What Bigfoot and the Pandemic Have in Common
And How the Rumored Beast Still Bewilders Me
***As I move in and out of time frames in this piece, I note “New Paragraph.” That is to tell the reader my moving out of the order of chronological time is intentional. It is jarring, though planned, and is directed to the point of writing about the subject of Bigfoot.***
I’ve been listening to a lot of David Paulides of Missing 411 fame lately. He’s interesting, smart enough to let the watcher come to her own conclusions, and it doesn’t hurt that he looks like a well-preserved Kurt Russell. I don’t believe I’ve heard the word “Bigfoot” come out of his mouth even once. But then I’ve only watched about five of his fifty-some YouTube episodes. What I have taken from his presentations is that he isn’t afraid to question the overwhelming number of people who go missing in the wild and that he gives particular mention to those SAR folks and Native American points of view that weigh in on this subject. He manages emotion and infatuation with a subject literally bigger than life.
New Paragraph: For many years I documented science. As a medical transcriptionist, I’ve transcribed literally years of physician notes. They were the scientists in my life. . . the recognizers of truth, at least medical truth. Pathologists, in particular, impressed me with their incredible insight, their decipherings through a world strewn with second guesses. I remember them deliberating for hours, seeking counsel between themselves, calling in professionals in the hard cases. They recognized something about disease that isn’t discussed very often — how it shapeshifts. How it sends you one direction when you should be going another.
New Paragraph: And, ironically, into this mix came Bigfoot. Being raised in the Pacific Northwest, I learned early on about the possibilities of this creature. Though my parents didn’t talk about bizarre tales often, it was usually when I was eavesdropping on them that I began to understand their fascination — hushed tones, more questions than answers, and a slew of uncomfortable gestures, like nail biting and chain smoking. Nothing else they could’ve done would have impressed me more — unless, of course, they had seen him themselves. But I don’t believe they did, despite how much I wanted it to be. Those barely uttered conversations between them and the gestures that went with them — about Bigfoot — settled in my young brain. And I never forgot.
New Paragraph: After transcribing for physicians over many years, I became intrigued with the idea of writing something of my own. I was living through some real-life drama, particularly serious illness in a young daughter, and had been journaling for some time. But the need to build story became overwhelming, and I began constructing a novel about a family and a complicated disease. A child was affected, so was a mother. And the idea occurred to me that I was slowly reconstructing a period of my own childhood when I was listening to my parents “undercover,” so to speak — when I heard their sincere worries about something wild and unpredictable, and was now translating that into the wildness of disease — horrible, disfiguring, unprecedented disease.
New Paragraph: Bigfoot still looms, mysterious and undetected, in the middle of a pandemic. His presence hasn’t subsided. In fact, I think he may be even more noticed by some who are the documentarians of fringe science, caught in the uncomfortable position somewhere between doubter and unequivocal witness. Like me, they watch others who describe this creature with fascination and memories of their own. Without them, we know only the rudiments of legends that persist and defy time and sometimes gravity. We yearn to validate something out of sync with reality, and so along with many others I cue myself to listen to stories of a beast that shapeshifts, that filters through a crack in time, that understands us perhaps far better than we understand ourselves. Bigfoot, I’m learning, is a lot like disease.
And so I watch David Paulides with a degree of admiration I will never afford somebody like Joe Exotic. Both of these men explore the wild unknown — but only one knows what I know. That an animal can creep into your subconscious without you ever uttering his name. That he can’t be caged, isolated, destroyed or forgotten, but he can be planned for, warned about, enlisted in recruiting believers, and magnified into the power of thousands. A lot like a disease, he’s rumored to pick off the weak and the brilliant and the unsuspecting. And until we gain a “specimen,” he will elude our every utterance. Bigfoot builds into our pandemic psyche. He never completely disappears and I wonder now if, like a virus that flares and wanes, he will forever stalk us, even in our most child-like dreams. He certainly has so far.
