I took a seat in the back of the room. The first speaker, freelance zoologist John Bindernagel, related his own track finding and explained that his experience made others feel free to tell him of their own. He thinks that many wildlife agency employees privately believe but are afraid to speak up. Bonnie West of Elma agreed. “When I placed an ad calling for Sasquatch experiences,” she said, “I was overwhelmed . . . two to four calls came in daily.” Her booklet, Bigfoot! He’s Still Out There, relates the sightings of a sheriff, a policeman, some moms, loggers, and a woodsman named Tall Tom.
A spirited discussion followed about certain recorded calls and sounds well known among those present, which a morose fellow behind me said with no ifs, ands, or buts were the noises of hogs and coyotes. Another tape was played, and a gruff voice from a man in a plaid jacket in the back said, “We know where that tape came from—Ray Wallace!” “Trash, then,” someone responded.
The next talk, “The Muddy Whites of Their Eyes,” was given by Donald Hepworth, an Englishman who works in animal welfare in Canada. Traveling through Idaho, he watched a pair of young Bigfeet climb a bank. In the dusk he took them at first for “Negro children.” One was clearly female, he said, and someone asked if her breasts were pendulous and drooping, as in the Patterson film. “No problem there,” he replied. “They were really quite firm and perky.” When pressed, he said he was used to seeing women equestrians and noting their figures beneath all the riding gear.
The compact, crouching form of Danny Perez sprang up and doggedly attacked the Englishman’s report on several points. A tall, spare man who had been quiet pulled him off, saying that Mr. Hepworth sounded to him like a good observer and that either he was a liar or he had seen two Sasquatch where he said he had. Hepworth went on to suggest that Bigfoot was an underutilized natural resource, and he proposed Sasquatch safaris to employ displaced loggers. I was reflecting on how well this would go down in my depressed loggers’ town when Sally Newberry, who plans her own Bigfoot festival for the diminished timber village of Elma, announced that her travel agency intends to conduct expeditions into the Olympic Mountains to see sites of Bigfoot encounters.
As this was being digested, Perez barked back, demanding to know what experience Hepworth had with primates. Hepworth replied that as an SPCA inspector he had rescued a gorilla. “Its owner dined in the nude with the gorilla,” he said, “while watching roller derby.” Hepworth confiscated and nursed the gorilla, but it died, “probably killed with rat poison by the owner’s psychiatrist boyfriend.” So this is Sasquatch Daze, I thought, and settled in.
The bitchiness at Harrison Hot Springs is nothing new. When the International Society of Cryptozoology held a Bigfoot symposium in Pullman, Washington, in 1989, their newsletter described the results as “colorful.” But the High Country News headlined it “Bigfoot Researchers Go Ape,” and the Longview Daily News described it as a “big flop meeting.” The “colorful” incidents included death threats, an arrest, a night in jail, a restraining order, and a shadow meeting held in a motel room by the “flakes” (paranormal types), who were not allowed to raise their concerns at the meeting. An anthropologist was admitted after agreeing to keep mum about his earlier assertion that three Yetis had astrally projected themselves into his Milwaukee bedroom. Danny Perez ranted, Paul Freeman walked out in protest of all the backstabbing (and of his own dismissal by many as a hoaxer), and Grover Krantz struggled for decorum—all par for the course in a field described by ISC member Forrest Wood as “characterized by much bickering, feuding, and backbiting.”
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The ones I’d really come to hear were the man in the plaid jacket and the tall, spare man, John Green. At the break I managed to speak with Green, one of the famous Sasquatch-hunter residents of Harrison Hot Springs (the other is Bob Titmus), as well as its former mayor. Probably the most prolific writer on the subject and holder of the largest database, Green is considered Mr. Sasquatch by many. He was a journalist and publisher of the weekly Agassiz-Harrison Advance at the time of the 1950s goings-on in California. After getting in on Slick’s expeditions there and in B.C., and later following up on Patterson’s film, he continued his investigations in Canada.
