Bigfoot and the Power of Unsolved Mysteries
Every darkness beneath cedar branches, every cave mouth pulses with portent.
I’ve been wanting to explore Washington’s Lewis River basin ever since reading Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by naturalist Robert Michael Pyle.* In early July, I got my toes wet, so to speak, on a trip to Moulton Falls Regional Park with two dear friends. We crossed the photogenic bridge (see photo in my March 2 post) and followed the river’s east fork along a barrier-free trail on an old railroad grade that is lovely for the frail of joint. Smooth and wide enough to walk three abreast. After half a mile or so, they hiked on while I rested knees and hips on a bench overlooking the small but lively Moulton Falls.
A seat where one can watch and listen to water breaking over rocks is a perfect place to breathe and be; I will never tire of a perch by waterfall or rapids. Although I always move on, it’s a tearing away rather than a finishing.
I’d sat a good while when my eye was caught by sudden movement in the shadows among alder and vine maple on the opposite riverbank. Just the simple act of imagining a creature lurking nearby—raccoon or mink or fawn—changed the place.
Not only that place: every darkness beneath cedar branches, every cave mouth pulses with portent. Move through a space believing in possibility at every step or turn of head—not expecting any particular thing, just expectant—and it comes alive with powerful energy. Exploring Bigfoot, Pyle took the usual “what if” beyond wide-eyed wonder and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
Sitting by the East Fork of the Lewis River, at one point I turned to stretch my back and was startled to see rising behind me a cliff, maybe 150’ high, that had been looming there unnoticed the whole time. Unnoticed because I was so taken with the river, with imagining what might lurk near its edge. So I had to shift around and contemplate that rock face a while, take it in all the way up to the mature firs on top, which filtered the sun burning behind them.
Pyle talks about our desire to believe that Sasquatch dwells out in the forest, that the wild might still be a place of mystery, surprise, threat, discovery. Bigfoot stories are told well beyond the Pacific Northwest. Colorado, Minnesota, Louisiana, North Carolina. Europe. Asia. And on around the globe. Everywhere, the desire for possibility. My husband wears an “I Believe in Everything” t-shirt, with Sasquatch in the company of unicorn, mermaid, UFO …
If there could be a Sasquatch (or rather, as Pyle points out, enough Sasquatches to ensure survival across generations) then consciously or not, we can believe there might still be wilderness. The forest wouldn’t be so cut over. So riddled with roads. So damn known. Flying along the western flank of the Cascades it’s all too easy to see where corporate/state/national forests end—even where not logged over—and private property begins: Every ridge is topped with trophy homes.
In 2016, I got to hear Pyle talk at the Bread Loaf–Orion Environmental Writing workshop. I’m no good at being the writer who can spin out just the right remark to convey my knowledge of and respect for a luminary and their work, while deftly referencing my own accomplishments. Nope. I went up to him all fan-girly and gushed. Told him how much his book meant to me and how many times I’d leant it out, because it was out of print. Why was it never reprinted? He told me of a rights snafu, but said that happily it was coming out again soon. You can buy your very own new edition right now!
But back to the question of how we—American culture, government, capitalism, property law—would cope with sharing space with another sentient species: the short version of Pyle’s observations is “not very well.”
Just look at white folk’s treatment fellow Homo sapiens: Africans imprisoned and shipped here for free labor. Their descendants. And the people who already lived here and had done so for thousands of years. Who, like most Indigenous peoples, knew well the sentient beings in their midst and had worked out how to be in communion with all of them. Yes, there was fighting and kidnap and burning. Human, after all. But also, recognition of the intrinsic worth and rights of tree and fish. Rock and wind.
I’m not convinced we want to find the mystery beings we like to believe in. Because, what then?
For me, especially in the months since Mama Ephemera started tracking her Muddy Feet through my life, this delving, note-taking, researching, composing is opening my pores and nerve endings to stories told by sword fern and bracken. In whispers on the wide path where the ridge behind me channels its water down to the river. By the vine maple sprouting from a ledge-birthed bed of moss and branching into the void.
I hope it activates your neurons and heart as well.
* Originally: Mariner Books, 1995. Rereleased at long last, in an updated edition, by Counterpoint, in 2017.
This lovely essay truly activated both my heart and my neurons. Thank you, Kelly!