or leopard, and much quicker than a bear. With binoculars I stare for a long time at the mute boulder, feeling the presence of unknown life behind it, but all is still, there is only the sun and morning mountainside, the pouring water.” Matthiessen returned from a later expedition to eastern Nepal with photographs of prints that he regards as good candidates for snowman tracks. And so Yeti lives on.

  But Yeti is only one of the Asian Bigfeet. There is also the Alma of Mongolia, depicted in Tibetan natural histories, and the related Almasty, or Wild Man of the Caucasus; Yeh Ren, the Chinese Wildman, which has been reported for at least twenty-five hundred years; and the Yeti-like Chuchunaa of Siberia. These creatures are taken seriously by many in Asia, even considered mundane among Caucasian herdsmen. Peter Matthiessen has told me that both he and George Schaller have open minds about several Asian species. Large-scale Eurasian search efforts have been f
unded recently by organizations ranging from the BBC to the Chinese government. According to the London Sunday Times, a million-dollar Franco-Russian expedition planned to go into Kazakhstan. Led by Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, a twenty-year veteran of the chase, the high-tech team intended to “capture an Alma with the help of the local population. We want to take a mould of its face and specimens of its hair, skin, and blood and then set it free with a radiotracer band. There is to be no King Kong spectacle of bringing it back.” According to British archaeologist Myra Shackley, the Chinese have designated a portion of the Shennongjia forest as a Yeti reserve. Shackley believes that Asian man-apes might well represent surviving Neandertals or their descendants.

  Ape-monster traditions come not only from mountainous regions but also from islands, deserts, and the tropics. They include the Cigouave, a voodoo-related Haitian forest beast; the Oreng-Pendek or Sedapa of Borneo and Sumatra; the Orang-Dalam of Malaysia; the Agogue of East Africa; and the Duendi of Colombia. There are swamp beasts galore, the Moth Man, the Gray Man of the Carolinas, and a wide array of troglodytes. Few cultures lack a human-faced hairy monster, giant, or wild man.

  It would be a mistake to think that Yeti-like entities are the property only of “primitive” cultures. Woodmen and forest gods and goddesses loomed large in Hellenistic, Phoenician, and other proto-European societies. So prominent and diverse were forest, cave, and other wildlings in relatively modern legends and beliefs that the great Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus actually recognized and named several species, including Homo troglodytes, H. nocturnus, H. sylvestris, and H. ferus. Wild-man images lasted well into modern times in Europe, at least as an artistic footnote to the dominant culture.