John Green was holding forth on one of his favorite themes, the stubborn failure of science to address Sasquatch. “A serious university or wildlife agency research effort would be win-win, whether they found it or not,” he maintained. “Why doesn’t it occur? Because our science is based on either/or and cannot afford to take chances on a perception of ‘maybe.’” But, he said, scientists often do take that chance on other matters. Besides, the parsimonious interpretation—that the beast exists—is clearly better than the alternatives, such as a widespread and elaborate hoax.
Green doesn’t talk with the Indians much anymore, partly because they don’t distinguish between concrete and other realities. Nor does he talk with Peter Byrne or René Dahinden. He claims that Byrne is a con man who will say anything for financial support and use his information in any way that supports his preformed conclusions. Yet when Green described his hopes, they sounded curiously like Peter’s. By computerizing his many reported events (examples of which appear in Bigfoot: On the Track of Sasquatch and his other books), he hopes to enable others to see patterns and apply them to their disciplines. His interest in the where/when/why of the animal sounded much like Byrne’s geo-time patterns, and I wondered whether this might be a source of their enmity. He said he could not use Byrne’s data because he couldn’t count on their accuracy, though others have found Byrne to be very cautious in accepting reports, one of the traits that impressed the scientists at Yale.
As for Krantz, who was also at Harrison, Green said he was “gullible” but clearly liked him. Ray Wallace, he said, was either “bats or having a hell of a good time, telling anything and believing nothing.” The real Bigfoot hunter, according to John Green, was his neighbor Bob Titmus, who was too ill to attend. Titmus is an expert hunter and tracker with a splendid array of casts, all of which he has taken himself. (Much of Titmus’s fieldwork was carried out in the Kitimat district, not far from the scene of Billy Hall’s story of the Kitlope Bigfeet.) The primary splits in the field, Green said, are “kill/no kill” and “share/no share”; the latter is one of the sources of his celebrated schism with Dahinden. Green claimed that what René cares about is who finds Bigfoot, and it had better be him. So when Green shares data with people who haven’t “earned” the right, he angers Dahinden.
Green said, convincingly, that his circumstances were such that he could walk away from Bigfoot tomorrow without losing anything other than a matter of interest to him. He is not invested in personally making the discovery, at least not in the way that Dahinden (and many of the others) seem to be. I believed him. I had known this face—combed-back, wavy silver hair; deep expressive wrinkles around tired, intense eyes; and a hard, thin, but not unfriendly smile—in a younger form, looking out handsomely from the jackets of his books of the seventies. It impressed me as the face of a man with a certain rigidity, born of long embattlement, but also with an authenticity of spirit. If that spirit is not equally generous toward all of his former coworkers on the Slick expeditions, I suppose he has his reasons. Clearly the hero of this meeting, he is nonetheless exactly what he claims Sasquatch is not and will never be—deeply and obviously human, for better and for worse.
As John Green and I parted, the man in the plaid jacket strode past, sucking on a pipe and looking straight ahead. It was Dahinden, Green’s former field companion and close collaborator in the early studies. Shortly after my Guggenheim Fellowship was announced in 1989, I received an evening telephone call from a man with a strong, gruff European accent. Identifying himself as René Dahinden from Canada, he wanted to know if I was on to something and what my plans were. I assured him I did not plan to look directly for Sasquatch, and he soon rang off.
Having read about Dahinden, I felt I was looking straight at
him when I saw the movie Harry and the Hendersons, in which a dedicated and well-armed Bigfoot hunter is parodied. Now I was standing with René under a roofed kiosk, watching the Bigfoot races in the rain. A team comprising the good people of Elma, where rain is the usual state of affairs, was undeterred, but the group was having a hard time coordinating the four-person feet and was losing soundly to the Canadians.
Dahinden is a tough, compact man, stocky but trim. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt that showed arms still well muscled when he doffed his lumberjack plaid to look for matches, a navy T-shirt, and worn blue jeans. He too had gone gray since the Tom Slick expedition. Raised in Switzerland, René came to Canada in 1952 and heard about Sasquatch from a farmer who employed him. He has been on the track ever since. Many of his findings are colorfully reported in his book Sasquatch: The Search for North America’s Incredible Creature, written with Don Hunter. Unlike many others, he proclaims his skepticism. “How do I know it’s out there?” he asks. “I’ve never seen one.”
