Bigfoot and Me: A Tale of Unrequited Love.
Back in the 1990s, my husband and I flew to northern California on vacation, but also to go to those rhododendron forests where bigfoot was supposed to live. I had done my research and had noted a few very specific spots I wanted to investigate. It was summer, and I thought that it would be a good idea to stake out a creek where BF would likely visit.
First, the locals had removed all the signs in the national (public) forests. We found the signs stashed behind sequoias and redwoods in several parks. And marijuana groves which gave us pause. But we soldiered on for miles and miles.
Second, the flies and biting bugs were very annoying. We had welts on our arms. But we soldiered on.
Third, there was no parking close to where we wanted to do the stakeouts, so we humped all our gear (cameras, tripods, bug spray, food, water, cognac, etc.) and soldiered on.
Fourth, we had originally allocated 3-4 days to do all this, but at the end of the first bug-ridden day, my husband wanted to stop, but I insisted we fuckin’ soldier on.
Results
No bigfoot sightings, but a few very odd disruptions of the vegetation.
In several places in the thick rhododendron forests, individual trees were pulled up by the roots and discarded 5-10 feet away from the hole. These trees were over 10 feet tall, and had trunk diameters of 8-10 inches. Big root systems. I very carefully inspected a few of these trees for bite or claw marks, or for branches with stripped away leaves, and saw nothing to indicate how they were pulled from the ground. My husband and I experimented with pulling together at a smaller tree to see if we could dislodge it. We couldn’t budge it at all. I was looking for claw or bite marks because that is how a bear or pig would dislodge a bush. Whatever had dislodged the tree was stronger than us.
It also didn’t use a shovel, because we inspected the ground around the hole and saw no evidence of this. We saw marks in the soil as if something was rooting in the hole, and had cast earth 5 feet or more away from the hole (the cast soil had dried out more than the undisrupted soil, and so was a slightly different color). I rooted around in the hole with a stick, and uncovered grubs, earthworms, and some bug with a white body that I couldn’t identify.
Not immediately near the rhododendrons, but about a quarter mile from the trees, we noticed a different specie of deciduous tree in small groves. Some of these trees had had their top branches twisted together; three to five trees in a straight line, not in a circular bunch. The trees were a few feet taller than we were (10 feet?), and the twisted tops were always higher than we could reach, let alone manipulate. Taller people than us, 6 feet tall lets say, could have done this if there were several people coordinating their efforts. We had seen these kinds of twisted together trees in southern Indiana in the deep forests, and could not imagine why anyone would bother. These trees were woven together.
Staking out the creek: for two half-days, I staked out a creek by myself. My husband had given up on the heat and uselessness of the endeavor, and went for a hike by himself. I never saw, heard, or smelt anything unusual. On the second day, my husband found me and persuaded me to give it up in favor of cold beer and air conditioning. On our walk back to the car, I casually looked down a ravine and THERE WAS BIGFOOT! I thought I was imagining things, but there it was. I was so excited, and then scared, that I became dizzy with adrenaline. I kept looking, frozen to the spot, when I realized bigfoot was really scared too as it was not moving at all. I then became worried that it would attack me if it was feeling threatened. What had I gotten my poor husband into?
Then as my eyes adjusted to the shadows in the ravine, I realized that the bigfoot shape was a big tree stump, looking remarkably like a bigfoot gazing up at the spot I was in.
Fuck bigfoot. My heart is forever broken.