Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Probably the best known of these figures is the Green Man. As explained by William Anderson in Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth, “The Green Man signifies irrepressible life.” The counterpart of the Great Goddess, he smuggled the pagan preoccupation with plants and the rest of nature into Christian tradition. Anderson’s book shows images of the Green Man—vines, tendrils, and leaves sprouting from his mouth or entwining his head—decorating ecclesiastical architecture throughout Europe. Shades of the Green Man may be reflected in Robin Hood, the King of the May, the Jolly Green Giant, and ultimately the botanist: a Green Man graces the main gates of Kew Gardens in London, the very seat of plant study.

  So when I sat in the Quartz Creek greenwood looking for Silenus, satyrs, fauns, and zephyrs (all of which are anglewing butterflies as well as rustic pagan deities), Bigfoot might have walked in and sat down beside us and been in perfectly suitable company. If Sasquatch is not Pan, Puck, Silenus, Dionysus, Enkidu of Gilgamesh, and Robin Goodfellow; if Dzonoqua is not Diana, Demeter, Astarte, Gaia, Maya, the Great Goddess, and Mother Nature, then they are damned close to it. For what are any of these characters but embodiments of nature, the earth, and all that is green and contrary to control?

  We live in an age when control—the grid, the boot, the gun, the nozzle, the law—has the upper hand. We have lost the wild repositories of power beyond the campfire, the mythic figures in which we might invest our fears, whom we might supplicate in pursuit of hope. Instead we have religions that rule behavior and perpetuate themselves through the application of order and conformity. For all of its values, contemporary religious life offers little of the all-embracing ardor of any “pagan” culture.

  The secular world lacks even that pallid and weird mythical figure, the devil (whose medieval form was concocted from the repressed wreckage of the arch-satyr Pan). Reason and rationality have sought to replace the need for the superstitions that upheld nearly all societies of the past and still prop up many in the present. But we don’t really behave rationally. Most of us have no sense of the stochasticity of the world—the natural history of chance—or of what cause and effect really mean. Churchgoers or not, people tend to behave deterministically, as if there really were such a thing as fate. Though the end of superstition might be an advance, most people still adhere to it, calling it luck or faith. In seeking to banish the terrors beyond the city walls, we have either subordinated our spirits to some “spiritual” system or traded them for the illusory comforts of the material world.

  Now we are seeing a rebirth of the desire to combine nature and spirit among some earnest folk who value the religious impulse yet feel religion has resided too far from the real world for too long. Earth and Spirit conferences and celebrations, the Green Spirituality and Green Cross movements, the writings of Matthew Fox and Thomas Berry and other more or less apostate priests and teachers, and the emergence of neopagan followers of the “old religion” are all manifestations of this urge to reintegrate what many see as elemental urges too long in conflict.

  As an interested heathen, I have watched various efforts to woo Gaia back into spiritual life, to rehabilitate the Horned One, to turn the considerable energy and resources of religion toward the problems of environmental conservation. The basic approach is heartening and infinitely more desirable than the contrarian practice of many fundamentalist institutions, which would banish nature altogether in pursuit of ultimate control.

  A simple and reliable test of a creed’s standing on these issues is to ask how its adherents regard the term “wilderness.” Those to whom it is anathema, something to be avoided and subdued, are on a one-way track toward irrelevance. Religions that revere wilderness, however, as the home of our neighbors, as well as the place where devouts and prophets from Jesus to John Muir have sought enlightenment, may be part of the solution.

  Unfortunately, much of the regreening movement is highly naive about nature and prone to confusing oatmeal with ideas. The headlong rush to embrace everything Native American (to the intense discomfiture and resentment of many Indians); the wholesale adoption of pantheism and animism without any awareness of their motivations, history, or special knowledges; and the conflation of the Green Man (who, like Dzonoqua, is sexually ambiguous) with the “wild man” of muzzy-minded men’s groups all detract from the possible potency of these movements.

