Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  There were indeed giants in former times. But perhaps group memory, hereditary tale, and myth all avoid the main issue. For as Mapinguari shows, there is another possibility: that there really are monsters among us.

  Wayne Suttles, in his paper “Sasquatch: The Testimony of Tradition,” says, “Any hypothesis that we human beings have an innate propensity to create mythical wild men or apemen might be plausible if there are no wild men or apemen in the real world. But if there are, then this hypothesis becomes unnecessary; beliefs in wild men everywhere might then be the result of direct observation plus that old anthropological explanation—diffusion.”

  By whatever route—diffusion from real but scattered events, atavistic experience of extinct beasts that we outlasted but once knew, or the spontaneous generation of gremlins and creeps wherever folklore grows, the monsters continue to arrive on our doorsteps, usually at night. We make them as much like ourselves as we dare, but we seem to require a certain distance—a green face, no head . . . huge feet.

  After apes became common knowledge, they remained monstrous only through hyperbole, such as fake jungle tales and King Kong. Since Fossey, the gorilla has lost its last shreds of monstrosity. In the film version of Gorillas in the Mist, with Sigourney Weaver playing Fossey and the gorillas playing themselves, Hollywood finally atoned for King Kong. The ape as monster was dead. Now Bigfoot has taken over the role. If and when its myth too becomes truth, we will have to look even further for a monster made after our own image. And as both faces of Rwanda have shown, there is only one place left to go. We are the last monster.

  −−

  When George Schaller left the high haunts of the mountain gorillas, he said that “all I could do was wish them luck and a free life of roaming about the mountains.” That is exactly what many would wish for Bigfoot. And again, in The Last Panda, concerning the long-standing question of the relationship between red and giant pandas, Schaller wrote, “Just as I hope that there is a yeti but that it will never be found, so I would like the panda to retain this minor mystery.”

  Schaller is not alone in wishing for the hairy giants’ continued anonymity. Many believers have told me they will be seriously disappointed if Bigfoot actually turns up. In a contracting world, they feel, what is left when mystery flees? Yeti proponent Edward Cronin, for one, wrote, in the Atlantic, “I would be deeply saddened to have it discovered. Every time man asserts his mastery over nature, he gains something in knowledge, but loses something in spirit.”

  Or as Peter Steinhart put it in Audubon, “The search for hidden animals is a skirmish in our continuing war against the death of wonder.” He worries that “if we ever find one of these creatures, a star will blink out in the heavens. Another mystery will die.” I understand the feeling, but I do not agree. As any entomologist knows, of mystery there is a plenitude. For me, wonder can never die, but habitat can. In itself, knowledge of the natural world can never be a sadness; it’s the outcome that counts, and we do not protect land for will-o’-the-wisps.

  −−

  I am continually asked by those who hear I am writing about Bigfoot, “So, tell me—do you believe?”

  I have never answered yes or no, and I don’t intend to now. Not because I am afraid to take a stand, but because it has never been my desire to finally decide. Bigfoot as beast, or Bigfoot as Rod Serling saw it, “an apparition walking in the landscape of our minds”? That’s up to others. I am content to have walked where Bigfoot walks for a season or two.

  Sasquatch walks, all right. Whether as a hank of hair and a hunk of bone or a boon companion in our hearts is something we may never know. And it might not matter. When E. O. Wilson met Kanzi, he was unnerved by how much the encounter with a bonobo felt like meeting a two-year-old child. “I had to ask myself,” he wrote in Biophilia, “was this really an animal?”

  It is time for us to see, as Darwin saw, that the point of separation between man and not-man has no fixed place and “is a matter of very little importance.” It is time for us to say, as Thoreau said, “We are conscious of an animal in us.”

  Maybe now, more than ever, the dark divide between the monsters in our minds and the monsters in our midst is the shadowland we walk together, hand in hand with Bigfoot.

  Back to the Dark Divide: 2017

  “Sasquatch, in his full-frontal wonderness!”

  —student, Portland State University

  The call came from southern California. “Dr. Pyle,” said a male voice, “this is Kurando, at the Robin/Tani Media Factory in Venice. We’re representing a Japanese television producer who would like to get in touch with you. It’s about Bigfoot.”

