This episode features a very familiar creature — the Sasquatch, the Bigfoot, the Wild Man of the Northern Woods. But this story isn't like any story you've ever heard...
Our third full season of Camp Monsters will start in September, thanks to our sponsors at YETI. In the meantime, we figured we'd give you a handful of stories to tide you over. And while you think you might know everything there is to know about Sasquatch, this is a personal account. A story that'll have you crawling under the covers questioning whether or not you really believe in monsters.
Season sponsor: YETI
Artwork by: Tyler Grobowsky, @g_r_o_b_o
This is an REI Co-op Studios Production
No matter how dark the night…
No matter how fast you run…
No matter what is chasing you…
You’ll be safe if only you can make it to the campfire.
There it is, up ahead, through the trees.
We’re waiting for you, but…
Will you make it?
This is the Camp Monsters Podcast.
Our third full season will start in September, thanks to REI and our sponsors at YETI. But to help fill the time between now and then, we thought we’d tell a story that we’ve been saving since before our first season because… well because it’s too long and strange to fit into a single episode. And because it’s personal-- in fact, it’s the experience that started me down the path of cryptids research, the story that sparked what would eventually become the Camp Monsters podcast. But there are parts of it that… well, you’ll see what I mean when we get there.
The story features a very familiar creature-- Sasquatch, the Bigfoot, the Wild Man of the Northern Woods. But this story… this isn’t like any Bigfoot story you’ve ever heard. Over the next four months we’ll be releasing a show a month, and I hope you’ll listen in and... help me piece together just how it all unfolded... and see if you can help me understand what actually happened.
The story begins… well, where it begins is one of the things we’ll have to figure out as we go along. But it began for me on a dark, narrow path, with branches pressing close all around… No, I guess we’d better go back further than that, back some years ago into a different kind of wilderness than the ones these tales usually start in. A wilderness of words in an urban jungle-- a bookshop in the middle of San Francisco.
We’ll call it a bookshop for lack of a better term-- it was part cafe and part local library; at different hours of the day it was a concert hall, a conference room, a tent for revival meetings of the more fantastic faiths -- and the couch in the back had made it a temporary home to more than one vagabond poet. It was a sort of community nest feathered with old books on every subject imaginable, which were stacked on every flat surface and spilling into piles on the floor. It was my kind of place. I was there as often as I could be.
But not as often as Roger. Roger was one of the bookshop’s regulars. He stood out, but not because of any eccentricities-- the shop had plenty of resident eccentrics. Roger was noticeable because of his blandness. In the middle of that funky, artsy place he’d show up every day in outdated but immaculately neat business-wear-- white shirt, thin black tie, shiny wingtip shoes. In that bearded place he was clean-shaven, with his steel-grey hair cropped close to his head. He always sat at the same table with a big older-model laptop in front of him and dry, technical books at his elbow. Somebody told me he’d been a big part of the first tech boom in the early 80s, one of the computer pioneers. He was an old man, or seemed old to me then, but he was lean and sharp-- when he moved he moved quickly, purposefully, spry for his age. Against the shop’s atmosphere of studied non-conformism, he was the conformist refugee.
Turns out there was a reason for that-- and he hadn’t always been that way. Roger intrigued me, and though he kept himself mostly to himself I made it a project to talk to him. It was slow-going at first, but once he got to know me I found he could carry his end of a conversation. Just light stuff, mostly-- he’d make some remarks about the weather or I’d tell some kind of joke.
That was how the whole thing started, actually. A joke. Something Roger said lent itself to a little spontaneous joke about Bigfoot. I don’t recall what the joke was, but it was funny and harmless and Roger laughed at it. Riffing off the laughter I made what I thought was an even funnier joke, and for the sake of variety I used one of the other names for Bigfoot: Sasquatch.
I guess Roger didn’t think it was funny. His laughter trailed off and the smile died slowly on his face, with him staring-- staring hard at me like I’d told him some horrible secret. I balked-- I couldn’t meet his gaze. I tried to smile, tried to form some segue, to laugh it off, to dismiss whatever I’d said that was wrong. But before I could-- suddenly-- he started back in his chair, away from me, with this look on his face… more than fear... like he was falling, and nothing to hold onto.
I became really alarmed. His eyes were pained-- panicked and distant. I leaned toward him over the little marble table that separated us, reached out for him with the vague idea of taking his arm, trying to snap him out of it. But as soon as I moved he ripped himself back away from me, snatching up his laptop, staggering, stumbling backward over a pile of books with only the impossible balance of pure adrenaline keeeping him from sprawling across the tile floor. Then he turned and ran, and was out the door and gone before I could even stand up.
