The leaden sky will soon fade to darkness and the cold air of a January day will just grow colder as I sit with Lonnie Taylor under the bare winter trees waiting for our quarry. I have traveled forty miles west of Nashville with hopes of catching a glimpse of, well, Bigfoot. I haven’t just idly entered the woods hoping blind luck will bring the fabled creature of cryptozoologists dreams my way. My guide is the self-professed guru of the great apes that live (or may not live) on Tennessee’s wildly wooded western Highland Rim.
Taylor came by his expertise on the subject of Bigfoot by accident. Not a man given to whims or flights of fancy, he doesn’t believe in most things until proven to him. He’s not even too sure a man ever walked on the moon. On this subject he allows there would be plenty of room for propaganda, considering the space race with the Soviets.
But one day in 2002 while deer hunting on Hayden Ridge in Humphreys County he became a believer in Bigfoot, a creature he had never given any previous thought. Hiking up a steep hill side he pointed to an uprooted tree that had pulled a good six feet of earth out of the ground when it tumbled.
“Right over there behind them tree roots, that’s where I first saw something standing looking at me. The root ball was a little bigger then but I could feel the eyes on me. It was eerie.”
“Did you know then it was something out of the ordinary for lack of a better word, or did you maybe think it was a deer or a bear or something like that?”
“It was upright so I immediately knew it wasn’t a deer and I’ve never heard of bears around here but I thought it might be another hunter. But it just stood there staring and anybody else would have said something.”
“Did you think about shooting it?”
“No. Because there was a chance it was another hunter but even by the time I figured out it wasn’t, even though I got a little scared shooting it just wouldn’t have seemed right.”
“So what happened next?”
“It just turned around and walked away. That’s when I could tell how big it was. It was over six feet tall, and broad across the shoulders.”
After that Lonnie ended his hunting trip early and walked at a quick step back to his truck on the little chert road. Headed back into town he said he debated who to tell and then decided he’d be better off not telling anybody. “Not even your wife?” I asked.
“We were going through a divorce at the time,” he replied.
So Lonnie sat on his encounter for two years until late 2004 when he saw a special on cryptozoology on the Discovery Channel. One of the commentators on bigfoot was with the North American Bigfoot Research Society (NABRS) and mentioned stories of encounters posted on the groups web site. Lonnie went to the library and looked through the group’s web site. He read several of the encounters from different posters and encouraged by the honesty of what he read he posted the details of his own encounter.
After reading Lonnie’s encounter on the web site Hank Davidson of NABRS contacted Lonnie by telephone to flesh out the story. “Actually we contact posters by telephone unless they click the Do Not Contact Me box on the web site,” says Davidson, who works as a state water quality inspector in Ashville, North Carolina when not moonlighting as a bigfoot field researcher. “We try to flesh out their stories and see if it sounds legit before we research it further.” I spoke to Davidson by telephone in my own attempt to pin down the veracity of Lonnie’s story. But I had to remind myself that Lonnie had only reported a bigfoot he had seen when he wasn’t looking for one. Davidson on the other hand had dedicated a second career to an animal that 300 years of science and settlement hasn’t proven to exist.
“After speaking with Mr. Taylor on the telephone I concluded that he had had an encounter with some creature that he couldn’t explain away as a trick of lighting or any other condition that sometimes makes familiar things seem unfamiliar. So I took a long weekend and drove over to Tennessee to conduct an onsight inspection with Mr. Taylor.”
Lonnie took Davidson to the spot he had just shown me. Davidson investigated the area for wallow areas, foot prints, and stray hairs on old barbed wire. “All he found was some deer fur in the bob-wire,” says Lonnie. “You can always find some deer fur in old bob-wire out someplace like this.”
Davidson concurred that he didn’t find anything of interest but that the area was sufficiently remote and wooded to harbor a large hominid and for that creature to go undiscovered “for a long time”, apparently forever.
One thing is for certain, Lonnie Taylor and Hank Davidson aren’t the only bigfoot believers.
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Skookum, Stink Ape…native legend, eyewitness accounts, and no shortage of tall-tales tell us that there is a pipedal hominid running around the remote places of North America. The First Nation tribes of the Northwest incorporated Sasquatch onto their totem poles. The stink ape has been running around the swampy land of Florida for years and a Bigfoot-like creature reported near Fouke, Arkansas inspired the 1973 film The Legend of Foggy Bottom. According to the Bigfoot Field Research Office there have been sightings all over Tennessee including Lewis, Hickman, Marshall, and Williamson counties.
