It was in 1932 or ’33 when Datus saw his first, though he had seen a good track when he was twelve, on a clam-digging trip to Pacific Beach. Gathering blueberries for his hotcakes, he saw that the berries had been picked over, and then he found the track in moss on soft dirt. He has known what Bigfoot was ever since. His trapper dad, a contemporary of John Dark, had seen a print too, but didn’t know what to make of it.
Datus, who once weighed 212 pounds, had gone down to 110 with the pneumonia and was now back up to 117. He raised a bony left hand and said, “It won’t take on no meat.” He wanted to get back up to his cave but could barely get around. “I’ll have to get some young guys to help me,” he said. And he probably will.
Datus was tired, and I felt we should go. Then he told me with some urgency that some of the Indians feel, and he shares their belief, that there may be several types of Bigfoot—some with the head bristles, some without, some maybe with longer hair—and that they may interbreed. “But that’s as far as it goes,” he said, “like a horse and a donkey. They’d make a mule.” The types haven’t arisen through evolution, he figured, because they can’t mix. This was a fresh view of hybridization biology, which others employ to demonstrate evolution, not disprove it; but it didn’t bear pursuing.
As I left I gave Datus greetings from Ray Crowe and Peter Byrne. “Poor guy,” Datus said about Byrne. “He works so hard.” He thinks all of Byrne’s gadgets and gizmos will just scare the Bigfeet away.
The night of the Bigfoot Daze at Carson, Peter Byrne and I had shared a cabin at the Hot Springs. As his daughter, Rara, and sheltie, Robin, slept soundly in camp beds, Peter and I chuckled over some of the things we had heard.
“Datus might very well see and believe,” Peter said thoughtfully. “But at the same time and place, others might not.”
Later I heard Peter’s words echoed in Wayne Suttles’s view that while Sasquatch-like creatures “may inhabit the real world of the Indians, this may not be relevant to the question of whether they inhabit the real world of Western science.” And Chief Lelooska spoke of things you could see only when watching “with Indian eyes.” Many would conclude that Datus also sees the world with eyes different from ours. So why do we tend to venerate the one as spiritual and write off the other as deluded?
−−
Separate realities aside, what has Datus Perry seen in those wild hills behind his home? For that matter, what has Ray Wallace seen? And what, if anything, did Paul Freeman and Ivan Marx see? Freeman is the former Forest Service employee who made a name for himself with Bigfoot tracks, Indian artifacts, and films of encounters, which are widely regarded as hoaxes. At a meeting of the Western Bigfoot Society in a narrow hall beneath Ray Crowe’s North Portland bookshop, we watched Freeman’s video sequence as featured in a television program on Bigfoot. In it Freeman said he was too scared by a close encounter after the fuzzy filming to continue, and was getting out of the field. Most present felt that would be a good thing. His bad rep stems from his admission on Good Morning America that he had faked tracks before finding real ones; from an expert man-tracker’s assertion that his tracks went nowhere; and from the unconvincing nature of his films, among other inconsistencies. Freeman is said to be a skilled artisan who has worked in orthopedic shoe labs. Yet Grover Krantz considers one of Freeman’s tracks, with dermal ridges and sweat pores, to be one of his linchpin exhibits. Has Paul Freeman been misjudged?
Ivan Marx, a former bear and coyote hunter, was involved in Tom Slick’s Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Expedition in northern California in 1960. In 1969, having taken the search north, Marx claimed to have found a series of tracks and films of a partially disabled Bigfoot in northeastern Washington. Almost all of the other serious investigators went to see for themselves. The story is complicated, and its radically varied tellings by John Green, René Dahinden, Peter Byrne, and Grover Krantz reveal the relativity of experience and the roots of dissension and acrimony. The various camps, at first cooperative, became embattled and embittered. In the end Byrne had bought a blank film, Dahinden was convinced of an absolute hoax, Green was bemused and disgusted, Krantz had another key track, Patterson had nothing to show for his high hopes of a follow-up to Bluff Creek, and Marx was off to points unknown.
