Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

by Dom Joly

  We said goodbye to the nice waitress at Tropicana, who had never understood why we were there or what we were doing but had delivered the closest to decent service that we’d encountered in this country.

  At midday we hopped on to the back of a pickup and roared off to the airport. There it was predictable chaos. JP found Ticketman, who wanted more money for the tickets but gave in when JP went apeshit. We then fought our way through the laughable screening process but were pulled out of the line by the same officials who’d hassled us on our arrival. They were now demanding money for an ‘exit tax’. JP was close to nuclear explosion. The officials said that we could not get an exit stamp without paying. JP pointed out that, as were not leaving the country, we didn’t want an exit stamp.

  Everything kicked off big style. JP and I eventually marched out of their room and joined the line again. The officials followed us and were by now really hassling us, but there appeared to be a VIP in front of us and he became interested in what was happening. The officials backed off and we got through the screening.

  A soldier checked my passport and thought my Iranian visa was my ID page. He spent ages checking it was in order. In the end he nodded and we were on the tarmac waiting for the plane to land so that we could get the fuck out of Dodge.

  The mystery plane eventually landed six hours late and only after it missed the actual airport twice and overshot the runway once. There was another rugby scrum to get on to the plane.

  Onboard every other passenger seemed to have a plastic bag full of smoked fish and the smell was absolutely astonishing -like an abattoir in a fish tank. A woman sat down next to us with an open bag and I very nearly passed out and thought I was going to vomit. Fortunately we were by the emergency exit and the stewardess told her to move: women are apparently not considered responsible enough to operate emergency exits. Normally this kind of sexism would appal me but, on this one occasion, I let it slide. It would be no exaggeration to admit that, for the duration of this flight, I became a little more religious. It lasted only an hour but both JP and I were absolutely convinced something else was going to go wrong.

  In between thoughts of imminent death I reflected on the problems inherent so far in monster-hunting. I certainly wasn’t dispirited. There was no rulebook for this. I was flying by the seat of my pants and trying, in a series of short trips, to do what some people spent years doing. The main problem seemed to be trying to distinguish between native beliefs and cold, hard facts. The stories of the monsters in the Okanagan and the Congo had come from the indigenous peoples and had been subject to osmosis by settlers or travellers who seemed to have some problem in interpreting what was real and what was spiritual. At least the Hibagon was a relatively new (though short-lived) creature: very rare in Japan, the land of a million ancient monsters. Whatever, I had at least had a sighting -something that many firm believers in these creatures would never have. It was all turning out to be as varied and weird and downright exciting as I’d hoped it would be. It was good to be alive and I couldn’t wait to set off on my next expedition, one of the daddies of the monster world: Bigfoot.

  That evening, safely back in Brazzaville, JP and I headed out to the best restaurant in town – a posh riverside place called Terminalia. We both ordered pizza and sat gazing over the mighty Congo at the lights of Kinshasa dancing on the moonlit waters. We were happy and in a slightly euphoric post-adventure mood. We went over some of the ‘highlights’ of the trip and the alcohol flowed freely. The pizza took a while but we were busy chatting and it was only when a terrible tiredness came over us both after an hour or so that we realized that nothing had arrived. The waitress wandered past and I asked her if there was any sign of our pizza.

  ‘Oui, oui – ça arrive tout de suite,’ she said, walking on.

  Another twenty minutes elapsed and finally Jean-Pierre went inside to remonstrate. He came back out half-laughing, half-stressed.

  ‘The oven is not working,’ he said.

  I asked him why they hadn’t just told us that from the start.

  ‘It’s the Congo, my friend: nothing is normal here . . .’

  We got up and wandered out through the gates and into the streets of Brazzaville.

  ‘Do you feel like visiting Kinshasa tomorrow?’ asked JP playfully. I looked at him and he was laughing.

  ‘Maybe next time, Jean-Pierre, maybe next time . . .’

  Bigfoot

  ‘Darwinian man, though well behaved,

  At best is only a monkey shaved.’