  Just waking up, I was a little geographically confused. Japan? Venice? I’d had plenty of kook phone calls since publication of this book, and I suspected this was another. But the next thing Mr. Kurando said made me listen up.

  “The producer of this popular weekly wildlife program in Tokyo read your book,” he said, “and liked your message about wildness and the unknown. He would like to make an episode about Bigfoot, and visit you to shoot footage in the Dark Divide.”

  Where Bigfoot Walks had been translated and published in Japan. This happy development led not only to the events I am presently describing, but also to my travel to Okinawa in 2003 with Gary Snyder for a conference of ASLE-Japan. There I had the fun of reading “Ghost Moths at Moonrise” to Rachel Carson’s Japanese translator, Terry Tempest Williams down-winder scholars from Hiroshima, a radical Ryukyu novelist, and other Asian environmental writers. I was reminded that during our e-mail exchanges, my translator had shared a body of ancient Japanese hairy giant stories with me. As Mojo Nixon said about Elvis, Bigfoot truly is everywhere. So this earlier call from a show-biz agent in LA, and the connection between Sasquatch and a Tokyo TV show, wasn’t as far out in left field as it first seemed.

  Over the following weeks, I determined that the title of the program was Sekai Fushigi Hakken (Discoveries of the World’s Mysteries). It was described to me as “a very popular educational entertainment TV quiz show” that had been on the air since 1986. The producer had indeed gotten the book, and what I wanted to say with it. I felt he would treat the subject with dignity, and not make it a joke or a parody. So I agreed to meet with the film crew when they came, and to take them up to the Dark Divide. First, I fixed them up with Peter Byrne, Ray Crowe, Larry Lund, and other active Bigfoot folk in the Pacific Northwest. After they’d seen them, on an August day in 1999, I met the eight-person crew at a café in Woodland, Washington: Tamotsu Iwagaki, the producer-director; Kanae Takeuchi, the show’s petite firecracker of a reporter and on-camera host; Kurando Mitsutake, the production coordinator/translator; a Yank expediter-cum-actor from Portland; and four camera-and-sound men. And we went from there.

  On the way up the Lewis River, above the village of Cougar, we stopped for an establishing shot into the rising Cascades beyond Yale Reservoir. While waiting around, I found a colony of small blue butterflies on yellow lotus blossoms beside the road. This species had never before been recorded in the western Cascades, so I was excited. The members of the television team were polite about it, but less impressed. They were hoping for bigger game.

  As we entered the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Tamotsu asked, “Will we see Bigfoot tracks now?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “People looking for them hardly ever find anything.” To stave off any disappointment I took them into elfin pine forest swaddled with deep, lime lichens, near the legendary lava tube known as Ape Cave. They loved these spooky woods, which reminded the director of similar forests in Hokkaido, and they got some useful footage.

  Then Kurando said, “They ask if we can go into the heart of the Dark Divide now?”

  That would have involved two or three days of hard hiking, with backpacks, boots, and tents; these were Tokyo people in nice clothes and shoes, on a tight filming schedule.

  �
��Not quite,” I said, “but I can take you into wilderness the like of which few Japanese, or Americans for that matter, have ever seen. You won’t know the difference between that place and the heart of the Dark Divide.” They seemed happy with that. I decided the best way to do it would be to hike a way on Boundary Trail No. 1. So we drove on up Forest Road 25 to Elk Pass, the site of my encounter with Something in the Night. They found the place immediately evocative, and Tamotsu recounted back to me the events in the book with flattering fidelity.

  My visitors were indeed wide-eyed as we entered primeval forest of a sort known only in folklore in Japan. But I could tell that the film crew needed something more. So, parking the van at the Elk Pass trailhead, I led them some distance down Boundary Trail No. 1, into the Dark Divide de facto (but unprotected) wilderness. Within three hundred yards we might as well have been thirty miles in. The lichen-festooned, old-growth noble firs rose around us, tall as a Kyoto pagoda, broad as a sumo or two. They’d seen nothing like it, all right.

