The Secret History of Bigfoot

The thrill, needless to say, is in the hunt. But it’s also in wilderness’s capacity to exceed your imagination, literally and metaphorically. A world that “displays itself in hiding,” to borrow John Berger’s phrase, contains immensities.

While (Robert Michael) Pyle had contempt for the Trumpers and magical thinkers, he was equally contemptuous of those who dismissed Bigfoot out of hand. “How can you say, ‘This cannot be’?” His voice, I noticed, suddenly became more forceful. His palms were upturned in the manner of someone addressing a jury. “I’m a scientist. I know what a null hypothesis is. I know how to establish deniability. I filter everything through parsimony, and Bigfoot passes the test. Not only is it parsimonious to think of the animal evolutionarily, but biogeographically it’s not a problem. And the food dynamics — a big hairy ape surviving on what’s available — hold up. There’s also Native American traditional knowledge of great depth. Very few areas of doubt cannot be confronted with parsimony. Not to mention that parsimony does not easily admit a hoax of such grand design and coordination. Talk about a conspiracy theory!”

While I had my doubts about Bigfoot, the point wouldn’t be to prove or disprove whether it existed but to try and set aside my own convictions, unpeel the oniony layers of belief, and understand something about Bigfooters and the culture that shaped them. Knowing as little as I did, I thought America itself might even poke its head out from behind Bigfoot’s shadow.

There is, to be sure, some nontrivial convergence, well apart from the Gandalf beards and Buddha paunches, between Bigfooters and Trumpers: extreme reactionary views, a tendency toward the sensationalistic, a fetishization of traditional masculinity, a hard-bitten mistrust of urban elites generally and the federal government and its scientific minions specifically, coupled with an inverse, reflexive flag waving and suspicion of “protestors” and “kneelers,” as well as a depth of commitment we used to reserve for the church. That’s not consistent among all Bigfooters, obviously, any more than wokester inanities like defunding the police are among self-hating liberals. But there seemed to be a disproportionate number of Trumpers in Jefferson, amounting almost to a homogeneity (it was Texas, after all). A key characteristic of both is that they trust themselves and themselves alone to parse fact from fiction, while at the same time, the language they share often doesn’t register a difference between the two.

The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition. Up to a point.

"Our newfangled spirituality, animated less by anti-religion than pro-everything else, is a Bizarro World muddying of alternative practices and nostrums with trace elements of Judeo-Christian superstitions and Oprah-style kitsch...so we join Wiccan churches, consult fortune tellers and psychics, contemplate mandalas, attend immortality retreats, try our hand at forest bathing, ayahuasca, spell candles, salt therapy, shamanic sound healing, homeopathic medicine, purging, or sweat lodges, or chart a path of "spiritual freedom" in the Eckankar cult. We believe in soul travel, extrasensory perception, ancient aliens, the lost continent of Atlantis, the positive energy of crystals, Nostradamus's predictions, yoga not just as exercise but as spiritual practice, Mayan end-time, astral projection, haunted houses, that coffee enemas cure mental illness, what the Oujia board says, or, like Tucker Carlson, in testicle tanning to replenish testosterone."

A remnant of our pagan past, the wild man was a living symbol of our innate wantonness and hardened nature, of what could happen if you strayed from God.

Bigfooting was a little like wilderness LARPing, pursued in often abstract terms, with an endgame that was hardly more real than Quidditch.

On a very fundamental level, we need there to be some mystery in the world. Those mysteries can be frightening, or they can be enlightening. Bigfoot is about mystery and about possibility, not about certainty. It’s about what might still be possible in this world of ours. For your friend Friar Tuck, the mere possibility of Bigfoot existing might be a psychological necessity, because it means we haven’t totally ruined this place.

there may be no more sacred expression of american exceptionalism than faith in a monster we’ve adapted to fit our peculiar view of history, unfalsifiable by facts proffered by science or qualified experts, and suggesting a medieval belief in the raw and violent power of nature.

perhaps he means how we’re unable or unwilling to reshape our narratives about the world, even when the evidence suggests those narratives are little more than figments. mired in nostalgia for the past, we lose sight of the present. so that even in this most remarkable landscape, awesome beyond belief, a scrim falls over our eyes, preventing us from seeing it as we might, if only we were more clear-sighted.