  This is where we get back to Bigfoot, for Bigfoot has much to do with potency. If hairy giants represent the same archetype as the Green Man and the Goddess, mightn’t they also suggest a model for reintegration? As ethnologist Marjorie Halpin wrote in Manlike Monsters on Trial, whether as “missing link” or as a quality of ba’wis [Tsimshian for Bukwus-ness] manifesting throughout nature, the Sasquatch is a recognition of the connection between the human and the natural.” Or as permaculture guru Bill Devall put it in Simple in Means, Rich in Ends, Sasquatch is the “ideal man-nature being.”

  If the myths often regard Bigfoot as a bogey, they also invest it with serious and important powers. And isn’t that the way with nature? The world is both scary and empowering. It is this duality of intimidating force and becalming strength that made it necessary for many religious dogmas to edit nature out. Adam and Eve were not expelled from the garden; they turned their backs on it when their authors edited out the Goddess. As Joseph Campbell put it in The Power of Myth, “When the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess that’s used in the Old Testament is ‘the Abomination.’”

  The Hebrews were not alone in relegating nature to the profane. As Campbell went on to tell Bill Moyers, “The Christian separation of matter and spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this separation. The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man.” Am I alone in seeing the shadow of Sasquatch at the gates of Eden?

  Campbell concluded, “Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.” Moyers then asked, “Is this what Thomas Mann meant when he talked about mankind being the noblest work because it joins nature and spirit?” Campbell replied, “Yes.” And when Robinson Jeffers, in “November Surf,” referred to the “two-footed / Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals,” he was hoping for a time when mankind “regains the dignity of room, the value of rareness.”

  As we seek such a state and names for the natural world to help us live with it instead of against it, could Bigfoot be an ambassador for a truly green spirituality? An icon with shoulders broad enough to accept our mortal dread, and honest enough to promise the earth as long as we both last, has a real appeal. Hardly a god, but maybe doing the same job if, as Campbell says, “gods are guides to the deep center of truth.”

  Unfortunately we may have gone too far in devaluing the thing we call Bigfoot to ever bring it back into respectability. Largely this is the result of a basic difference between how we view reality and how the Kwakiutl view it. To us something is real if we can see or touch it every time we look for it. To them it might be solid now and phantasmic tomorrow yet be equally real. The adoption of an absolutist or positivist view of the world, a figment of Western thought with roots in Aristotle, Newton, and Spencer, militates against appreciation of the Kwakiutl view. When the Greeks and Romans traded their old pantheon, what we’ve all grown up calling “classical mythology,” for monotheism, they gave up all the sweet and maddening ambivalence of their gods.

  They sacrificed, in short, a universe in which chariots pulled the sun and thunderbolts were thrown by pissed-off, imperfect gods, where mortals might marry gods and be blinded, killed, or eaten for it, then reemerge in another form. They traded whimsy and pregnant possibility for the idea of
order, swapped all sorts of resurrections for just one. The new ethical order, if observed, was at least more humane, if no more rational. But in the deal they gave up the kind of relationship with nature that allowed the likes of centaurs and satyrs to romp.

  You would think that the religiously mystical should be able to accept the possibility of transcendent states of existence, such as resurrection. But if a certain magic is not to be found in the scripture of a particular creed, it is out of bounds, in the realm of the Beast. For the so-called secular, the scripture is likely to be National Geographic. If it’s not there, it’s not at all.

  The old bestiaries suggested the existence of phoenixes and rocs and all sorts of weird organisms, even hippos and rhinos. That narwhals turned out to be “real” and unicorns “unreal” would have mattered little to the compilers, who were more concerned with recording what men thought was out there than documenting natural diversity. Nowadays biogeographers believe only in what they can be shown. I understand this impulse and act on it in my butterfly studies. But whatever we have gained through the objectivity of Western science, we have lost in the utility of rocs and phoenixes and all creatures beyond the pale of the cabinet or the cage.

  The very fact that the word “myth” has come to mean in the common parlance an erroneous idea or mistake reflects our collective faith in one-dimensional reality. As Campbell and Moyers richly showed in The Power of Myth, a myth is simply a system of belief. And many of the most enduring belief systems do not have our myopia.