  W.S. Gilbert

  I settled into my seat on the flight to San Francisco. As I did so the one in front of me was tilted back violently by a very fidgety Indian gentleman. We were still on the tarmac and I knew my rights: no tilting until after take-off. I gave his seat a shove back and battle commenced.

  ‘I have the right to put my chair back – this is why it is designed in this manner!’ shouted Fidget.

  ‘Not until we take off. Seats must be upright until we take off; that is airline law,’ I countered.

  ‘You are British? This is why you lost the Empire: for this sort of arrogant behaviour. It is why you lose the cricket as well.’ This was a very left-field argument but it stumped me momentarily. I considered mentioning that it was a shame we had not taught our former colonial subjects the basics of travel law, but realized that I’d be hoiked off the flight by the steward.

  ‘As a matter of fact, England are currently the best cricket team in the world.’ It was checkmate.

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’ He had run out of steam and he knew it.

  His chair stayed up until we’d taken off, when he immediately titled it back to the full extent. Sometimes I hate travelling.

  Arriving in San Francisco I braced myself for the usual torment of entering the United States. In my experience, if you happened to have been born in an ‘enemy’ country, as I was (Lebanon), then you could expect a five-hour wait, a dumb interrogation and, if you’re lucky, an internal examination. To my utter joy, however, it turned out that the whole NSEER system has finally been abolished, having caught precisely zero terrorists and turned everyone who went through it into an anti-American since its hasty introduction by panicky Neo-Cons post-9/11. I sailed through and was soon riding the futuristic monorail to the car-rental agencies. I wondered how long it would be before monorails stopped looking futuristic.

  There can be few things more liberating than driving over the Golden Gate Bridge with good music blaring, off on a road trip into the badlands of Northern California. When the purpose of said trip is to find Bigfoot, it’s off the scale.

  I’d done most of this journey before. The very first travel piece that I ever wrote was for the Independent. In it, I set off to find the Giant Redwoods I’d heard so much about. Like most tourists, I stopped at Muir Woods, about twenty minutes north of the bridge, and walked around craning my neck upwards and marvelling at these natural monsters, unaware that they were mere minnows compared with what awaited me further north.

  California is an extraordinary state. To me it’s a microcosm of the United States, with the deserts and lush hills of the south, the seaboard cities and then the wild of the north that even includes a ‘Lost Coast’. My destination this time was Willow Creek: Bigfoot Central and home to a museum dedicated to the Sasquatch, as the Native Americans call him. Willow Creek is inland from Eureka, a large(ish) town on the coast about 250 miles north of San Francisco. As you drive north from San Francisco you go through several areas. First you pass the outskirts of Sonoma and Napa, wine country. Then it’s into beer country, dotted with hundreds of microbreweries. Finally, you enter marijuana country and all bets are off. Willow Creek is in Humboldt County, famously the home of hundreds of reclusive weed farmers who hide their crops in the woods and are renowned for not liking strangers wandering about. Maybe unsurprisingly, Bigfoot territory lies slap in the middle.

  I’d left San Francisco at about three-thirty in the afternoon so I wasn’t going to make Eureka that
evening. I drove up Highway 1 for a while. This is one of my favourite drives in the world: it’s like rolling through an enormous Hitchcock set. I got to Bodega Bay, where he filmed The Birds, before turning inland and stopping in Ukiah, a little beer town, for the night.

  I’d stayed here before on my Redwoods trip and had been billeted in a bed and breakfast with a woman who lived with a giant turtle. I hate bed and breakfasts. This time I checked into the Economy Inn Motel. The reception smelt of curry and a tiny woman gave me the key in exchange for forty bucks. The room was like every motel room you’ve ever seen in American movies: slightly grotty, but sort of strangely exotic at the same time.

