I heard a logging hooter in the near distance. Bob said it was a timber sale allowed under an agreement to get some logs flowing while the timber plan was being worked out, and that sometimes the owls respond to the whistle. But there is nothing for them there. If the timber plan fails to protect these woods in the long run, these owls will of course be gone, along with these trees and the mollusks and the rest of the old-growth specialists. The people in Randle would be more cheerful—until these woods too were gone.
When Bob whistled and the owls whistled back, I listened carefully. The whistles and barks were much softer than what I had heard, and tended to be ascending rather then descending. But when the mother whistled to one of her young (it had to respond in kind before she would deliver the mouse), her querulous call carried something of the tension and the tenor of the Elk Pass sounds. Bob said the mother has a much louder and sharper alarm call, but he did not want to elicit it because of a worrisome redtail hawk in the area. He said that call is often given at night in the autumn when an interloper gives cause for alarm. But either sex can give the agitated whistle at any time of day or night and at any time of year.
I had heard reports of spotted owls flying at people and other objects, and I asked our guide about this. He said a habituated owl (the sort that biologists condition to pop for a mouse at the appearance of any senator or reporter), which these owls were not, once struck his mouse tube. One Forest Service district biologist who laughed off the reports was swooped on, and when he fled, he fell and broke his ankle. Another companion was knocked flat, Bob said. And as he was telling me this, the male owl flew directly at my head from behind, swerving at the last moment.
Back in the truck, Pearson said that barred owls also whistle and swoop and are more aggressive. The barred owl is a generalist that has spread from the East and is competing with its relative, the much pickier spotted owl. Barred owls will dive while giving the loud, raspy, descending last part of their “Who cooks for you, who cooks for y’allll?” call. Bob has been swooped on by a barred owl, and it freaked him so that he split, leaving his coffee cup on top of his car—even though he knew who the swooper was and knew it wasn’t likely to hurt him.
That confession made me feel better about my behavior at Elk Pass. It also reminded me of my grandfather’s story of being swooped on by a “hoot owl” nearly a hundred years ago in Kentucky. I always assumed it was a great horned, but maybe it was a barred. Far from merely striking him, the owl hooked its talons into his shoulders and held on as GrandPop ran, yelping. I had seen the scars left by that experience. So maybe Bob was wise to drive off, and maybe it was just as well that I stayed in my car and put the pedal to the metal when the roof was rapped.
Earlier I suggested that the discovery of Bigfoot would make the spotted owl’s impact on forest planning look mild. Wouldn’t it be rich if it turned out that the spotted owl accounts for many of the sounds that Indians and whites have long reported as giants’ whistles? I think of Tah-Tah-Klé-ah, the Owl Woman Monster, and realize that the connection is not new.
In fact, I have seen it happen myself. At the Harrison Hot Springs gathering, a tall, hunky young man, very full of himself, announced that he had the definitive recording of Bigfoot. He’d been camped on an island, and came back with sounds that he implied would put all the old guys’ efforts to shame. “Play it,” someone shouted, so he did. Eerie shrieks and whistles, then quite clearly, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for ya’aaaallll!” René Dahinden, who knew a classic barred owl call when he heard it, snorted loudly. I, who know it too, just chuckled to myself. The crestfallen wannabe has not turned up since.
At any rate, after going out with Bob Pearson to call and hear and see the small, beautiful birds at the center of the logging tempest, I am willing to admit that my encounter might well have been with Strix instead of Homo nocturnus or any other bipedal ape. That those sharp, piercing whistles were born of a feathered throat instead of a furred one. That had I flashed my light on the hillside where the whistles arose, the eyes it found would have been round and black instead of almond-shaped with a red-reflective tapetum. That the thud on the roof of my car was a body blow from a self-propelled missile instead of a twisted twig of wild cherry hurled by a thickly muscled arm. All this seems highly possible, if not probable.
But what about the tracks? No owl made them. With due respect to my favorite field companion, no elk made them either. And if it was a megapodal hunter after a grouse or a deer, he must have been wearing Birkenstocks or moccasins, because those looked like no boot prints I’d ever seen.
Fred Bradshaw, a former Grays Harbor policeman who claims two dramatic Bigfoot sightings, recently found a line of tracks on pumice in Oregon with similar proportions to those I saw. To him the prints he saw meant that Sasquatch had likely been there. What did the Elk Pass depressions say to me once I’d had time to think about them? Many writers before me have concluded that either Bigfoot walks or there has long been a secret track-faking conspiracy so sophisticated and complex as to make most other conspiracies look as simple as pie. “My” tracks weren’t the best, but they had impressed the expert, Grover Krantz. Just how impressed was I?
I had gone into this investigation hoping to keep an open mind on the subject of Bigfoot. To me, having a truly open mind is a rare state, easier to define by its opposites. One thing it does not mean is belief; faith is the opposite of an open mind. Another condition that has nothing to do with open-mindedness is gullibility or credulousness, which are just forms of faith-hunger. Coming from the other direction, I can further define the term by stating that it also opposes the hard head and the set jaw. It refracts impressions rather than reflecting them. An open mind is a window, not a mirror. Now we’re getting closer.