  I pointed out a sapling with limbs twisted off Bigfoot-style, not snapped by ice or snow, and a great midden of bark beneath a dead fir, stacked up as the Klickitats say Tselatiks does it, not tossed about as a pileated woodpecker would. (I had found this big, snow-covered bark-mound the previous autumn and wondered whether it might even be a game-safe; Bigfoot is reputed to make such cold-storage meat-caches). The cameramen eagerly photographed these possible artifacts; at least they were something. I read aloud from the book for the camera, pointing out this ’n’ that. Then we headed back toward the van.

  This is the important part to note: I was in the lead, and we were traveling cross-country, off-trail, by a route I picked as we went. There was no sign suggesting other humans had been there all season. Deadfall on the trail had mercifully kept both motorcycles and mountain bikes off the Boundary Trail. I took a diagonal path back up toward the road at maybe a twenty-degree pitch, the eight members of the film crew following behind. We were in untracked wilderness.

  And then, abruptly, I stopped, right foot in the air. The others bunched and bumped up behind me like Keystone Cops. I still hadn’t put my foot down. Because there on the forest floor before me—I’d nearly stepped on it—was a goddamn track! Pushed into a pumice slope just below the trail, the impression had forced a stick well into the spongy substrate.

  “Oh!” cried Kanae.

  “Wow!” Americanized the first cameraman, next in line. And when Tamotsu arrived, before the sound-man, assistant, and Kurando, he simply gaped. That was the moment when he felt, and I knew, that their transatlantic journey was worth every yen of his considerable budget.

  The ground was recent Mount St. Helens pumice ash, overlain by fir needlefall, twigs, leaves, and a few patches of old snow. There was very little open ground, and when there was, it was overlain only by the tracks of squirrels, mice, and martens. But here was one patch of bare sand, and smack in the middle of it lay an obvious hominoid hoof print. There was a good heel and right instep ridge, big toe, and push-off scratch marks from the other toes. The preceding and following steps, and most of the trail of which they were a part, would have fallen on heavy plant debris with no impression possible except perhaps to a master tracker, which I am not.

  Well, in a word, everyone freaked out. The crew was mesmerized, then ecstatic. I was simply shocked, and afterward, ever since, unsettled. They got busy exposing a lot of videotape while the sunlight lasted. I made measurements and constructed a stick corral to prevent anyone from inadvertently putting his or her foot in it. Suffice it to say that lots of backs were slapped as we returned to the van with monster-long shadows. My new friends’ long trip from Tokyo was made.

  We all ate well down at the Rusty Duck restaurant in Longview that evening, before parting. Kurando presented me with a fan with a sumo wrestler on it, a pretty tin of tea, and a nice check. And when the episode was aired a few months later, and Kurando sent me a copy to view on VHS, even through the show’s rowdy and very strange format—something like Hollywood Squares meets Animal Planet—I could see that they’d done the subject proud, and with dignity.

  But that wasn’t all. The following Monday, I got a call from Jeff Baker, book review editor at the Oregonian in Portland. The newspaper had chosen Where Bigfoot Walks as their Oregonian Book Club selection for the next month, and Jeff wanted a fresh interview and photo to run with it. He asked if we could take a day-trip up to the Dark Divide for the purpose.

  “Sure,” I replied. “And, Jeff—have I got something to show you!” So on the Thursday, Jeff, his photographer, and I returned to Elk Pass.

  The author, Jeff Baker, and the track found with the Japanese film crew, August, 1999.

  My little twig-corral was still there, and the impression had remained perfectly intact. Jeff and I poured the plaster of Paris I’d brought this time (I’d taken none along on the first encounter). It was late in the cooling day, and mixed too thin, so it failed to set up. But before we left, the photographer and I got some decent pictures of the plaster-filled track. The mix ran out on the side of the big toe like a bad bunion, but otherwise it gave a good impression.

  The coarse substrate did not make for distinct toe prints other than the big toe, but the heel and outline of the foot, if foot it was, were quite distinct. And here’s the important thing: the dimensions of the track were the same as those of the line of tracks I’d discovered following the night of the whistles nine years earlier—and the location was only a few hundred yards from the earlier site on the slope by the borrow pit above the forest road. Suggesting, in other words, the distinct possibility of the very same animal having survived in this location over the past decade.

