Miles from my home, on Northern California’s Trinity River, a tributary to the Klamath, sits tiny Willow Creek. The tiny town is best known for its Bigfoot Museum. Across America there’s some dispute over the best area for Bigfoot watching, but Willow Creek has a pretty good case. It’s near here, where in a rather rugged area called Bluff Creek that the most famous Bigfoot home movie was made. 1967’s Patterson-Gimlin film has been enormously influential. The appearance style and gait of the hairy hominid in this short film has become iconic Bigfoot lore, framing all speculation since about the mysterious forest creature.
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It’s fitting that the Bigfoot footage is probably the most iconic home movie from the 1960s outside of the Zapruder film. That other film, which captured the final moments of John F. Kennedy, has generated even more voluminous speculation. Researchers dedicating hours to the analysis in their shadow and blur university labs where John Travolta’s character from Blow Out is the professor. And like the Zapruder film’s ability to frame our cultural imagination about assassination plots, grassy knoll crossfires, men with black suits and black umbrellas and so on.
Bigfoot might be a phenomenon in American folklore, but it was the film that made it iconic. The movies have attempted Bigfoot as well to, let’s say, less than resounding success. There are loads of B-horror movies about Bigfoot, none of them terribly interesting. Most of them are framed by that old film – shaky cams, home movie footage found in a creepy abandoned camp. It’s become a staple of the found footage variety of horror movie from Cannibal Holocaust to Blair Witch Project. Even Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek, filmed in Humboldt County, repeats this Super 8 / VHS influenced trope. In the 1970s, an alien robot Sasquatch wrestled in slow motion with Steve Rogers on the Six-Million-Dollar Man. And there is the 1980s John Lithgow-starring Harry and Hendersons, which was spun off into a three season run tv show in the 1990s. By now it’s become something of a joke, fodder for Jack Links jerky and witty pomo commercials for upstart mattress companies. Bigfoot isn’t treated as a bloodthirsty monster like a werewolf, but is something of a jolly mascot of the forest. The sylvan Santa. The Cupid of the Klondike. A schmaltzy curio, bringer of glad tidings. Bigfoot rumors and speculation are endless.
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Something is terribly amiss with all this buzz and activity circling around a legendary creature. There are lots of ways to talk about this, but I’ll refer to the movie Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, where Jack and Kyle trip on 
mushrooms and have a music video with Sasquatch. Their lyrics however unwittingly point to the precise problem with Sasquatch lore,
“There were some scientists/ Tryin to figure out the Sasquatch riddle / Then they figures out it was a missing link / Scientists have proven that the Sasquatch he is real / Take a look at the plaster cast of his foot now you know he’s real . Listen real close to the audio tape not human you know he’s real / Couldn’t be a man in a gorilla suit no fuckin way now you know he’s real / Real, real, real-real, real … Sasquatch we know your legend’s real / Sasquatch we know your love is real.”
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All of our thoughts and lore of Bigfoot center on a basic question – but is it real? This is the key concern here. Not Sasquatch, but Reality. The key concern is a test of science. The questions we ask are more in line with forensics. Hair. Footprints. DNA. Fossils. Carbon dating. As the 17th Century Enlightenment philosopher Sir Francis Bacon said the ambitions of science, “My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”
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I submit that all of these questions concerning Bigfoot’s earthly reality are precisely the wrong questions. Not only wrongheaded, but banal. What are we demanding of our obsession is that empiricism will be capable of everything; even if that means using science to prove a matter of faith. To frame the Bigfoot question in such a way is already losing grasp of any significance Bigfoot might have. It’s not only hostile to nature, but it extinguishes the imagination, purging it of its penchant for enchantment while it restlessly pillaging the wilderness for resources.
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Bigfoot, in short, is not a matter for scientists to discover, but for folklore to point the way toward earthly soul-making. But to do this other thing, this other path, is to indulge the story. Yet this is precisely what is missing from Bigfoot speculation. For the last fifty plus years the only question we could come up with was the most boring one – is it real? The vacuity of this pursuit has left Bigfoot devoid of a coherent lore. Tenacious D sang “we know your legend’s real” – but what is the legend? What is the myth? Where are the bedtime stories? There has been no Bram Stoker, Mary Shelly, Victor Hugo, nor even Brothers Grim, Charles Perrault, or Hans Christen Anderson to give shape to the Sasquatch imagination. Of course, all of these writers were European, and they drew on folk stories, myths, dreams and fairy tales indigenous to their continent. Yet you never see anyone walking around with night vision cameras trying to prove vampires exist.
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This conspicuous lack of myth points out to me a core lack of indigenous folklore in America. Of course, there is a diverse world of American Indian lore, but this has not exactly translated to the dominant settler culture of North America. When settler Americans celebrate holidays, they invariably celebrate traditional European holidays with pagan roots gnarled under Christian patina. Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, Easter, Halloween and Christmas, all follow close to age-old Pre-Christian culture and climate. American knowledge of folklore and myth borrows heavily from the European literary cannon. Stories of werewolves, vampires, mermaids, trolls, elves, brownies, fauns, leprechauns, poltergeists, and so on, rely on European sources. Even American fantasy writing like hearkens to European lore and folk religious tropes from Renaissance, Middle Ages and prehistory. It’s as if American lore and literature is the distant child of Europe rather than a deep culture rooted in the American landscape. The barriers of race, language, creed and culture prevented the settler culture from absorbing much of the pagan folklore of the American Indians.