One need not be an aging hippie or shaggy mountain man whose spent too many nights alone in the woods to believe Bigfoot exists. In a 2002 interview with National Public Radio Jane Goodall, the world’s most noted primatologist, professed, "you'll be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist…". The club of Bigfoot proponents includes Ph.D.'s and fish-and-game and law enforcement officials.
What makes so many people believe (or at least want to believe) such a creature exists? If these giant hominids do exist why have they never been scientifically documented? I will tell you now I am no believer in Sasquatch or creatures like it. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in the Northwest and Tennessee and many, many other people have spent their entire lifetimes in the remote backcountry of the United States and never reported such a creature…never even knew to think about it. I can't believe that such a creature could be out their and remain undiscovered, leaving no indisputable evidence, for so long.
But like so many I want to believe. I've read the books of the true believers and that is what I intend to share here, there evidence.
Like so many stories Bigfoot has its roots in legend, both mythology of native peoples and the urban legends of the recent masses. A giant hairy wild man was a real but unseen entity feared by the Native American tribes of northwestern North America. Skookum or Saquatch were two of the common names given to this animal who hovered just below the realm of the spirit world. The creature haunted their dreams, adorned their totem poles in an effort to ward off the evil spirits, and I suspect kept the children from running off too far from the village.
Early white settlers to the area learned of the tales and had their own encounters. In his 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter future-president Theodore Roosevelt relates a story told to him by an old trapper who had a fatal run in with a hominid in the mid-1800's.
Referred to as the Baunum account after the old man who related it, he describes how he and a partner were trapping in then little known mountains between Montana's Salmon and Wisdom Rivers. Having been terrorized by a shadowy, smelly bipedal creature for several days Baunum returned to camp at the end of the fourth day to find his partner dead, his neck broken with fang marks in his throat.
The next time a Bigfoot creature gained widespread public attention was in 1924 when construction worker Albert Ostman took a vacation to Toba Inlet, British Columbia to look for an abandoned gold mine he'd heard about. While in the deep Douglas fir and sitka spruce forests Ostman claims to have been abducted by a family of Sasquatch. According to Ostman he spent a week with the hominids. His story goes that he was treated well and may have been the intended beaux of an adolescent female who he describes as demure. At any rate Ostman made his escape and the world lost its first chance at Sasquatch/human romance. His story went out to newspapers all over the United States and Canada.
Depression and World War occupied the minds of Americans throughout the 30's and 40's but in 1958 Bigfoot burst onto the national scene once again and hasn't been out of the American consousness since. A contsruction crew was building a highway through a remote area of Humboldt County in California when bulldozer operator Jerry Crew reported finding large, human looking footprints. The story was picked up by the Associated Press and garnered international attention. Ray Wallace, one of the contractors on the road project took advantage of the attention and turned Bigfoot into a cottage industry, selling plaster casts to tourist from a roadside stand. Upon his death in 2002 Wallace's family confessed that he had forged the tracks found by Crew. In fact he kept the fake feet in a shed behind his house. But this apparent forgery inspired two down and out cowboys from eastern Washington to travel to California and collect the most controversial evidence of Bigfoot's existence to date.
Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were a week into their search on the afternoon of October 20, 1967 when they stopped by Bluff Creek to water their horses. This is when they saw a large, black hominid, a female as evidenced by the breasts, walking away from them on the other side of the creek. Hurriedly Peterson got out his camera and filmed ninety seconds of grainy footage that has become the holy celluloid canticle of the true believers. The film has been examined umpteen different times and has held up to the best measure of proof that exists: it can't be completely dismissed by non-believers. Though this is backward logic from the scientific method of proving a fact, it at least casts some degree of possibility on an unlikely prospect. Of course as of late 2007 there is an old cowboy up in a little sage brush town in eastern Washington who says he was in the monkey suit that day but he hasn't garnered too much credence from believers or skeptics.
Perhaps the most credible proponent of Bigfoot's existence was the late Grover Krantz, Ph.D. and Professor of Anthropolgy at the University of Washington. Krantz studied Bigfoot casts with a more critical and learned eye than prior researchers who, for the most part were self-proclaimed (and self taught) experts at tracking and hunting. The evidence that turned Krantz into a believer was the existence of dermal ridges on casts of Bigfoot prints. These ridges were a curious anatomical detail that he hypothesized no hoaxers would have thought to carve into an imprint making device. Additionally Krantz looked at the shape of the foot, differentiating fraud from credible evidence by the relation between the big toe and the ball of the foot. Most hoaxes produce a flat footed uniform indention not compatable with the anatamoically function of an actual foot in motion. Perhaps Krantz's most memorable support of the existence of Bigfoot is his espousal of the anatomical veracity of the Skookum cast.