  The last time I was in town I found an oasis called the Ukiah Brewing Company & Restaurant – a haven in a town full of beauty parlours and combat gear. It was only three blocks from my motel so I popped in to get a drink and some supper. There were several groups of draft dodgers in various corners and I installed myself at a high table in the window. I ordered a beer and steak and watched the Patterson/Gimlin film of Bigfoot on my laptop. This is probably the most famous piece of monster footage ever. The film was shot on a sixteen-millimetre camera on 20 October 1967 by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin on the Klamath River, near Orleans in Northern California. The film shows a large female (she has big bosoms) Bigfoot walking away fast along the bottom of a creek. The creature has come to be known as ‘Patty’ by cryptozoologists. It’s either a hoax or the most important piece of wildlife footage in history. The Wikipedia entry about the encounter goes like this:

  In the early afternoon of October 20, Patterson and Gimlin were at Bluff Creek. Both were on horseback when they ‘came to an overturned tree with a large root system at a turn in the creek, almost as high as a room.’ When they rounded it they spotted the figure behind it nearly simultaneously, while it was ‘crouching beside the creek to their left.’ Gimlin later described himself as in a mild state of shock after first seeing the figure. Patterson estimated he was about 25 feet (8 m) away from the creature at his closest. Patterson said that his horse reared upon seeing (or perhaps smelling) the figure, and he spent about twenty seconds extricating himself from the saddle and getting his camera from a saddlebag before he could run toward the figure while operating his camera.

  He yelled ‘Cover me’ to Gimlin, who thereupon crossed the creek on horseback, rode forward a while, and, rifle in hand, dismounted (presumably because his horse might have panicked if the creature charged, spoiling his shot). The figure had walked away from them to a distance of about 120 feet (37 m) before Patterson began to run after it. The resulting film (about 53 seconds long) is initially quite shaky until Patterson gets about 80 feet (24 m) from the figure. At that point the figure glanced over its right shoulder at the men and Patterson fell to his knees; Patterson would later characterize the creature’s expression as one of ‘contempt and disgust.’

  At this point the steady middle portion of the film begins. Patterson said ‘it turned a total of I think three times,’ the first time therefore being before the filming began. Shortly after glancing over its shoulder, the creature walks behind a grove of trees, reappears for a while after Patterson moved ten feet to a better vantage point, then fades into the trees again and is lost to view as the reel of film ran out. Gimlin remounted and followed it on horseback, keeping his distance, until it disappeared around a bend in the road three hundred yards away. Patterson called him back at that point, feeling vulnerable on foot without a rifle, because he feared the creature’s mate might approach.

  Next, Gimlin rounded up Patterson’s horses, which had run off before the filming began, and ‘the men then tracked it for three miles, but lost it in the heavy undergrowth.’ They returned to the initial site, measured the creature’s stride, made two plaster casts (of the best-quality right and left prints), and covered the other prints to protect them. The entire encounter had lasted less than two minutes.

  Those two minutes had a profound effect on me as a kid. I first saw only still images taken from the film and reproduced in the Arthur C. Clarke book. This was obviously in the days before the Internet and there was no way for a schoolboy in Oxford to access the footage. I finally saw the shaky, mysterious film on a repeat of the Arthur C. Clarke show on television. I watched it once and was transfixed. Now you can go on the Internet and see it endlessly looped, slowed down, analysed . . . Back then, however, it was an elusive experience and I longed to know more about it. Was it a hoax, as many had claimed? One of the problems was that Patterson had rented a very expensive sixteen-millimetre camera and couldn’t remember what film speed he’d filmed it on. This made reconstructions quite difficult. I wanted to know more about the film, to try to get near to where it was shot, speak to people who knew the pair. A couple from New Jersey seated next to me – presumably because I was the least dangerous-looking person in the room – were eager to chat. I told them that I was hunting Bigfoot and they told me that there was one in New Jersey. I tried to look sceptical, as though I was something of an expert in the field. They appeared impressed – but then again, they also appeared impressed by metal cutlery.

  I told them about my wine/beer/marijuana Northern California division and informed them that they were right on the beer/marijuana frontier. They looked very excited and asked me whether I could sell them any dope. I patiently explained that I was ‘not from round here’ and they nodded, unconvincingly They ended up asking the waitress, who told them about medical marijuana. It was readily available: all you needed was a note from a doctor. They asked her if she was a doctor. She replied that, no, she was a waitress. I started to weep quietly.