On the dark and stormy divide between what you want and what you get, there strides a slippery essence. I call it power, and a kind of freedom: the power to change your mind, the freedom to grow. I think this essence is the source of the strength the Kwakiutl Hamatsa sought when he went into the woods to contact the wild ones. John Napier called it “entering the Goblin Universe,” and we can still do it.
Twice more I returned to Elk Pass. The first time the stale snow of spring on the Boundary Trail held big melted tracks that honestly could have been anything to a receptive mind. The pumice slope was rain-harrowed and elk-gouged. The second time was by moonlight in summer. I took off my clothes and walked nude for half a mile or so, the white pumice path a soft and softly lit beckoning through the high, hairy firs. When I returned, my clothes were where I’d left them. I whistled and nothing whistled back; there was one loud, weird noise off toward Pinto Rock, and that was it. The tracks in the pumice were my own.
“What a good poem inevitably hears, sees, and speaks,” wrote poet Jane Hirshfield, “is that point where perceived and perceiver join, where inner and outer worlds meet.” Then my walk in the nude was a poem, and a good one. I didn’t hear Bigfoot or see it; I was Bigfoot. The pumice and the moonlight met in me, and through me Bigfoot gave voice.
An open mind neither rejects nor limits itself to the scientific method but considers it among the other tools for palping the universe. It doubts everything and accepts everyone. It is completely skeptical and wholly receptive, seldom wishy-washy but often unsettled. The open mind is not afraid to be made up, then, like a bed, to be thrashed, stripped, and made fresh all over again. Convictions? The open mind has them. But like everything else, convictions are liable to amendment.
The possessor of this mythic mind has the ability to slither hither and thither, to poke and prod and dodge. This is the only way to take the world, and it is an ideal almost never realized.
The proud owner of a closed mind would never have interpreted my clues as revealing anything like a Bigfoot, especially if each clue were taken separately on its own merits. But the inmate of the sort of vacuum-packed oatmeal tub of a mind that often passes for open when actually flaccid
can spot a Bigfoot anywhere: in elk tracks, in snow tracks, in my tracks; in a pale and naked hulk moving gingerly through a moonlight mile, barefoot.
What I want is a state of brain aloof from arrogant dismissiveness, free from superstition, and rich in question. That seems to me the only way of approaching Bigfoot that would be acceptable to the subject—and the only way to be a naturalist. When I showed Grover Krantz my plaster cast from Indian Heaven, he said he doubted it had anything to do with a foot. “But the important thing is,” he said, “you saw it.”
According to Bergen Evans, author of The Natural History of Nonsense, anyone “who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.” To see is to be open, to take it all in without being taken in, to be aware of the sweet possibilities of the world. What more could you want? How much more fun than being the willing slave of instant opinion, pro or con, closing the door from either direction. “Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think,” wrote Evans. This is the kind of mind I wanted to bring to Bigfoot: free, and open.
Weird whistles, a bump in the night, and a set of tracks at Elk Pass brought me these gifts of happenstance: a lever to keep my biologist’s brain propped open on a topic that begs for closure; a rare glimpse of my own myth; and the knowledge of what it is to be among the charmed or cursed ones who have encountered something in the night.
Epilogue
Monsters in the Mist
Are we or are we not simians? It is no use for any man to think anything else out until he has decided first of all where he stands on that question. It is not only in love affairs: let us lay all that aside for the moment. It is in ethics, economics, art, education, philosophy, what-not. If we are fallen angels, we should go this road: if we are super-apes, that.
—Clarence Day, This Simian World
Gorilla, girilla, gorilla! Gorilla, girilla—see the beautiful girl turn into a gorilla, right before your eyes! Gorilla, girilla, gorilla!” The barker repeated his weird incantation as he drifted through the crowd, winding down the midway and back again to the tent with a garish poster of a part-woman, part-ape in front. “Girilla, gorilla, girilla!”
I was visiting my former wife JoAnne in southern Florida, where she was a ranger-naturalist in the Everglades. I was living in New Haven, Connecticut, at the time. I’d been sick for weeks, but the March sun and the birds and butterflies of Shark Alley soon put me back on my feet. We’d gone with friends of JoAnne’s to see a carnival that was limbering up before heading north with the spring. We considered paying the buck to see the gorilla girl but laughed it off. I’ve always regretted that decision. Though repelled by its premise, I was also fascinated. I wanted to see how they would make a human become an ape before my very eyes.
Recently, on National Public Radio, I heard it again: “Gorilla, girilla, gorilla.” Steeped in Bigfoot and all things anthropoid, I listened up automatically. The commentator was telling about seeing the same carnival act I had passed up some twenty years before. He described the amazing metamorphosis in the dim light, as the young woman faded out and the hairy ape emerged. Later, walking between the tents, he stumbled on a small woman and a strapping lad sharing a break. The sideshow huckster shooed him away, but the illusion was gone. The girl was not the gorilla.