I went to Bossburg, far up the Columbia from Carson, and asked around about Marx and the Bossburg Giant. It was difficult to imagine this bucolic old village as the center of the Sasquatch world, as it briefly had been in the winter of 1969–1970. The local garage man who had rented a place to Marx told me that everyone considered him completely bogus. “I’ve seen those slabs of wood he made the tracks with,” the man told me. But again, Krantz has a track from Bossburg of a foot-wounded animal, and he considers it completely genuine, impossible to fake by anyone less knowledgeable than himself, and a critical piece of evidence. Both Marx and Freeman made casts of handprints that Krantz considers good candidates for reality, as well as footprints.
Krantz’s acceptance of tracks from two men considered fakers by the others has led to charges that he is gullible. Byrne, a master tracker, feels that Krantz has been fooled. Two papers in the Skeptical Inquirer, published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, analyzed and dismissed Freeman’s evidence. Though Newsweek called the prints “startling new evidence for Bigfoot,” writer Michael Dennett found them wanting. Joel Hardin, a U.S. Border Patrol tracker extraordinaire who has never lost the trail of a fugitive, examined the site for the Forest Service soon after Freeman’s report and found no trail continuing beyond the distinct impressions. Dennett proposed how the dermal ridges in Freeman’s tracks could have been faked, and the second paper attacked the sweat pores as bubbles.
Yet in Big Footprints Krantz analyzed both sets of tracks from a morphologically sophisticated viewpoint, rebutted the doubts, and produced arguments that are quite convincing. Clearly, persons of goodwill disagree in the matter, if any Bigfoot hunters can truly be said to have goodwill toward the others.
−−
When I think of Marx and Freeman, Wallace and Perry, I see two men considered charlatans by many of their Bigfoot peers and two broadly thought of as hyperbolical at best. Each has his champions, and each has his convictions, or so we presume. It makes me wonder: Can it happen that people have experiences that are quite authentic (at least to them) and that arouse their interest and then, in the absence of further excitement, attention, or reward for their efforts and hopes, cross the divide into the manufacture of their own kicks, either in the damp sand of a creek bed or in the soft gray putty of their brains?
When I mentioned this thought to Peter Byrne, he doubted it applied to Marx and Freeman; but he felt it might be true of others. He mentioned a man who had a quite credible sighting, which many others investigated to their satisfaction. But he went on having sightings over the next dozen years or so, “all the way to the last one when a BF walked up behind him and put its hand on his shoulder. Oh yes, indeed!”
Is this another dark divide that Bigfoot illuminates in the glare of its red headlights, the too-human border between truth and desire? Maybe Marx was always in it for the money; perhaps Wallace has been a jester from the start. But then again, perhaps the casts are real, and only some way into the chase did the line of tracks trail off into ignominy. When men begin with gold and try to salt the mine with base metal instead of the other way around, when they concoct clumsy prints, silly films, and even sillier statements and expect to be taken seriously, they must have changed within themselves.
Many Indian groups speak of Bigfoot-like spirits, such as River Otter, as having the ability to bewitch. In one Tlingit lineage men were driven into the forest by whites in the early days of contact. There they were bewitched by Otter and mated with her, and the unfortunate offspring were the Kooschtaka, or Bigfeet.
I think Bigfoot bewitches men. They fall in love with the idea of Sasquatch when they first see something
or find a print on a muddy bank. They love the attention it brings them, and they see the glittering prospects of catching what everyone else wants to catch. They think they have an inside track in the chase. Or they find a friend in Bigfoot, who becomes the object of their passion. When their devotion is unrequited, with no more tracks or sightings and nothing to film, they grow desperate. Ignored by men and monsters, they contrive to renew the thrill by making their own evidence, and once they do that, they are lost, for they will never be believed again. Or else imagination takes over from observation, with the same result. Hoax and hallucination: the twin bewitchments of Bigfoot.
Or perhaps, as Marjorie Halpin wrote in Manlike Monsters on Trial, “As long as Sasquatch is a personal rather than a collectively sanctioned experience it will remain hallucinatory as officially defined by Western culture.” I guess Datus Perry doesn’t much care. He just sees what he sees.
