Listening for Bigfoot

A few years ago, my wife and I awoke about 4 AM on a windy night to an odd sound outside our second-story bedroom.

“Do you hear that?” Julie asked me in a whisper. I said I did.

“What do you think it is?”

“Sounds like Bigfoot rolling a wheel barrow,” I responded sleepily.

I knew immediately it was a mistake.

“Do you think it is?” she asked, a nervous edge entering her voice.

“Well,” I backpedaled, “if it is, he’s probably building a patio.”

We were awake for the next two hours waiting for the howl, or the knock, that signified we had Squatch as a landscape contractor. Bigfoot has been a recurring theme for our conversations, though almost always in the not-quite-rational wee hours of the morning, or on long road trips through the Pacific Northwest. We do live in Bigfoot country, if there is such a place; the home where we suspected Sasquatch was building us a rustic lanai backed up to a six-and-a-half acre nature park in which we regularly saw deer, raccoons, opossums, and even the occasional coyote. The most exciting large mammal we encountered—at least second-hand—was a black bear, which was discovered on the playground of a nearby elementary school early in the morning. Our ferocious guard dog, Daisy Lightning, a 16-pound brindled pug with poor eyesight, did her best to simultaneously wake us and frighten off the intruder, barking and snarling like some kind of hybrid of Cerberus and White Fang, in a package the size of a pork roast with feet. It must have worked, because animal control was able to subdue the bear an hour later, a mile or so from our home, and remove it safely to the Oregon Coast Range.

These days, we live between that same Coast Range and the Pacific Ocean, so who knows? We might meet that bear again. We’ll be on our own this time, though: the ever-valiant Daisy Lightning is now living with her big sister in southern California (at least that’s how my younger daughter always described herself in relation to our brave little pug.) We’ve had no bear sightings yet, though once again we find ourselves living near a park adjacent to a wilderness area, which in turn backs up to one of the many small lakes that dot the Oregon Coast here between Cape Meares and Mt. Neakahnie. We’ve seen deer many times in the park and deer prints in our garden; the primary criterion for landscape plant selection is: will deer eat this? Fortunately we have many favorite plants that meet this specification, and our small garden boasts a selection of heuchera, lavender, daffodils, grape hyacinth, and other plants that are not flavor-of-the-month for the local deer.

But that Bigfoot thing… We regularly take road trips through the breathtaking scenery of the Pacific Northwest—just going to the grocery store, for us, involves passing some of the more stunning parts of the Oregon Coast, and heading into Portland for a night on the town or a few days of work takes us past the Trask Wilderness and through the Tillamook State Forest. And trips to California have seen us stopping in the Avenue of the Giants, near the coast, or whisking ourselves along Interstate 5 beside another kind of giant, the Siskiyou mountains.

It was on one such trip through the Siskiyous that Julie, some years before, first brought up the subject of Bigfoot, as the deep carpet of green rolled over the edges of the foothills while Mt. Shasta’s glaciers winked in and out of view as we swept through the curves and crests of the highway.

“Do you think Bigfoot is real?”

I relayed some of the stories I’d heard growing up in northern California, on summer vacations as a child near the shores of Lake Shasta. Our hosts, looking to harrow up our young souls and freeze our blood, told in hushed tones of dark, shaggy figures furtively loping through the forests, the footfalls of huge feet hushed by the carpet of pine needles and leaf mould. Our eyes widened with each syllable, and refused to close even after we returned to our cabin, my brother and I straining into the darkness swept by yellow headlights as our parents drove back to where we were spending the night.

“But do you think he’s real?” Julie repeated.

“As the TV show says, ‘I want to believe,’” I responded. “It’s not necessarily that I want to believe in Bigfoot in particular: I want to believe that there are still wild places in the world, places where a larger-than-human biped could realistically be expected to elude the gaze of science and publicity for hundreds of years.” She nodded.

“I want to believe that there still exist stretches of forest unspoiled by human contact, not yet cut down and replanted, not yet razed for subdivisions and supermarkets. I want to believe that there are swaths of nature not yet catalogued, indexed, documented, eventually to be put up for sale to the highest bidder, covered in asphalt and tilt-ups.”

We rounded a bend and saw, off to the west, the jagged grey teeth of the Castle Crags, the Shasta Wilderness’ answer to the Dolomites of Italy or the Dentelles of Provence, ragged ridges of granite jutting out of what seemed to be the infinite forests of the Siskiyous.

Is Bigfoot real? I think I’d be saddened to learn definitively one way or the other; if a Sasquatch was ever taken, humanely of course, to be studied and scrutinized and catalogued in the grand hierarchy of Earth’s creatures. It would diminish the sense of wonder and mystery represented by the vast stretches of unexplored country in which he may, or may not, find refuge.

And if he were fully and unequivocally debunked, that might be sadder, if only because a full and unequivocal debunking would involve the demolition, or at least the despoiling, of what legend says is the habitat and range of Bigfoot. We need the wilderness, with its unanswered questions and unexplored depths.

I’ll settle for listening for the sound of a wheelbarrow and a heavy tread in our back yard on sleepless nights.