At least one fine Bigfoot poem has emerged. In her “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids,” Margaret Atwood wrote: “Sasquatch: / A wound has been made in me, / a hole opens in my green flesh; / I see that I can be broken . . . to murder my pines, my cedars / is to murder me.” Atwood, like Lessing, treats Bigfoot as a vessel of alienation and profligacy. Wendell Berry’s “To the Unseeable Animal” can be read as a love song to the mystery of the beast beyond.
Sculptor Richard Cook has found the animal’s humor. Cook describes himself as a practitioner of Beringerology, the study (and manufacture) of fake fossils, named for Dr. Johann Beringer, the victim of a notorious paleontological hoax. But he creates his pieces to delight, not to fool anyone. Working in clay from the Whiskey Creek beds next to his cabin near Port Angeles, Washington, Cook creates a wonderful array of extinct animals both hilarious and ingenious. These he gives wildly punning English and scientific names such as the Culture Vulture (Omniverons) and the antlered Sconcetron (Candelabraferens), a forerunner of Rudolph. Cook has done two species of humanoid giants: Big Foot (Megalopodus), whose black skull bears great tusks; and Quelbitrax (Flagrantedelicto), “a specialized sasquatchian cousin,” whose teeth are like barbed spearpoints. “They must have made it a formidable biter,” writes Cook, “though I should think it would have had a hell of a time disengaging afterward.” Maybe that’s why it’s extinct.
A new and supple Bigfoot is emerging in music as well, in the lyrics of several singer-songwriters in Sasquatch country. The Dorsches, a musical family from Aberdeen, south of Washington’s giant-rich Olympic Mountains, have recorded a lovely song called “Footsteps in the Wind.” It tells the story of a young girl finding a huge track by the river and wondering, “Could Bigfoot have been here, or am I imagining he’s near / Oh, I wonder if he’s watching me, or if he might appear / Think I hear / Your footsteps in the wind.” In the haunting harmonics of the repeated refrain, you feel the immanence of something large, important, and good.
J. W. Sparrow is a folksinger who lives in the Bigfoot territory of Mount Rainier’s foothills. His song “The Man in the Mirror” tells of “a man up on the mountain, with his hair down to his knees,” who is “standing tall for all of us who say that we still care / about this blue shining jewel we all share / A gentle voice whispering, ‘Yes, compared to what,’ / a message concerning the paradise we’ve got.” Sparrow’s refrain too is a compelling one: “It’s the man in the mirror, the last mystery / The one you often hear about but very seldom see.”
It is “the man in the mirror” who is the problem here, and if we go a little green around the gills at the realization, it will only heighten the effect. We must cleave to the Green Man, we must grasp the Goddess; however, we try to avoid them. Someday we will discover interdependency, or else. The recovery of respect for “a creature that would understand forests in ways we cannot,” in Wallace’s words, will only hasten the day we take responsibility for our own footprint on the land.
In the meantime, what are curious people to think? Phil Bunton, editorial director of the Globe Communications tabloids, told the Los Angeles Times, “Our readers want to believe this stuff. The world is very boring.”
The credulous public, caught between the cynical tabloids and the skeptical scientists, are unable to use the archetype’s power to enrich their lives. Is there a third way to regard Bigfoot with a truly open mind—realizing that its flesh-and-blood existence among the deer and the ravens is an open question and at the same time that it clearly exists in the hearts and minds of many?
Dr. John Mack, Pulitzer Prize–winning professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes that UFO abductees should be taken seriously. If he’s right, aliens may one day graduate to the New York Times. Our methods of empirical observation need to be stretched, he says, to appreciate the experiences his patients have related to him. Echoing Lelooska, Mack says we have so constricted our consciousness that we cannot experience what the Indians call the spirit world. Carl Sagan regards the public credulity about aliens and other tabloid-type tales as evidence of widespread scientific ignorance. Considering the popular denial of evolutionary biology, I tend to agree. Unlike my correspondent who tells me that aliens are helping Sasquatch colonize prefab habitats in space (“they leave with great reluctance. After all, Earth is their home”), I don’t believe that Bigfoot has the remotest connection to UFOs. But maybe both phenomena should cause us to reexamine how we judge the testimony of the universe.