  Just before I left, I went to the loo and found the old New Jersey guy talking to the chef, who appeared to be a doctor because some deal was clearly going down.

  My motel room would have made a fabulous murder scene in a TV show. I turned on the telly but Piers Morgan popped up so I turned it off feeling dirty and violated.

  Surprisingly I got a great night’s sleep, despite the man next door to me snoring so loudly through the paper-thin wall that I thought this might be my first earthquake. I awoke to the sound of the snoring man weeping loudly. I’d had enough exotica and headed out for breakfast before hitting the road north again.

  The scenery just got more spectacular the further north I went. Mist clung to the hills and the moss-covered coastal oaks had a haunting air about them. I was now most definitely in weed country. I drove into Garberville, a town that boasts a ‘Cannabis College’. The town looked like a movie set from 1972, with long-haired hippies shuffling about and sitting on the sidewalk strumming guitars tunelessly. Everywhere I looked were smoke shops and shady-looking men in pickup trucks buying disproportionate amounts of lighting equipment. It was all a bit Twin Peaks.

  Just to the north of Garberville is the magnificent Avenue of Giants – a truly majestic stretch of road about twenty miles long that is bordered and overlooked by some monster redwood trees. Unless you have actually seen a redwood or a giant sequoia, it is difficult to describe just how mind-blowing they are. It is no coincidence that a group of them is known as a cathedral. There is something immensely spiritual about them.

  Would you like some redwood facts? Here you go then.

  They are the world’s largest trees in terms of total volume. They grow to an average height of about 280 feet and 26 feet in diameter. Record trees have been measured to reach 330 feet in height and more than 55 feet in diameter. The oldest known giant sequoia based on ring count is 3,500 years old. I thank you.

  Back in my enormo-vehicle, I was really enjoying my leisurely cruise down the Avenue of Giants. At times the trees were so tall and so thick that it was almost dark. Then a lone shard of sunlight would find a way through the foliage and light up a section of the road like a movie spotlight. I kept taking photographs; I just couldn’t stop as the trees were so impressive. The problem was that it was almost impossible to take a successful photograph because I could never get the whole tree in my v
iewfinder unless I lay on the road and looked straight up – and even then it was a bit weird.

  Suddenly, to my left, I spotted a fallen giant. The trunk was about thirty feet in circumference, and its decaying root system looked like a small city’s infrastructure. The Avenue was totally devoid of traffic so I stopped right in the middle of the road and took some more photographs out of the window.

  Then, from out of nowhere, a beaten-up old truck came speeding down the Avenue honking violently at me. There was no problem in getting past me and the driver would have spotted me from a good 200 yards away, so they were just trying to be jerks. I ignored them and carried on taking photos. I think that my fearless attitude might possibly have been slightly emboldened by my new status as a monster-hunter. Canoeing down the Congo changes you somehow: honking pickup trucks do not phase you . . .

  The truck drove up alongside mine. I looked into it. To my surprise all three occupants were women. They were in their mid-twenties and looked like they spent their weekends beating up lumberjacks.

  Asshole!’ they all shouted in unison before giving me the rigid digit and zooming off.

  Assuming that these ‘ladies’ were not simply people who didn’t appreciate my TV work, I considered this to be totally uncalled for. In fact, I’m ashamed to admit, a red mist descended upon me in this, the calmest and most reflective of nature’s places. I gunned my engine and set off in hot pursuit of the rogue females. After two or three minutes I’d caught them up and observed with pleasure the driver’s startled look in the mirror. I started honking and flashing my lights. I was behaving like an idiot, but I was really angry. I had no idea what I’d do if they stopped; I just wanted to register my displeasure. I imagined Stacey in the seat next to me screaming, ‘For fuck’s sake, Dom, stop . . . What are you doing, you bonehead?’