I believe an undiscovered primate stalks the forests of North America. It takes guts to admit this publicly.
It’s not hard to see why Bigfoot makes people uncomfortable. We’ve been taught from an early age to view the unknown with skepticism, programmed to believe everything in the world has already been mapped, graphed, catalogued and coded.
My fascination with Bigfoot was first kindled when my father and I were watching an episode of the show In Search Of. Blurry stills from the original Patterson-Gimlin film appeared on the TV screen, and my seven year old synapses began to fire with wonder.
“Dad, is that real?” I asked about the hairy creature looking back over its shoulder as it strode away from the camera.
I doubt my father considered his reply much or knew the impact it would have on my life when he said, “We just don’t know.”
Meanwhile, second grade was telling me everything worth knowing was already known, inside books that needed to be memorized and recited in stuffy classrooms far away from any forests or mountains. My dad’s answer offered a different possibility, that the most fascinating parts of our world might still be a mystery.
The incident that turned me into a true Bigfoot believer occurred in 2014 on a late summer night in Western Michigan. My wife and I had been staying in a cabin bordering the Manistee National Forest. Our last night there, we sat out back with our dogs as the fire in the firepit burned down to embers. A coyote pack was yipping nearby. The forest around us had taken on an impenetrable feeling.
Then, in the distance, we heard something different – a yell but also a howl, human but not-human. It was a soul-jangling sound, unlike anything I’d ever heard during a lifetime spent outdoors. As the first call ended, a second call picked up from the opposite direction and lasted a good ten seconds. This was immediately followed by a coyote screeching in acute distress, then a series of low, guttural sounds. That was when our Great Pyrenees, who’d been quietly sleeping by the fire all night, suddenly began snarling and lunging toward the tree line. Pyrs are known to have a highly calibrated aggression threshold. Differentiating between real danger and a false alarm is hard-wired into their DNA. I’d never seen him behave like that before or since.
I’ve run through a checklist of all the creatures known to reside in the forests of Michigan. I’ve listened to recordings of their vocalizations, and nothing captures the sound we heard that night so much as the Ohio Howl, one of the most well-documented Bigfoot recordings in existence. I know this incident falls far short of the burden of proof most people require for belief. But they weren’t there. They didn’t hear that unearthly sound, or feel it chill their bones to the marrow. If they had been, they’d probably feel differently. For my part, I’ve been on a personal quest for Bigfoot ever since.
A few years ago I enrolled in a tracking class taught by legendary wildlife tracker Jim Halfpenny. I took the class in part because he was known to consult on sets of suspected Bigfoot prints. If people found strange tracks they couldn’t identify, Halfpenny was one of the first people they called.
When I jokingly mentioned my interest in Bigfoot during an icebreaker, I swear I saw an enigmatic smile flicker across his grizzled face. I was certain he had secrets about this legendary creature. And if I proved myself worthy somehow, he’d share those secrets with me.
Our first day out in the field, we were combing through a muddy washout near the site of an old forest fire, when I stumbled across a large human-shaped print. Convinced I’d discovered a Bigfoot track in the middle of Yellowstone National Park, I shouted out my find and the whole class gathered round.
Halfpenny took one glance at the track. Then, with something less than patience in his voice, he explained that I’d discovered a bison trackway where its hind hoof overlapped with its front hoof, making a blobby Bigfoot-esque print in the mud. I was disheartened, and more than a little embarrassed. It felt like I’d let him down, maybe even failed a test.
Later that same day, though, I found another trackway, this one laid down by a male wolf at the exact moment he spotted some prey on the banks of the Yellowstone River and veered off in pursuit of his next meal. This time, Halfpenny was breathless as he examined the track over my shoulder. Based on the print size, he said, this was a juvenile, likely experiencing the first year outside his natal pack – a lonely, perilous time in a dispersing wolf’s life cycle. That meal he’d spotted along the river – a fawn, maybe a beaver – could have helped sustain him on his quest to find a mate and form a new pack. Did he catch that meal? we asked. Did our wolf eventually start his own pack? Halfpenny shrugged. The tracks didn’t tell that part of the story, so we were left to speculate.
In my version, our wolf did catch his meal. He survived and started a fierce pack of his own that would go on to roam the mountains and valleys of Yellowstone for generations to come. Halfpenny never shared any of his Bigfoot secrets with me, but I learned something even more important from that class: You can search your whole life and never find what you’re looking for, but as long as you keep looking, something worthwhile is bound to turn up.
The Zen practice of koan meditation asks the student to focus on a paradoxical idea that has no solution. Focusing on a single koan encourages the practitioner to release their attachment to logical understanding, and instead embrace intuitive insight. By breaking out of this preconditioned thought pattern, it is said that the student awakens to the true nature of reality.
For me, the search for Bigfoot is my own personal koan. It helps me step outside the daily grind of emails and Slacks and alerts and notifications. It’s a reminder that real meaning can be found in the things we haven’t figured out.
For example, while searching the forest, I’ll sometimes stumble upon branches that are crisscrossed or leaned against each other in ways that defy physics. Some people theorize that Bigfoot make these structures as a way to mark their territory. Whenever I spot one of these anomalies, I examine it from multiple angles, asking myself: Did Bigfoot stack these sticks just so? Or were they arranged here by the artful hands of gravity, wind, and water? However they wound up like that, the odd fractal patterns and unexpected symmetries of the forest are a wonder to behold.
While combing the ground for a Bigfoot track, I might instead spot a white quartz or a hazy agate, a striated feldspar or a dragon-scale tourmaline. If I remember to slow down, I might marvel at the ancient geologic forces that shaped it, and consider the fickle cosmic currents that carried me to this moment, to this place, so I could appreciate this beautiful rock.
I often set these newfound treasures somewhere prominent, like a fallen log or a flat rock, as an offering. I like to imagine the delight someone or something will experience when they stumble upon this secret gift, regardless of which species they belong to.
At least once a trip, I’ll make a Bigfoot call, to see if there are any around who want to communicate with me. My Bigfoot call mimics the sound we heard that night in Michigan. It starts low, and slowly rises. Once I reach maximum pitch and volume, I hold it until I can hardly take it anymore, and then I hold it a little longer until my lungs finally clear out all the stale oxygen that gets stuck deep down in my diaphragm. My call has never once successfully convinced anyone or anything to respond, but that first breath of fresh air after a good long howl always leaves me feeling reinvigorated, my zest for life renewed.
My quests to find Bigfoot happen far less frequently than I’d like. Sometimes in the dead of winter, when I sit at my desk here in Chicago, filling out spreadsheets, prepping lesson plans, grading papers, I’ll look out my window at the dreary cityscape, and dream about when I can get back to the mountains, back to the forest, and resume the search.
I know the odds of finding Bigfoot are vanishingly small, but that’s never been the point. The act of searching for Bigfoot is an end in and of itself. Koans aren’t supposed to be answered. Just like some mysteries are better left unsolved.
Believing in Bigfoot means believing that something surprising or delightful lies around the next bend in the journey. Making myself available to that prospect turns the world into an endless source of wonder, waiting to be discovered on the trail of Bigfoot.
Born and raised in Montana, Giano Cromley is the author of two young adult novels and a collection of short stories. He is a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and was a BookEnds Fellow with Stony Brook University. He is an amateur woodworker, a certified wildlife tracker, and an English professor at Kennedy-King College, where he is chair of the Communications Department. He lives on the Southside of Chicago with his wife and two dogs.