For the world is not boring. The Green Man is coming back and will lift the scales from our blindered eyes. And who knows? Maybe this time he will take the face of Bigfoot, and the Goddess will don Dzonoqua’s mask.
Will we rescue the myth from the gutter, restoring its green shimmer, its beauty, power, and potential? If we do, the habitat of the giant will truly become our own. Until then we will have to be content to meet Bigfoot at the supermarket checkout stands. For there he will surely be found, hanging out with the King.
13
One Hundred Hours of Solitude
One returns from solitude laden with the gifts of circumstance.
—Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
If the ancient people of Indian Heaven had worn NBA-sized moccasins, this could have been one of their footprints.
On the face of a big flat rock jutting into Deep Lake, right where I stood, was a remarkably footlike impression. When I placed my wet foot inside the print, it looked as if a little boy had stepped in his big brother’s track. I sat beside it, dangling my legs over the rock’s edge and trying to decide what to make of the artifact. I’d seen much less impressive marks claimed as Bigfoot tracks. I was confronting something that I had to admit might represent an upright ape who, long before, had walked where I was now walking.
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When the day came to hike into the Indian Heaven Wilderness, I awoke to see cottonwoods and firs overhead, five gray jays at breakfast, a day cool with high, heavy broken clouds. I devoutly hoped that rain would hold off until I was well up onto the plateau, for on this leg of the journey weather would make all the difference in the world. I waxed my boots to be ready for the worst and departed in the forenoon with the skies clearing, the temperature pleasant.
After registering at the wilderness boundary, I headed up the steep Cultus Lake Trail. I saw lots of boot tracks, but there would be no cycles, hooray! The troughs were wide, made by packhorses, and walkable. Rounding a hairpin switchback on the way to the top of the world, I emerged into an opening that seemed a doorstep for Mounts Adams and Rainier. In full sun the two snowy lumps, their valleys cloud-wrapped, rose like improbable painted backdrops in a low-budget version of Paradise Lost. Now the sky was clear, the air in the seventies, my fresh supply of Gray’s River water more than welcome.
By one measure you have entered the wilderness when you’ve left your daily life behind. My field notes show I wasn’t there yet: observations like “an anglewing skirts the edge, a pika calls from rocks below; Cultus Creek mutters under the breeze in the firs” alternate with jots like “ASK THEA: Dory’s address? coffee? coffee cup w/specs!!? Howard & Caitlin’s full names & address? + notch in belt? flea bath for Bokis? letter to KB?” Putting away my notebook, I resolved to put away the world as well, so that I could begin to really see the earth.
Soft fungi lined the trailside—puffballs, flocculated chanterelles, orange-peel Peziza—but they failed to soften the rocky path, which kept climbing for a long couple of miles. A white inchworm moth flew to a patchy fir trunk, chancing in its gyre to land on the right color patch. A Douglas squirrel, dismantling fragrant pink and blue fir cones for its swelling midden, darted up the backside of the same tree.
Then the first Indian Heaven meadows appeared, and I entered the palette of reds for which the tableland is famous. A little pond was a mirror framed in reds, pinks, yellows, oranges, greens, and the blues of berries and noble fi
rs. A redtail did several silent doughnuts in the still water and overhead as well. Stalks of a long emergent grass, fringing the mere, lay limp against its limpid surface. If I’d gone no farther, I would have forever understood the enchantment of Indian Heaven.
Raven’s coarse trill broke my silent arrival at Cultus Lake. A low barking in the east was likely another dialect of the multilingual corvid. When I found my campsite on the south side, facing Bird Mountain, the gray jays were already there. I knew it was my campsite because two contrails had crossed overhead, marking the spot with a big X. On a fairly level spot by a berry patch, away from the modest fire pit, I set up the camp that would be home for several days. Dragonflies hawked the clearing in the slanted sun as wrens inspected the action and golden-crowned sparrows teased a young Cooper’s hawk.