Dahinden, with his jowly red face and short hair that looks trimmed with lawn clippers, has an impish demeanor, but his talk at Harrison Hot Springs was salty and dismissive: “I’m telling some of the people in this room,” he said, “that they’d better learn about footprints, or they should just take their buckets and play in the sand.” He has no patience for hoaxers: “We’ll all get thrown in the same damn pot with morons and their damn fakes.” He is irritated with those who give credence to what he sees as obvious hoaxes, as he believes Green, Byrne, and Krantz did in certain Washington State cases at Bossburg and Walla Walla. “Why fuck around with that shit when you’ve got a big case somewhere else?” he spurted. He interviews everyone he can and bases his strong opinions on a combination of exhaustive knowledge and hunches that “hit him in the head.” A bombastic elder gnome, he is both respected and resented for saying exactly what he thinks.
René laughed and cursed over the peccadilloes of forty years spent on the spotty trail of what might be a wraith. He of course has opinions on all the others. As he has written, “The search for the Sasquatch is a bit like looking for the Holy Grail, except that it is performed by very unholy people.” He blames John Green for mistakes in interpreting the Patterson film, but he doesn’t let himself off either. After Patterson died, “We did so many dumb things.” This unleashed a bleak soliloquy on Dahinden’s interest in that storied strip. He acquired rights to the film, but having failed to ask the right questions at the time, he and Green had to rely on Gimlin’s word. A convoluted and vicious course landed him in a legal and financial morass involving Gimlin, Patterson’s widow, and many others. I got the feeling that Dahinden would much rather have spent the time searching for Bigfoot, but the grail was elusive and the film was there. It wouldn’t be the first time celluloid had stood in for flesh and blood.
Dahinden chuckled at the races, pipe smoke swirling through his gappy teeth, and pointed out an osprey overhead. His eyes lingered on the high valleys where he’d spent happier, younger days. When he came back, I asked him what finding Sasquatch would really mean to him. Puck spoke up through a wide smile: “I’d appoint myself Bigfoot’s attorney and spokesman. We’d go to the government and say Bigfoot was there first, according to the Indians. They drove him out, and now we’d demand they throw the fuckin’ Indians off the reserves so he could go home!”
He looked weathered by the rain that now came hard, but he was far from finished. As he said in his book, “I just have to keep on going—and I will do—until one of these creatures is found, dead or alive.”
Sasquatch Daze was winding down. The folks from Elma spoke better than they raced. Fred Bradshaw, a jovial retired police officer, recounted his impressive encounter with a huge upright creature in the southern Olympics whose odor burned his nose, “like feces and sweat.” Then Robert Milner gave accounts from the Rockies and played videotapes of interviews, though the one of a person who was under the influence of Psilocybe mushrooms at the time of his experience did not inspire confidence.
Scott Herriott, a professional stand-up comic, told of an encounter with a Bigfoot near Willow Creek. It had bioluminescent eyes “as red as the light on the camcorder” that didn’t get used because his companion was weeping with fear. They said, “Soka, soka,” to the beast, á la the famous Sasquatch abductee Albert Ostman, and I recalled Ray Wallace’s “Zuki, zuki,” which he said he had learned from a Yurok. Herriott finished with part of his comedy routine, which was received better than the straight part.
Next came the small, bearded Danny Perez, who wanted to know why hadn’t Herriott carried a gun and blasted the thing? Danny’s talk, though histrionic, was interesting, and his main premise—that we are conditioned to think that something that cannot exist does not exist—was apt. After saying a few rude things about his collaborators and avowing his lack of respect for credentials and books, he announced that he planned to publish a book of his own in 2000, “because I get a kick out of this.” He admitted that he is “blunt and nasty for accuracy’s sake,” and that he discounted certain Russian reports, partly because “my contact was an asshole.” Then he returned to his attack on poor Donald Hepworth questioning his reliability because he’d been married twice.