−−
I lay in the deep porcelain tub on the men’s side of the bathhouse at Carson Hot Springs. When I climbed out of the steamy spring water, an attendant named Larry mummified me in hot towels and reclined me on a cot. After that, a masseuse named Corrie macerated my muscles. This process put me in mind of the reverse of a plaster-of-Paris casting. I came in hard and set, softened in the bath, melted to a gel in the body wrap, and completely liquified under Corrie’s gifted hands in the massage. If I hadn’t had to move at last, I would have dribbled down the drain, run on into the Wind River, and merged at last with the Columbia.
When I had solidified enough to move, I strolled a leafy lane behind the old hotel to a path leading to a suspension bridge over the Wind River. The relaxation remained, but I lost the light and returned. Downy hazel leaves brushed my hands; maple and mud made a scent, strong and fragrant like that of witch hazel or horehound or some herbal preparation dimly recalled.
After dinner I read in a worn, would-be-leather rocker in the shabby-comfy lobby of the old false-front St. Martin’s Hotel. The last of the old Russian bathers, who live across the river in the Oregon Cascades, had retired to their cabins. After the desk clerk donned her nylon tavern jacket and left me with “Good night now . . . have a good one,” I was alone in the hotel.
I didn’t read for long. I knew I would sleep the second I hit the bed, so I stayed down a little longer and ran over the past month in my mind. What did it prove, this crossing of the Dark Divide, besides re-radicalizing me on forest issues, as if I needed that? I did not find Bigfoot, but then I wasn’t looking. I had a chance to use my plaster of Paris and came away with a nice cast of a somewhat footish impression on a rock. I found big tracks in a muddy pond and heard strange whistles at Yellowjacket Pass, a likely collaboration between black bears and gray jays. Among the ancient trees of Quartz Creek I was briefly overwhelmed by a truly foul stench that could have been anybody’s body.
If, occupied by my own too-human concerns, I never quite slipped into the skin of Grendel, I did feel a powerful empathy for his harassment by jets, trucks, cycles, saws, and the people who wield them. Perhaps unfairly I transferred my own irritation with them, to a beast whose backyard is invaded daily. After eating a lot of berries and mushrooms and things I hadn’t eaten before, I convinced myself that the land could support another large omnivore, if only we would support the land in its annual battle to grow more than we take away.
Now, at the foot of a one-million-acre Sasquatch refuge, where to kill one with malice was a gross misdemeanor, I was no closer to knowing whether there was anything out there. That, of course, was never my objective. I’d been stewed in a Bigfoot brew as hot and steaming as my afternoon mineral-springs bath, but nowhere near as clear as those mountain waters. My mind was massaged with a million attitudes and the opinions of those who share their green and rocky space with a famous myth.
I had a copy of a drawing Datus Perry had made of a Bigfoot: “very accurate sketch of one that followed me to my shelter.” Unrolling it, I read his annotations scribbled near her feet:
Mowglee Sasquatch hand her a flower I walked up to 25’ from her—she never moved till after I left.
7 ft. tall Oct. 20, ’85 sundown at my camp
Back again in ’86 Datus Perry no harm
Lovingly drawn, she stands erect and at attention, her hands at her sides. She wears a buckskin tied around her shoulders like a tennis sweater; her tiny ears barely show above her sloping shoulders; and her petite, peaceful face is topped by a sharp crown like a dunce’s cap. Datus told me that they stand still like this, hoping to be mistaken for a snag. Others have suggested that a snag is exactly what Datus saw. I rolled her up.
So who knows? Maybe she is up there, just as Datus saw then. Maybe the remarkably apelike stone heads found not far from here in the Columbia Gorge represent real animals known to the ancient makers. And maybe the Skamania County ordinance pertains to actual flesh-and-blood creatures that can be shot to death. Perhaps the final notation on Datus Perry’s drawing could be taken as the last word:
“no harm”
There are worse ways for people to spend their time.
−−
Of course, there never will be a last word on Bigfoot.
As I turned in that night, the words of two old rock-and-roll songs ran around in my head as a medley, a super-group duet by the Grateful Dead and the Moody Blues. “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” crooned the Dead, and the Moody Blues replied, “We decide which is right, and which is an illusion.”