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What makes a silly freak show perennially compelling and profitable is certainly not the visual effects, no doubt clever but bush league in this day of Crichton and Spielberg. Nor is it the sexual subtext, no more subtle here than it was in King Kong (for what is the subsuming of a nubile woman by a hairy ape meant to convey, like the famous scene on the side of the Empire State Building, if not a kind of ravishment?). No, it is the merging of our kind with another kind too close for comfort that draws in the gawkers year after year.
This too is the fascination of Bigfoot—the not-quite-us of it. As I found again and again in my visits with Bigfooters, no question enthralled and confused them as much as the animal’s possible humanity. Those who advocate killing one define Bigfoot as nonhuman and not very intelligent, while those who venerate it almost as a green god tend to feel that Bigfoot blends the best of humanity with more desirable wild traits. In Skamania County it is the coroner’s call whether any apelike animals that do get shot shall be deemed human. Until that melancholy scene occurs, maybe a look at our previous struggles in finding the obscure line of demarcation can help us envision what we and Bigfoot may be vis-à-vis each other.
Ever since Darwin, the darkest divide has been the one between ourselves and our ancestors, or our surviving siblings. However we hang the known fossil and living species on the anthropoid bush, no one can avoid seeing the connections but those who persist in exclusive creation myths. To Darwin the exact point of departure mattered much less than the process. “In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used. But this is a matter of very little importance.” And so it should be. (Except, perhaps, in Skamania County.) But not everyone agrees.
Darwin’s descendants have since provided the fossil evidence and Mendel’s the genetic, to end any residual doubt about our origins. The remaining questions concern order of species differentiation, rate of evolution, breakpoints, and the faces of the absent personnel.
The outline is clear. But familiarity with the story has not made us uniformly comfortable with our company in the fossil record.
We stern Europeans have always indulged vicious attitudes toward primates other than ourselves, including other humans. It was not unusual for races considered strange (by the dominant culture) to be exhibited, enslaved, exterminated, even collected. Ota Benga was an African pygmy taken from the Congo by missionary Samuel Phillips Verner and displayed next to Geronimo at the St. Louis World’s Fair. In 1906 he became a caged exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. The British Museum of Natural History acquired the skins of Australian aboriginals, and a steatopygous female from the African Kalahari became a Smithsonian specimen. Linnaeus optimistically named us Homo sapiens—“alike and wise”—and Darwin argued for our common species identity, but witless acts of supremacist barbarism continued.
While Europeans routinely considered black people to be a different species, native peoples have often failed to differentiate between themselves and other primates. Some pygmies, one biologist with African experience told me, do not consider themselves fundamentally different from chimpanzees. Another told me of Borneans who considered orangutans to be people who chose not to speak so as not to have to deal with the Dutch tax collectors. And the !Kung San of the Kalahari call baboons “the people who sit on their heels.”
Western attitudes toward monkeys and apes have seldom been so collegial, but there have been exceptions. British journalist Richard Boston wrote in a 1977 Guardian column about Lord Monboddo, an eighteenth-century learned eccentric “who believed that orang-utans belong to the human race. This is a very likeable idea. The only orang-utans I have seen were in Chester Zoo. They were delightful, gentle, graceful creatures and far more human than most of the people who regularly make the front-page headlines.” Boston went on to describe a well-known incident that took place when a French ship went aground off Hartlepool, England, during the Napoleonic War. The only survivor was the ship’s mascot, a monkey. “Its stature, grimaces, and jabbering caused it to be taken for a French spy and hanged.”
We have needed no such excuses to torture and execute vast numbers of primates in the name of medical research. Even if we accept that animal rightists sometimes become terrorists and that much human good has come from research, most thinking people abhor the excesses of the laboratory. The public disgust with gratuitous research using primates (and other animals) can be gauged by skimming any issue of the AV Magazine, a venerable and respected
antivivisection journal far removed from the firebombs of some animal rightists.
“We now have sufficient information about the capacities of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans to make it clear that the moral boundary between us and them is indefensible,” AV quotes Peter Singer. The Australian professor of bioethics, supported by people as diverse as primatologist Jane Goodall and author Douglas Adams, has launched The Great Ape Project to eliminate the use of these animals in research and entertainment.
But respect for even the higher primates is far from uniform. As I began writing this chapter I was listening to A Prairie Home Companion on American Public Radio, a variety program in which I ordinarily take great pleasure. One of the ersatz “sponsors” that week was “Oranga-Help,” promising freedom from housework to those who would “hire a primate,” which would cook, clean, and even pick off your fleas. Ironic? Perhaps. Harmless enough? Maybe. But the joke’s premise—that hiring minority human “help” has become non-PC so why not move one rung down—struck me wrong.
I remember one of my sister Susan’s first 45-rpm records: “Aba daba daba daba daba daba dab, said the chimpee to the monk; baba daba daba daba daba daba dab, said the monkey to the chimp.” Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter performed the duet in the 1951 MGM recording “Aba Daba Honeymoon.” I loved the tune, luckily, since Susan played it incessantly. At least the songwriter differentiated between monkeys and chimps, something that pop culture has rarely done, and the message was a sweet one: “Then the big baboon one night in June/he married them and very soon /they went upon their Aba Daba honeymoon.” Simians have seldom fared so well in human entertainment.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 37