  When I got home after the film shoot, I told Thea the news. A skeptic, at first she said, “Oh, poo!” But when I showed her the measurements against the stick I’d notched just an eighth of a mile away and nine years before, and the dimensions were the same (about sixteen inches long, six across the fifth metatarsal, three-plus across the heel), she said, “Huh!”

  As for me, I felt my sense of the creature ramping one notch closer toward outright acceptance.

  −−

  When I went into the woods to look for my sense of Bigfoot, in the autumn of 1990, I came out again with a great and rare gift: an open mind. The actual physical existence of the animal never was the main thing, but rather, the question of whether we can save the kind of wildness in which even the possibility of wood-giants can survive; and the other question, whether the animal manages to retain any of the dignity and power it has always held for its longtime human neighbors. I found that, the tabloids be damned, it does.

  But the question, it turns out, is inescapable after all. In the twenty years since Where Bigfoot Walks was first published, hundreds of readers have written or cornered me and put it to me: “So—do you believe, or not?” I never give them satisfaction, because the fact is, I still don’t know. The best of the evidence is not easily dismissed and is sometimes compelling. But proof—in the form of big artifacts like bone or tiny molecules of DNA—continues to be maddeningly elusive. For some hunters, sadly, literally so: the byways of the backwoods are strewn with the tattered lives and minds of frustrated and broke True Believers. It’s a kind of gold fever.

  This is the central conundrum facing the Bigfoot investigator, hunter, lover, enthusiast, buff, or interested scholar: how does one maintain belief—or better, in my view, an open mind—as year after year goes by without definitive resolution? I see it as a graph, with experience on the ordinate, time on the abscissa, and acceptance as a dependent quantity lying somewhere in between, where doubt intersects with evidence. For sensible people, it takes fresh action on the y axis to counter the inexorable passage of demon time on the x axis, and to keep hopes afloat.

  So what has happened since I first crossed the Dark Divide and wrote about it that would serve to keep hope alive for me and others? Of course there has b
een a vast amount of palaver and poppycock all over the Internet, most of which I studiously avoid. It is easy to disappear into the shadow of this particular chimera and never come out. I take a very selective approach out of self-defense, and to keep it from going all silly or tainted by the toxic side of social media, of which Bigfoot brings out the very worst. Even so, a few bright things have emerged to catch my attention. Here is a brief, far-from-exhaustive litany of what I have found most interesting:

  1. The Quileutes at the Bookstore: On Publication Day, in the summer of 1995, I gave a reading from the book to a packed house at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Afterward, a delegation of Native Americans in the back stood and asked to be heard. They were Quileutes, from LaPush (this was long before werewolves and vampires settled into their territory, courtesy of Twilight, giving them even stranger bedfellows than Bigfoot). “These people live among us,” said their spokesman. “We tell you this not so you will come to bother them or hunt them, but so you will treat them with the respect they deserve. We wanted to see if your book treats them with such respect.” (I was deeply relieved to hear that they thought it had.) The audience was struck dumb. He asked if he could play a tape of the creatures’ normal sounds, to illustrate what he told us. Rick Simonsen produced a boom box, and two hundred people listened, rapt, to a concert of cries, whistles, and calls much as I’d heard on Elk Pass that night, and at Timberline on Mount St. Helens, that other cold autumn night in 1970. If anyone came to Elliott Bay that evening with a totally locked-up mind, I suspect they felt the tumblers slipping a bit on their way home.

  2. Jane Goodall Speaks. In the spring of 1998, I was in Washington, D.C., at the Jane Goodall Institute. As a member of the Advisory Board of the Orion Society, I was there to help present Dr. Goodall with the Orion Society’s John Hay Award—a signal honor given to Wendell Berry, E. O. Wilson, Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Ann Zwinger, and other major figures in environmental writing, education, and reform. Jane and I shared the same master editor, Harry Foster, at Houghton Mifflin. “Why didn’t you ask me to blurb your book, Bob?” she asked me.