Now came the challenge of the food cache. It isn’t easy to suspend comestibles out of reach of scavenging bruins in the subalpine, where all the trees are small and limber. But unlike Juniper Ridge, where I’d given up and (against all advice) taken my pack into my tent, here there were trees worth trying. I tied the cord as high as I could between two firs, one lashed to another for rigidity, and pulled it taut. Lots of effort to little effect. By sunset, after I had struggled with ropes and bags for an hour or two, my cache hung about six feet off the ground: a good gift height for bears.
I managed to filter a quart of water or so from the shallow, silty lake. As I began to prepare dinner, the Cooper’s hawk was attempting to do the same. Investigating a thrash and a flutter, I found the cinnamon-breasted accipiter going after a small bird in a fir bough. The songbird flew; the hawk flew and twice missed. Between sallies it sat on bare limbs in full view, its head rotating left, right, up, down, looking for the vagrant prey. When the sparrow launched, the hawk followed but failed to make contact. It made an irritated pass at a chickaree issuing rapid, single-note alarm calls nearby; the squirrel freaked and lost its voice. In the fading light I could see the hawk’s yellow legs, chartreuse bill with black tip, striped breast, banded tail, gray-brown mantle, white eyebrow, and dark eyes; what I couldn’t see but easily imagined was its frustration and hunger. Finally the raptor flew off, having paid me no mind—unlike the noisy, nosy squirrel and the raven, who passed over with voluble comment.
Before it got too dusky I searched the forest margin for a granny stick, or clothesline pole, to bolster the hangline. The downed trunks and branches were all too heavy or short, but they furnished a plenitude of firewood. In the wood edge by the meadow, pasty white warts freckled the scarlet caps of fly agarics like clouds in a lurid sunset. The real sky was clear, cooling into mauve. I returned to camp, kindled a fire, and prepared my couscous. Before bed I walked to the upper meadow and saw the quarter-moon through mist and pines before it set. Polaris came out tentatively over Cultus Lake as I pulled into my tent and lighted my candle lantern. Bark-picking birds were still at work after dark. After the usual screaming low flight of fighter jets about eight thirty, pure mountain silence. I was twenty-four hours into solitude.
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Cold, clear, up at eight. Many a naturalist would be shocked, but for me that’s an early start. I had coffee and granola bars, conserving my H2O. I didn’t think fluids were really an issue in this lake district, but the aborting of my earlier trek on Juniper Ridge was still too fresh in mind to let me squander water. I walked around my own lake and across to the next, just a quarter mile to the northeast. Deep Lake shone the blue-green of an ocean bay in summer. Far out from shore a flock of ten ducks stippled the surface, all in the same brown eclipse or female plumage, maybe shovelers or mallards.
I intended to join the ducks, but first I shit in the woods. That’s something “nature writers” seldom write about, but it occupies a portion of every day in the out of doors and requires close attention to your surroundings. I was glad to see Ten Speed Press’s publication of How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer. It’s astonishing how few people are adept at it and how few it takes to spoil (and actually pollute) a wild area.
During the time of enforced contemplation, I speculated on scat calling cards and the species who leave them. We are among the few animals that make an active effort to hide our feces. Many leave them purposefully to advertise their presence in the territory to potential mates or rivals. Exploring animals, as any dog-walker knows, eagerly seek and sniff the signs of others. Cats scratch, but they seldom bury their poop very effectively. As in so many matters, we do the opposite—we urgently avoid the wastes of our own kind. Those who mark the territory are seen as slobs, not interesting interlopers.
So what does Bigfoot do? When Sasquatch goes apeshit, does it hide the evidence as careful people do? Or, like some bad-mannered zoo baboon or human, does it scatter its crap around the countryside at will? If this is a beast that perceives its plight, caution would argue for concealment rather than advertisement. Some of the monster-hunters claim to have found Bigfoot droppings, massive mounds of excrement somewhere between human turds and bear heaps, usually less unformed than a cow pie. Bigfoot newsletters print photographs of lumps and reports of “specimens” stored at this or that laboratory or in someone’s freezer. But coprolite researchers have not yet made a Bigfoot breakthrough.