  Now come the new cosmologists and the quantum physicists who, going Einstein one (or several) better, tell us that the world is a relative place after all. Interpreted in one way, modern physics suggests that the Kwakiutl could be right: Dzonoqua today might be here and rock-solid real and tomorrow exist on the other side of a dimension that hasn’t been named or numbered. Of course, you won’t find a physicist who really supports the notion of some Bigfoot enthusiasts (those without a boat, in Mojo’s words) that Bigfoot moves between dimensions at will. Quantum mechanics tend to tinker at the edges of universes and in deep time and other imponderables, not so much in the here and now. But the point—and the irony—is that we seem to be coming back, kicking and screaming, into an intellectual environment where logical positivism has to scramble to stay on top.

  Realities differ. I have a brother whose reality today is vastly different from the one he perceived prior to a head-on encounter with a cattle truck. A psychiatrist we once consulted told me that to try to change his mind about the reality of his “delusions” would be futile, that they are as real to him as asphalt or elm trees are to me. The membrane between reality and dreams was one of the tissues rearranged in his brain. Though Howard’s wit, subtlety, intelligence, and vocabulary remained intact, his version of events and his apprehension of the world have changed dramatically. I have given up telling him that he was not the Ivory Soap baby.

  In the same way, to those who see, in Chief Lelooska’s words, “with Indian eyes,” realities about Bigfoot (and many other entities) are relative. In a generous extension of this logic one might propose that to the readers of tabloids the stories are real. Perhaps they are the visionaries among us, the ones who are able to see past our heritage of Western objectivity into the rich realms of alternative realities. After all, some of the boatless people’s narratives have all the imaginative flair and color of the wilder aboriginal myths. But I am not that generous. These people need help. The difference is that while Indian traditions are held in common by entire clans or tribes and are told with a mixture of respect and whimsy, these modern myths tend to be taken in dead earnest by particularly unconnected individuals. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is their very alienation that drives them into the arms of aliens.

  One person who heard of my interest in Bigfoot wrote, “I have been in contact with a starship commander and several specialists aboard his fleet for almost a year now. [They have told me that] Sasquatch has the ability to move from the 3rd dimension to the 4th, at will.” Bigfeet live in sovereign, matriarchal tribes, communicate through shamans, heal wounds instantly, channel, and travel through mental projection. “My frustration,” he concluded, “is knowing they exist, but being unable to assist them in protecting their habitat, since proof of where they live doesn’t exist. And if proof was available, the area would become, I fear . . . a shooting range.”

  Another correspondent predicted that I would have a close encounter based on the numerology of my name. “Your master numbers in all three names would cause a harmless resonance that the sasquatch crowd would recognize and respond to.” He went on, “If we are 3-D, they are around 5-D . . . About all a shotgun would do would pepper their aura field.” A third enthusiast announced that “the world is going through an incredible transitional period that has to do with God (not religion), ETs/UFOs + Bigfoot. Prepare for survival in the ’90s.” I’m sorry; these are not the words of shamans.

  The tabloidization of the world seems no different from the general spread of dross in the mass culture today. Examples abound: television almost in toto. Walmarts and malls instead of vital town centers. Vocabulary’s decline. Bestseller lists. Lite music, food, and beer—oxymorons all. And architecture: I recently saw a historic photograph of a magnificent hotel, the Louvre, that once stood in Astoria, Oregon. On its site now stands a McDonald’s. The barbarians are not at the gates; they’re well inside.

  Bigfoot has not escaped the march of mediocrity and tacky commercialization. As the late primatologist John Napier wrote in his important book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, “Bigfoot in some quarters of North America has become Big Business, a commodity to be exploited to the full. It can no longer be considered simply as a natural phenomenon that can be studied with the techniques of a naturalist; the entrepreneurs have moved in and folklore has become fakelore.” And that was in 1973. Since then the Oregon Tourism Division has featured a frame from the Patterson-Gimlin film on a flier labeled “Oregon Scavenger Hunt Item #17 (a direct-mail piece with gratuitous shock-value photo of Bigfoot).”