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Perhaps the reason the settler culture has little indigenous folklore has less to do with the relative shortness of time Europeans have been dwelling in America and more to do with the culture that they brought with them. Europeans found America in their cultural Renaissance, and found their United States on the pillars of the Enlightenment Project, Capitalism and grandiose ideas about spreading civilization. The settler culture, the culture of occupation, had no prehistory, no antiquity, and no Middle Age – times in which a culture had ears for the call of nature and it’s animistic, ensouling traits. This is why there are no Bigfoot bedtime stories in our history. If you’ve heard of one, it’s a postmodern retcon. American folklore has more to do with settlers and people of industry rather than wood elves. Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Daniel Boone, John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, Wild Bill and the countless cowboy heroes that turned themselves into literary icons of American Western literature. But again, these legends were partially based on historical figures and are specifically about spreading industry and civilization in the wild landscape; actors in rendering from earth her bounties.
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I propose that the enduring fascination with Bigfoot represents a vestige of indigenous American paganism shared among both the indigenous and settler cultures. It’s an enchantment with the native earth that we’ve been quashing with our obsessions with empiricism, subduing a myth-making mind at every urge of enchantment. Bigfoot has a locality in the wilderness specifically. He exists in the cultural borderlands of the dominant culture. In the Pacific Northwest his iconography pops up everywhere from bumper stickers to wood carvings. Similar to the borderlands of the American West in spots from New Mexico through the Rockies where the indigenous mythic imagination is evident in every gas station where curios and trinkets of animal spirit charms, wood carvings, kokopellis and kachina dolls. This is the cultural hub for legendary creatures from the Jackalope to the Jersey Devil.
Years ago, I read a fascinating history book called Beyond Geography by Frederick Turner. In it, he makes a startling case that the master narrative of all of western civilization is that it’s based on a contempt for nature. History is built out of a quest to repel and overcome the wilderness. The configurations of complex societies were built to resist, defy, sublimate, reconstruct wild nature and turn it into useful human product, or capital. It’s a theme in city-building as well as symbolically constructed in religion back to Augustine’s City of God, indeed, as far back as ancient Summer. This deep history translated to the European colonization of the New World. Discovering the new continent was not only the biggest fortune ever to be found and, well, stolen, (the theft of the Incan empire’s gold funded the Spanish empire for two centuries), but it offered a chance at spiritual renewal for the settlers. The themes of renewal, rebirth, the frontier, these become the grand narrative frames of American settlement. In some senses, this manifested itself as a contempt for the wilderness and mania of construction and expansion ensued in the New Frontier. For the early settlers and pioneers through the first couple of centuries in America, the wilderness takes the form of a dark, chaotic wood. A land of wolves and hostile natives speaking foreign tongues worshiping pagan gods. It was, to be blunt, a place of the devil. And to repel their fears, as well as the temptations of nature, they retreated to their written sanctuary, The Holy Bible.
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In this time the dominant story became the captivity narrative based on a hysterical fear that colonists would either run away tempted by the sirens of nature, or be kidnapped and turn “savage.” Repelling the natives, domesticating the animals, taming the wilderness, was part of not only the civilization project, but a religious duty to redeem the fallen primitive world. Cannan is to become Zion. America to become God’s chosen land and people. They saw in the new land a place to be reborn in the image of the new Adam. This is a key mythic origin for the American settler culture, born of one foot in the old world and one foot in the new. The new American identity forged in the crucible of the American wilderness.
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But there was another, hidden source of renewal in the New World. It’s a more hidden path, a left hand path, if you will. It kicked off in the Puritan colonies, where in 1625 at Marymount, now Quincy, Massachusetts. There colonist Thomas Morton incited a pagan resistance to the Christian occupiers. He and some others carved a May Pole and began pagan revelries with some of the local natives, blending pagan traditions of the British Isles and the New World. Morton and his separatists did this for five years and were eventually arrested in 1630. Morton was eventually deported back to England. What was this subversive group on to? If their group had instead turned into the primary culture rather than the Puritan, what kind of America might have emerged? Would our culture’s attitudes towards nature been different? Able to celebrate the lifesoul of things? Able to witness in everything not just measurable things, facts, or capital, but a living marvel to behold?
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It’s of this mind, this enchantment with living things, that a figure like Sasquatch belongs. A half-person, half-animal wild-ling, an emissary between humans and the Green World. What we need is a myth of Bigfoot. Perhaps Thomas Morton wasn’t deported to England. Perhaps that was a cover story. Maybe Morton became that Green Man, became Bigfoot. Sasquatches are not a different species. They are us when we’ve finally rooted here. They are the living world, visible to only those who have eyes to see. Bigfoot lives where the word for world is forest.
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There was more to this essay but I lost it in the woods somewhere.
A Fragile Dignity 