The search is not for a wild man but for how wildness has left men, then to bring that wildness back.
—Daniel C. Taylor, Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery
We’re crammed into an old wooden rowboat, with Leonard in the back, paddling against the wind with two-by-fours cut by Stanley Edwards himself. Only Leonard speaks, periodically directing our strokes through the thick blooms of aquatic weeds. He’s irked about the way the trip has gone and returns to his laments about his plight and life. My mind is overloaded, and I block out most of what he’s saying. But one sentence penetrates:
“Without meaning, a man’s life falls apart,” he says.
Our run-in with the sow and cub the previous day marked the end of our expedition—and my trip. It was as if some denouement, or climax, had been reached. It felt like a powerful, unspoken truth: that there was nothing more to do. My travel companions, I think, sensed that too.
At first I can’t help feeling that I’m returning empty-handed—that the Sasquatch has run circles around me.
But it really hit home more than once during this side trip with Leonard that it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things whether the Sasquatch actually exists or not. The possibility of a physical Bigfoot may be important for people like John Bindernagel and other scientists, who are working within a certain materialist worldview involving mammals, natural histories, and primate lineages. But to me the implications of the Sasquatch have amounted to a different significance: what it tells us about ourselves.
When I think of everything I’ve considered related to the Sasquatch—belief and skepticism, scientific pursuits, traditional tales, personal mythmaking, pseudo-religious awe, pattern-matching, and the attempt to explain the unexplained—I realize these are all expressions of meaning. And that our pursuit of the Sasquatch, our various interpretations of it, are a reflection of this deepest of human motivations.
Without meaning, a man’s life falls apart.
I’ve seen during this trip that we have an innate, fundamental need for meaning—for our lives to be meaningful. Everything—our beliefs, our disbeliefs, our worldview, our perception, our actions, what we do and why we do it—is driven by this default search.
This applies to John Bindernagel and his quixotic quest to convince his skeptical colleagues of the existence of the Sasquatch. You can see it in the coastal First Nations communities reviving and preserving their culture, and resisting the systemic interests that sometimes seek to exploit them. It is evident in the work of conservationists like Ian McAllister and Captain Brian Falconer, as they struggle to maintain the integrity of the world’s most intact ecosystem. It also applies to Leonard Ellis, in his connection to a hunting tradition, a life in the outdoors, and the struggle against the challenges inherent in that environment. By finding meaning we build connections between seemingly disparate things, creating a greater whole. Out of life’s chaos we form a bigger and more coherent picture, one that feels more unified and connected. Meaning is a compass and rudder for our lives. It helps to make our suffering more tolerable.
Whatever its reality, the Sasquatch is a compelling symbol replete with potential meanings. Wild-man myths abound the world over. They do so largely because many of us seek a connection to the way we once were—to the more primal stages of our development, which, though partly superseded, still remain in us. To others, Sasquatches are anything but obtuse throwbacks to our lower selves; instead, they embody a supernatural cunning and higher capacity. They exist on a higher plane, personifying the unknown—or yet to be discovered—aspects of the universe. For some indigenous people, the creatures are preternatural custodians of nature, who, as characters in traditional stories, have something to teach. By deifying Sasquatches, some of us look to comfort ourselves with the idea that we share the universe with a comparable higher intelligence, that there’s an order to things that we can sense but not properly articulate, and that we’re being watched and perhaps taken care of.
The scientists, amateur sleuths, and explorers looking for the creatures are driven by the thrill of discovering something great. They find meaning in these investigations into new and unknown realms on the fringes of knowledge itself and in manning the outposts on the dangerous and exotic frontier dividing what we know from what we don’t know. These are modern-day mythical journeys.
My own quest in search of an explanation for the Sasquatch phenomenon overlaps with this mythical quest. The fruits of these travels—the characters, the stories, the unlikely coincidences and strange connections—have created a deluge of meaning for me. I’ve developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of the environment and the need for humans to maintain its integrity in the face of the growing forces of consumption that imperil it. I’ve also walked away with a heightened admiration of and a closer connection to the First Nations communities I’ve visited, about which I knew little prior to the trip.
Though no incontrovertible proof has emerged for Bigfoot’s physical existence, I find myself awakened to a new significance of the creature. I’ve learned to see the Sasquatch as a powerful symbol of the natural world—a diminishing realm from which most of us are becoming increasingly estranged. On one level, Sasquatches personify the more refined spectra of nature that we cannot, or often do not, see. They remind us that there is much more to the natural world, writ large, than meets the eye. They also show us, almost by holding up a mirror to ourselves, that the eye with which we see is limited. The artificial lines we humans have created, the fragmentation we have wrought upon the whole, separate us from the wilds to which we are inextricably linked.
The more we humans denude our environment, the more elusive the Sasquatch becomes and thus the more we grasp for it—not quite realizing that we are chasing after an aspect of our own nature that is vanishing with the disappearance of our earth’s nature. It is no wonder that the indigenous residents of the Great Bear generally don’t pursue Sasquatches or make too big a fuss about the creatures, beyond paying them the normal respect. The compulsion doesn’t exist because, in a way, the essence of the creatures already lives within them. It exists in their surroundings, and in their intent—and actions—as responsible stewards of their lands and waters.
So, do Sasquatches physically exist?
At a certain point in my journey, I had come to understand that binary thinking on the matter—”exists” versus “doesn’t exist”—was a quagmire. In the spirit of avoiding that mental posture and in the name of real open-mindedness, perhaps, I’ve come to see that we need to consider one more possibility in this conundrum of conundrums: human logic, suitable for explaining a certain level of physical existence, simply doesn’t apply here. In other words, maybe the Sasquatch, whatever it is, exists in a reality lying beyond our ordinary perceptual capacities. Naturally, we try to explain phenomena in terms we understand. In certain cases, however, our accepted and understood definition of cause and effect may be limiting or downright wrong. The greatest experiential scientists in human history—mystics from various philosophical traditions—and our own quantum physicists of the modern era concur that the universe is not only other than what we perceive it to be, but also so convoluted and paradoxical in its behavior as to contradict our own systems of reasoning. Reality extends far beyond our familiar conceptions of space, time, and causality into a wholly different field.
Given all the different interpretations and perspectives, perhaps the best, most reliable description of a Sasquatch that we can muster in words—right now—is one that borders on the philosophical, or even metaphysical: it is a meeting place, a point of distillation, or a moment, in which the spirit of nature, including some long-lost part of ourselves, and an observer come together in an experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Contrary to what we like to believe, some questions have no answers. And in the case of the Sasquatch we may simply never know. To be married to one idea, one meaning, and remain locked into it without direct knowledge, just to create certainty and mental stability, is much closer to delusion than most of us realize. It’s also as far away as we’ll drift from the noblest of Noble Beyonds: the fundamental reality veiled from us by our subjective senses.