Sourcebooks
Review by George Yatchisin
How much of writing is staring down the dark. (Just ask Dante and his selva oscura.) Of course that also means, how much of life is staring down the dark, knowing that even if we fail or fear to consider it, the dark will swallow us up in the end. So maybe that’s why we want something to be out there, and why not Bigfoot?
Here’s one of the nut graphs John O’Connor offers in his lively, thoughtful, funny, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster:
Whatever mythic yearning monsters fulfill, we’re jonesing hard. Sixty-six million of us, according to a recent survey, profess to believe in just one: Bigfoot. Sixty-six million! As these numbers suggest, it’s not only crackpots who believe. There may be no more sacred expression of American exceptionalism than faith in a monster we’ve adapted to fit our peculiar view of history, unfalsifiable by facts proffered by science or qualified experts, and suggesting a medieval belief in the raw and violent power of nature. Perhaps we all need Bigfoot in our lives, whether we realize it or not.
Having survived a cryptozoologically-curious 1970s childhood myself, from Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of… to creepy drive in viewings of The Legend of Boggy Creek, to the grainy Patterson-Gimlin film—not even a full minute, but the Bigfoot even stares back at the camera—I might be too perfect an audience for this book. But O’Connor so thoroughly explores our need for Bigfoot, while often hiking through the wilderness for the shy creature himself, alone and with others, from Oregon to Kentucky to Maine, that the book makes for a heady, thrilling ride. Even if he likes to lean on psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, including this crucial quote, “Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.”
Sure that’s an impossible to resist hook for a creative nonfiction writer. And O’Connor is very much a master of creative nonfiction, from his reading list (Peter Matthiessen, John Berger, Edward Abbey) to his ability to nail an image, with lines like, “The Columbia River, still as a martini, curled along beside me,” or, “The weensie glint from my headlamp illuminated fuck all.” Then there’s his high/low culture range of references that joke and elucidate at once; in one paragraph he can manage to connect large footprint tracks among Immanuel Kant, Werewolf in London, The Howling, and close with the zinger, “We could quickly be relegated to the meat aisle.”
O’Connor also deftly deals with the dread BBIs, or Boring But Important Information passages. He’s ever sure to provide context to a sentence like, “Of the approximate 1.04 billion acres of virgin forest that formerly existed in the United States, more than 96 percent of it has been cut down,” by making sure we see the loss of ivory-bill woodpeckers, wolves, panthers, “trees older than Chartres Cathedral.” His time searching the habitat of the possibly extinct ivory-bill in Bayou de View, Arkansas, makes the pain greater than just the heavy weight of ginormous numbers.
For this is an environmental book, too, a howl of lament (Bigfootian in eeriness and force?) for all the hardwood gone, of our climate warming. Quoting a Utah State Univ folklorist, Lynne S. McNeill, O’Connor suggests our belief in the hairy cryptid might mean this: “It says something positive about our wilderness spaces. It says we haven’t totally destroyed our planet, that there are enough wild places left that a creature like Bigfoot can live undetected.”
Reading through the bibliography of Bigfoot lore also leads him to the ugliness of -isms. For just one example, O’Connor writes that the influential Ivan T. Sanderson’s1961 Abominable Snowmen is “where Native folk tales and iconography of shaggy humanoids first became mashed up with the white man’s self-ratifying pseudoscience, fueling a sloppy condensing and transmogrification of Indigenous legends that characterize much of the Bigfoot canon today (we take what we like, discard the rest).” That’s nailing colonialism and appropriation in one pithy parenth.
Ultimately the book might most strongly read cryptozoology as capitalist critique. O’Connor argues for Bigfoot as the ultimate, run to the woods and do your own thing Libertarian, or even, “A great white hope, expressing and repressing titanic disquiet at the unwinding of the white working-class world and fulfilling a desire for the magical reassurance that the old regime, despite appearances, would endure.” These passages brought to mind Joe Bageant’s incisive Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. So many of the folks O’Connor runs with in his travels could easily be disregarded with haughty, Cambridge-living, university-teaching contempt. But O’Connor very consciously doesn’t go there. He knows we all need something to get us by. And how much better to hunt for an elusive hairy beast in the woods than a VP you think did your movement wrong in the halls of the Capitol.
Although there is too often an ugly slippery slope synergy from Bigfoot to UFOs to Lizard People to Q to Donald Trump, O’Connor kindly suggests, “We might, then, see Bigfoot as metaphysical consolation, a form of therapy and sustenance. Bigfoot’s tribe sure could use it these days.”