The Skookum cast came about during a Bigfoot hunting expedition in 2000 in Washington's Giford Pinchot National Forest. The researchers laid some bait WHAT KIND? in some soft mud. When they checked the "trap" they discovered some prints and the hollows of likely butt checks where the animal had sat down and leaned over on its side. The resulting 300 pound plaster cast was examined by a team of scientists, wildlife experts, and law enforcement fingerprint specialists who agreed that they had found the imprint of an animal not easily classified. While short of the holy grail (a carcass) the Skookum cast is among the strongest evidence cited by Bigfoot believers as to the existence of such a creature.
But I must confess I lump Krantz, Peterson and other Bigfoot "provers" in with all people who want to believe. For me the most compelling research (not evidence) into the existence of Bigfoot is contained in Robert Pyle's 1995 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. Pyle, a renowned nature writer and holds a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry, entered the woods of western Washington with a simple premise: Is this area large enough and bountiful enough to hide and support a large hominid?
Pyle spends a summer and fall wandering the remote backcountry between Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams. He talks with local Native Americans who tell him their native mythologies of such creatures, he talks with an old road builder who tells him of contracts he had with the U.S. Forest Service forbidding him to go public any sighting he may have of Bigfoot type creatures…and he eats a lot of salmonberry to show there is ample vegetation to support a large animal (of course bears have been supporting themselves on salmonberry in the same area for millennia). And at the end of the book, after weeks and weeks spent walking alone (and often naked) in this vast wilderness, Pyle has an encounter he isn't able to explain. I'd like to tell it here but that is Pyle's story and a selling point for his book so I don't think my divulging the curious and slightly creepy episode would be right.
But Pyle's study of the sustainability of Bigfoot's habitat is more important than the search for the creature itself. The earliest encounters with giant hominids come from men who were inherently seekers: hunters, trappers, prospectors. They had left behind the familiar to make a go of it in the unknown. Their search for precious metals and fur was just an extension of their inward search for themselves. It is little wonder they should return and grow old telling fantastic tales of what they found.
Lonnie and I leave the woods with the gathering twilight and it’s fully dark when we get back to his truck. We drive the eight miles into Waverly and go into a bar called At Work for a beer. We haven’t seen any sign of the creature today. In fact, despite many subsequent deer hunting trips in the same woods Lonnie hasn’t seen any other sign of the elusive creature since his chance encounter seven years ago. I wonder if this makes him doubt what he saw.
“No, I’ll always know what I saw was real that morning,” says Lonnie, staring at his bottle of Bud Light, peeling the label. “If I never see another one I’ll never doubt the one I saw. It’s like falling in love, even if it never happens again you’ll always remember the first time.”
And I can hardly believe how appropriately Lonnie summed up my own thoughts of his experience and everyone who claims to have had an encounter with Bigfoot. What they experienced so unexpectedly makes a profound impact, and like love, though they may never experience it again, that first encounter lives on in their psyche, and they become a true believer.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 09, 2009
A Field Guide To Southern Rivers...
Southern rivers are rich places that have captured the American mind for hundreds of years, inspiring music, literature, and the study of nature. With over 500 species of fish and other aquatic life, the rivers of the Southeastern United States are among the most biodiverse on Earth.
"A Field Guide to Southern Rivers" describes the most common and the more interesting flora and fauna one is likely to encounter along rivers of the region. I have spent my life fishing and canoeing the rivers of middle Tennessee and have spent time on rivers in Georgia and Florida as well.
I earned a chemistry degree in college with forty-four semester hours of biology and spent weekends exploring hills and hollows collecting plant specimens and looking for waterfalls. In my adult life I have been a land surveyor, chopping through the brush, locating streams. I know southern rivers.
The book begins with a 1500-word essay describing riparian ecology and how the different components of an ecosystem fit together to form the “web of life”. From there the guide goes into descriptions of species, families, or orders as applicable. The descriptions in my guide tend to be generalized while presenting some anthropocentric information about the plant or animal in question. My voice is as much that of a poet as of a naturalist.
"A Field Guide to Southern Rivers is an indespensible resource to a natural wonder.
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