I and Thou: A Bigfoot Encounter
Still from the from the Patterson-Gimlin film, 1967. Wikimedia commons. I once bought a shirt at an outdoor market in New Orleans that I still wear pretty regularly. It’s red plaid flannel with a hand-stitched Sasquatch in classic mid-stride on each shoulder. It takes people a beat or two to see the figures, in brown thread against the crisscross background. They stare hard into the fabric covering my collarbone.
“Is that…Bigfoot?” they ask, as if they’ve discovered something that maybe even I wasn’t aware of—sighting, there on my shoulder, the myth given shape and substance.
I used to wear the shirt on nights when my roommate was out of town. I’d walk the two miles from our Mid-City apartment to the loud, dirty, shoulder-to-shoulder dance floors I liked on Saint Claude Avenue. Strangers would point at the little Sasquatches on my shirt. “You into that stuff?”
“I guess you could say that,” I’d reply, and with straws in their mouths they nodded knowingly.
Shouting to be heard above “Bennie and the Jets,” they’d tell me they’d seen a UFO once, an enormous blue light low over empty fields. They’d talk about some relation who’d been to Loch Ness years ago, and how the water had trembled against the shore as if something below were stirring in its sleep. For so many, these fraying patches of thread in the shape of Bigfoot became an excuse to talk about doubt and belief.
In some ways, Bigfoot is an easy currency for discussing meaning. On the one hand, he conjures curiosity, magic, and an avid desire for wonder. On the other hand, he stands for weariness, frustration, and the jaded disappointment when you realize, time and time again, that wonder is not easy to find and belief is difficult to maintain.
Whenever I move to a new place, I visit the website for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. Reading stories of encounters that took place close to my new home, I learn two things: the names of nearby wilderness areas, and the fact that a relatively high number of the people who live near me believe their immediate surroundings contain inexplicable strangeness.
The design of the BFRO website makes these encounters feel even closer. Clicking on a map of the United States, you hover the cursor over a state and an alphabetical list of counties appears. I click on the names of places I’m beginning to recognize, and read about people laying claim to mysteries that happen close by, the footprints left in their flowerbeds.
A few months after moving to Iowa, I read about two young men who volunteered at the Macbride Raptor Center, a wildlife research facility and sanctuary for injured birds of prey. I’d recently visited the Center with friends, so I could easily visualize the span of dense woods behind the network of cages with owls awake and hungry inside. The two men had driven out through the woods