Grover Krantz took the podium to speak on the challenge of what to do if one actually had a specimen, qualifying his comments (and getting a laugh) by saying he might not be reliable since he’d been married four times. Even those who disagreed with the idea of taking a specimen were intrigued by the challenge of what to do with three hundred to five hundred pounds of rotting flesh that smells bad to start with and that represents a scientific H-bomb, a huge media honeypot, and a legal tar baby.
The group dispersed. All the worthy hunters went their ways to imagine their answers to the questions Grover had raised; to watch for red eyes and black shadows as they drove the rainy roads; to picture their canonization or enrichment or apotheosis or honorary degrees, should they be the lucky one; to suck on their resentments and beefs and blandishments like so many sore teeth. I settled into a long wet drive back to Gray’s River, where John Green, René Dahinden, and Grover Krantz were but names on a sagging bookshelf.
I found myself thinking about the taxonomy of Bigfoot hunters Krantz presents in Big Footprints. He recognizes five categories: hard-core hunters, novices, tranquilizers, recorders, and “professionals.”
The hard-core hunters are after a body or, more specifically, the first body, because as Krantz says, “There will be no second prize.” He discerns four main motives: fame, money, personal vindication, and scientific knowledge. Given the stakes, he feels it is entirely natural that little sharing and lots of prevarication go on. The novices, he believes, are naively bumbling along in the belief that they will find a Bigfoot and that the world will happily believe them. They either graduate to another category or drop out of the search. Tranquilizers want to capture an animal for proof and study but believe it should be done with tranquilizing darts instead of bullets. Krantz gives a reasoned argument of the impracticability of this approach, which is based, he says, on a dramatically false set of assumptions.
The recorders gather information and, not being hunters, usually distribute it freely. Their data vary widely in quality, and some really collect accounts the way others might collect stamps. They publish periodicals such as the Track Record, BigfooTimes, the Monthly Bigfoot Report, the Bigfoot Record, and dozens more. A few recorders become chroniclers, chief among them Green, Heuvelmans, and Sanderson; one, Perez, has produced a “respectable” bibliography. Krantz eliminates all those who mix UFO and paranormal information with hominoid reports as irrelevant or in the category of wackos and what he calls the “lunatic fringe.”
Grover’s final (and least favorite) group are those he calls “professionals.” These investigators, he maintains, “do not want the sasquatch to be proven to exist.” They have made a profession, or at least a reputation, based on the beast and
stand to lose their standing (and, for some, their livelihood) when it is found. This group can include the UFO/supernatural types if those themes further their purposes; in other words, they are calculating opportunists. Some “professionals” are simply out for any publicity, something real Sasquatch investigators try to avoid whenever possible unless it might advance the search.
Krantz’s nomenclature is a helpful accounting of the types and motives of these wraith-trackers, but it leaves out the academics and scientists who have taken a serious interest, such as himself. Since virtually all the other investigators scorn mysterious and monolithic “Science” for its uninterest, those scientists who pay attention deserve special note. Nor does Krantz’s list account for serious investigators who disavow the use of guns or darts.
Perhaps another subspecies should be recognized: those who root around for big apes in less likely (because they are open or densely populated) areas such as Iowa, South Dakota, and New Jersey—as some people do, nearly full-time. And an appendix might note the range of day jobs held by these night watchers: a physicist in New York, an environmental planner for a Washington tribe, a carpenter in Michigan, an Omaha English teacher, college students in Indiana, an electrician from Bremerton, a pycnogonist (sea-spider specialist) employed by a primate laboratory . . . there seem to be no demographic limits to the field except, apparently, gender. And there are more of them than anyone might suppose.
I have several times been approached by men mad for Sasquatch who in their driven fervor seem to fall outside all categories. One of these was Ken, who called me from the local store one autumn afternoon. I brought him home and talked Bigfoot with him over an ale. A big, paunchy man of fifty-two, he wore a plaid poly shirt open to sweaty black chest hair; his green poly pants shed threads where they’d been shortened. The Goodwill effect was warranted: a broke Texan, he’d just driven down from Alaska in an old truck with a U-Haul trailer attached with a homemade hitch. The expression on his creased, shaven face flickered between speculation, obsession, and exhaustion. He was tired of getting “Mexican wages” working construction. One good photograph, he said, and he’d have it made.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 24