A strange trip it had surely been, and I considered it essentially finished. All that remained was to go home, think it over, and write it up. The Dark Divide, crossed once and crossed again, had expanded to embody a whole mountain range of divides, perhaps paramount among them that muddy slide between right and illusion.
Little did I know as I drifted off to sleep that the strangest part of the trip was still to come, that one more night, one more passage, and one last event would crack my imagination wide open in the matter of Bigfoot.
20
Something in the Night
Now in the night
the dark walker came
gliding in shadow.
—Beowulf
When I awoke at Carson the next morning, October 4, I knew it was time to leave the hills. I was more than ready for home and Thea and Bokis, my cat. I had a dentist appointment, a month’s mail and phone messages, a manuscript to finish. In other words, life. And I had to drive to Olympia for a meeting of the Natural Heritage Advisory Council the very next morning.
I slept in, idled over breakfast and a bath, then walked up the river again to the suspension bridge. I would have remained willingly, suspending my obligations, suspending my disbelief, seduced by the breathy utterances of the Wind River into staying behind just a little longer. Then, having succeeded in using up much of the short gray day, I could dawdle no longer.
But on the edge of Carson the Wind River Trading Post, a junk shop with secondhand books and a Bigfoot statue, lay in wait. I had to check it out. Adjusting my eyes to the dim light within, I spotted a copy of Victor Cahalane’s Mammals of North America and dived in, to learn about pikas that live in slab piles or logjams in streams. I wondered how long it would be until we could pick up a mammalogy text and read about the natural history of Gigantopithecus canadensis alongside Lutra canadensis, Castor canadensis, and Cervus canadensis.
I came out an hour later with three books: an old Thornton Burgess Bedtime Stories volume, Mother West Wind’s Children (a wartime reprint edition by Grosset & Dunlap); a little leather-bound book of Lamb’s Essays of Elia (“half genuine English calf, super-extra hand finished, gold top, untrimmed edges, sewn with silk,” $1.75 in 1893 from Henry Altemus, Philadelphia, now $8.50); and a 1932 anthology, Washington Poets, mostly rhyming, its brown cloth spine split from loving overuse. By now it was late enough for dinner so I took my treasures into a Mexican restaurant down the road, whic
h surprised me with excellent tamales.
I began to read Bigfoot into everything. Burgess dedicated his book “To all who love the green meadows and the smiling pool, the laughing brook and the merry little breezes.” Well, who is that if not Sasquatch? When Charles Lamb wrote in “Witches and Other Night Fears”: “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire . . . may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition,—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types,—the archetypes are in us, and eternal,” surely he was foreshadowing Bigfoot. And when Muriel Thurston, the former owner of Washington Poets, in her own poem “Fugitive” wrote, “Everywhere I go I find / What I thought to leave behind,” she had me in mind.
I just couldn’t face the freeway yet. I realized I could get to Olympia just as well by crossing the Dark Divide on dirt roads as by following the Columbia to I-5, if I didn’t mind losing a night’s sleep. After having the forest roads largely to myself for so long, this seemed infinitely preferable to sharing a rainy freeway with semis and motor homes. I wanted to buffer my emergence from the mountains until the last possible moment. So, leaving Carson at last, I turned left instead of right and headed north.
By nine p.m. I had shot up along the western fringes of the Big Lava Bed and Indian Heaven. Near one of the trailheads I stopped to cut some noble fir boughs for a silkscreen Thea had in mind. Then over the top of heaven and down a narrow green slot between close alders on the gentle grade of little Forest Road 3211. It followed Rush Creek, here a minor torrent of white spray, but I remembered it as a dry bed of black pebbles on the Indian Heaven plateau. The road felt and looked like an old logging railroad bed, and in the rain I realized that it could easily be washed out or made unpassable by a deadfall; I might have to retrace the long wet drive. But it took me to the major forest thoroughfare, No. 90, which carried me west along the Lewis River to No. 25, the post-eruption Mount St. Helens “expressway,” at Eagle’s Cliff. Images from my journey flooded my mind as I peered through the rain-washed glass, my traveling chamber fragrant with the terps of the fir boughs.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 35