I didn’t see him for two weeks after that-- kicking myself the whole time the way a young person will, for not knowing things that I couldn’t possibly have known. Some evenings I’d find myself wandering the foggy streets aimlessly-- deep-down hoping to run into Roger, to apologize to him, to help him, if I could. I spent less time at the bookshop, but it was there that he finally turned up again-- scruffy, his clothes dirty and rumpled, thinner: looking nervous and harried. He was sitting at his old table-- no laptop with him this time-- and when he saw me he made a little gesture that invited me over.
I was ready for anything-- or so I thought. Anyway I was ready to listen to and empathize with him and try to help him wrestle with whatever delusion I imagined must have gripped him. But when he wet his lips and spoke it was with the quiet, even voice of a man in full command of his senses but… cornered. By what, I was about to find out. He told me this story.
Years ago, in the seventies, Roger had left San Francisco to live with a group of like-minded young people on a piece of land in the mountains of Northern California. I knew the area-- where the last lush green of the Cascade Range crashes into the heat of the Sacramento Valley, and the mix makes a dusty dense forest of fir trees and yellow rocks baked in the sun. Those were good days, for Roger, even better than they had felt to him at the time. He’d learned a lot about himself, about who he was, and when he came back to the city he brought those lessons with him. But when he came back to the city… there was a specific reason for that. There was an experience that he’d had there out there, in the mountains, that… that he was trying to get away from.
It had been on the first warm night in spring. They’d had a campfire, as they often did, and the night passed pleasantly as the laughter and singing gradually damped down into talking and thought… the night had felt so perfect that Roger wanted to be closer to it, so he walked away from the fire and up the face of the familiar hill behind it.
He didn’t go far. From the quiet dark spot where he chose to sit at the foot of a tree Roger could see the shadows his friends cast moving weirdly around the fire clearing-- he could hear their voices shape words that were just barely lost to distance. The smell of woodsmoke was faintly everywhere, as much in his hair and clothes as on the night’s cooling air. Roger looked beyond the fire, saw one or two dim lights from houses across the valley, and above that a path of stars spread bright and cold and still in the sliver of sky that he could see before the boughs of the tree above him cut it off.
Roger was in a philosophical mood, and the stars didn’t bring him back to earth. He danced along their path with his eyes, and began to whirl at the thought of all those many massive suns swirling around out there, billions of them, and the worlds that circled them, and the creatures that might-- that must-- be on those worlds. And the mystery of all that vastness scooped him up, and then settled his mind back on the mysteries of the forest around him. The things that some people said they’d seen right in this very area.
He wasn’t far from where Patterson and Gimlin had pulled their big prank a couple of years before. They’d shot a short, shaky film of a grainy figure they claimed was a bigfoot, a sasquatch. They’d made casts of huge footprints they said they’d found.
A nice little publicity stunt, Roger thought. And it had brought business and tourists into the area, which he supposed was good for those people who depended on business or tourists for their livings. But since moving out here, Roger had been all through these woods by night and day in every kind of weather. New to the forest, he’d looked with fresh eyes at it, and some of the strange and wonderful things he’d seen had been so surprising as to frighten him at first-- the black bear ambling around the bend of the trail in the first light of morning, or the carcass of a deer in the hollow behind a fallen log he’d jumped. But always he’d ceased to feel afraid, once he understood what he was seeing.
These were the thoughts that were running through his mind when he first saw it. It was a figure running across the hill, straight at him-- no, that was just the shadow in the firelight. But there was a figure casting that shadow, and that figure was moving toward him-- walking, it seemed, but covering more ground than seemed possible with each step. And all that Roger could see of it was its silhouette.
Roger didn’t think he wanted company just then-- if he had he would have stayed by the fire. He’d let whoever it was walk right past him, go on wherever they were going-- they wouldn’t see him in the darkness of the shadows under the tree where he sat. But as the figure strode right up toward Roger his mood suddenly changed-- the chill of the night bit into him and suddenly he thought he might like someone to talk to, someone to walk back down the fire with. The figure was really close, almost right up to him. He’d have to call out now, or let the person walk by…
And Roger, the old, troubled man, paused there in his story, and turned red-rimmed eyes onto me with a plea in them-- a plea for me to step into the past, to undecide what he had decided to do and change everything that had happened to him since.
What do you think Roger decided to do, that night? What would you have done? Called out to the figure? Or stayed quiet in the shadows? What do you think would have been the right decision?
Leave a review with your choice of action in the comments section, if you are using a service that allows comments. Or email your choice to podcasts@rei.com. Who knows?: Roger might even take your advice. Should he call out? Or stay quiet? Remember to subscribe so that you can listen next month and find out.
Once again, special thanks to YETI for sponsoring the upcoming full season of Camp Monsters Podcast. Check out their coolers, mugs, camp chairs, and other high-quality stuff at your local REI, or online at YETI.com. See you next month, right here at the campfire.