  A silly-looking Harrison Bigfoot was the official mascot of the Washington State Centennial, and the Seattle Sonics have another version. The name “Bigfoot” denotes pizzas, monster trucks, and innumerable campgrounds and motels. Not only Willow Creek in California but also Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia and Carson, Mount Baker, and Elma in Washington hold annual Bigfoot revels. These are all in good fun. But the footraces with big plywood feet, the clowns in gorilla suits, and the endless array of Sasquatch foodstuffs and doodads encourage little real respect for a venerable myth.

  The Northwest Indians, with their masks, totems, and tales, might be said to have commercialized Sasquatch first. Dzonoqua was sometimes involved in the breaking of a copper, one of the most important potlatch transactions. But as Lelooska explained it to me, Dzonoqua was a figure that impinged on many aspects of life besides potlatch—wealth, power, the chieftancy, forest mysteries, and so on. There is no such depth to the contemporary exploitation of Bigfoot.

  Bigfoot became a staple of the scandal sheets when the Patterson-Gimlin film called attention to a possible monster in our midst, then left us wondering. It was inevitable. So was the movie Harry and the Hendersons, which was actually not an unsympathetic treatment. In the end we must ask, has popular culture devalued a great myth or given it new life? I think I know how Dzonoqua and the Green Man would vote.

  But there are other, brighter signs that a respect for the old traditions might not be dead. Among the many sensational treatments of Bigfoot can be found a number of titles that treat the subject intelligently, with subtle humor and suitable respect, and with care for both the language and the importance of myth. Notable among these is David George Gordon’s Field Guide to Sasquatch, published by Sasquatch Books of Seattle.

  The small shelf of Bigfoot fiction is largely filled with rustic murder mysteries and salacious tales somehow in
volving Sasquatch as malefactor or local color. But lately several writers of stature have turned their attention to the big fellow. Scott Russell Sanders’s Bad Man Ballad is the best of the Bigfoot novels I’ve seen. In his short stories “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” and “I Am Bigfoot,” in The News of the World, Ron Carlson plays off the urban legend of predatory Bigfoot to probe restlessness from both sides of a broken equation. In Bigfoot Dreams novelist Francine Prose describes a trash journalist who identifies with the Bigfoot of her crazy stories. Both authors play off the tabloids and come to opposite but equally desperate conclusions. Carlson’s bereft character says, “Believe it. Everything. Everything you read. Everything you hear . . . Believe the small hairs on the back of your neck. Believe all of history, and every version of history, and all the predictions for the future . . . Everything has happened. Everything is possible . . . I gotta believe it.” To Prose’s Vera it’s all false hopes. “Your dead ones aren’t really dead. Cucumber slices will cure your arthritis. Elvis is alive and well on Mars. Your alien lover is at this very moment winging toward you via UFO. It’s not true, Vera thinks. None of it.”

  Some distinguished essayists have also written memorably on manlike monsters. Doris Lessing’s piece “The Thoughts of a Near-Human” is labeled fiction by the Partisan Review. It is an account of a Yeti distanced from its own kind through contact with humans, then driven to contemplate suicide by captors who fit it with a transmitter before releasing it. Told from the animal’s viewpoint, the story has all the moral authority of the writer’s powerful essays. In The Klamath Knot, a splendid exploration of evolution myths in southwest Oregon, David Rains Wallace treats forest giants in a manner worthy of their lineage. “The giants who left their tracks near Bluff Creek are eloquent mythic expressions of evolutionary uncertainty,” he writes. “Are they competitive lords of the snow forest? Cooperative children of the ancestral forest? Are they human? Are they alive?” And Washington writer Wenonah Sharpe, in “Some Thoughts on Sasquatch Watching,” speaks of our good fortune in having “an indigenous wraith, a shadow still dancing on the cave wall, a sylvan deity not yet vanquished by the inexorable march of science and universal education.”