There is an alternative to advertisement and concealment. I remember the mild shock I felt when I visited the Cincinnati Zoo a few years ago and saw the coprophagous behavior of the gorillas. I thought it must be a manifestation of zoo neurosis, like a fox pacing back and forth in the same interminable, stylized route. But Dian Fossey set me straight in Gorillas in the Mist:
All age and sex classes of gorillas have been observed eating their own dung and, to a lesser extent, that of other gorillas. The animals simply shift their buttocks slightly to catch the dung lobe in one hand before it contacts the earth. They then bite into the lobe and while chewing smack their lips with apparent relish. The eating of excrement occurs among most vertebrates, including humans, who have certain nutritional deficiencies. Among gorillas coprophagy is thought to have possible dietary functions because it may allow vitamins, particularly B12 synthesized in the hind gut, to be assimilated in the foregut. Since the activity is usually observed during periods of cold wet weather, I am inclined to relate the “meals” to instant warmed TV dinners!
In Bigfoot’s case this behavior could be doubly adaptive, doing away with the evidence of its presence while recycling valuable nutrients. Of course, something has to come out in the end. But Bigfoot (who doesn’t bother with toilet paper) must be better at hiding its scat than at least half the humans, judging from many a feculent roadside pullout and campsite.
Deep Lake was hemmed by a fir-and-huckleberry frieze, with Mount Adams rearing above the eastern shore. Emergent grass lay prostrate on the surface like threshed rice on a paddy, but this was no cultivated scene. Human sign was present in the eroded paths around the shore. Some of the erosion, like the racecourse to the south and the peeled cedars here and there in the national forest, might go back to the Indians. But most of the paths were worn by recent decades of use by hikers, riders, fishers, hunters, berry pickers, and beauty lovers. I was just the latest of these, but for now I had it to myself.
The soft mud of the beach bore signs of deer, big and little; dog, coyote, and horse; marten and bobcat; and an array of birds. I was thinking about how obvious a Bigfoot track would be among these lesser imprints when I came to the rock overhanging the water and spotted the foot-shaped impression stamped into the very stone.
The depression in the rock could have been an erosional formation, an old carving, or modern vandalism. But the stone was probably lithified ash rather than cooled lava (basalt), so it might represent a fossil Indian or Bigfoot print. It was thirteen inches long by about five at the “instep.” The indentation was slanted inward, so the outer edge ran out, leaving no clear indication of width. I could imagine a sharp heel impression and a reasonable indication of the ball of a foot an
d a big toe. No other toe marks were evident, so if this was indeed a footprint, the foot had either been covered (as by a moccasin), or the detail had eroded away. I had not brought along my plaster of Paris from the camp, and I needed to obtain water and bathe. So I decided to study and cast the “track” later. If it had been here these hundreds of years, it could wait another day to be memorialized.
The surface of Deep was calm. Blue dragons hawked and rustled over the shores and shallows. Red crossbills swooped over, and the ducks circled the lake lazily. I hung awkwardly over rocks to fetch water until I found a perfect, butt-shaped perch like a tractor seat over deeper water. During the slow filtering process it occurred to me that this could be a Bigfoot butt print. I laughed at myself but ruled nothing out.
Bathing off the big rock, I recalled such a boulder jutting into Glacier Lake in Colorado. On childhood fishing trips it was one place we boys could dangle our lines where our jittery impatience wouldn’t spook all the fish in the lake. Because of latitude, five thousand feet of elevation in the Cascades equals ten in the Rockies, and Deep was as cold as Glacier. Cringingly I immersed crotch, kidneys, nipples, armpits, nape of the neck. My danglers withdrew, demonstrating both the adaptive value of genital shrinkage in a sperm-threatening medium and the effectiveness of cold showers. Clouds of silt boiled up around my feet like mushrooms of dust before a rolling front of TNT. How many lives I destroyed, how many Giardia cysts I stirred up, there was no knowing.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 20
