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''Sasquatch Is Real!'' Forest Love Slave Tells All! (Cont.) IT'S MIDNIGHT AGAIN, ANOTHER NIGHT on the BFRO stakeout, and I'm crammed into Brian Smith's Isuzu Trooper. We're bouncing down a logging road in the Gifford Pinchot outback, shining a huge spotlight into the woods, still looking for Bigfoot. "I'm 99 percent sure the creature's not going to attack me," says Roland Wolfe, 63, a retired real estate agent from Boise who spends up to four months a year roaming the West in search of Sasquatch. After reading hundreds of sighting reports, Wolfe says, he believes the beast would rather flee than fight. Smith pipes up. "I think if you were to chase a Bigfoot, that might be when it tries to kick your ass," he says. Wolfe shifts in his seat and adjusts his ass-kicking insurance, a holstered .44. He has no intention of shooting a Sasquatch, he says; the gun's just there for protection from the unknown. Still, he dreams of high-tech devices to help track one. "Have you heard about these titanium exoskeletons the army's working on?" he asks. "It lets you climb hills without burning out your thighs. With something like that you could stay close enough to a Bigfoot to follow it." "If you wanted to," Smith says, downshifting into a switchback. "If you were crazy enough," Wolfe says. As I've come to find, crazy is a matter of degree. Two days later, after the spotlights, the screech session, and more apples fail to attract any 'squatches, the frustrated BFRO crew gathers around LeRoy Fish's truck for a postgame wrap-up. "A lot of this work is pretty tedious," Jeff Lemley, a 32-year-old BFRO curator from Hood River, Oregon, confides to me. Yet the men are convinced they could bring the beast home if only they had the resources. They need more camtrackers. They need people in the field for weeks at a time. They need money for DNA tests of hair samples. "I know we can do this," says Fish. "I'm saying bait stations, bait stations, bait stations!" (Like Krantz and Dahinden before him, LeRoy Fish didn't live to see his dream come true. He died of a heart attack in March without ever laying eyes on the elusive being he seemed certain was out there watching us.) That day, before packing up my stuff and heading back to civilization, I took a walk alone in the woods. Roland Wolfe's curious description of Sasquatch—"the creature," he called it—kept rattling around in my head. Why do we need the creature to exist? Maybe because this sort of wild two-legged phantom has been with us as long as we've been able to tell stories, an icon summoned from the shadowy ravines of the subconscious—the Green Man, the yeti, the Jersey Devil. As Richard Bernheimer wrote in his 1952 study, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, the man-beast embodies "the impulses of reckless physical self-assertion which are hidden in all of us, but are normally kept under control." The Bigfoot hunters desperately want their wild thing to be out there, living beyond the bounds of our control. And they understand that there's an ocean of forest in which that wild thing can hide. Most of us forget this. Thirty years of dire warnings about the loss of wild lands have left us with the impression that tiny atolls of trees are all we have left. Please. Drive out into the rural North American West. Cruise from British Columbia to the middle of California. Turn off the highway just about anywhere and head down a forest road. Five minutes later, chances are you'll be alone in the middle of nowhere. Even at noon you won't be able to see more than ten yards through the trees. Tough to hide? You'd have to sit in the middle of the road all day to be found. Since my hunt in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest with Fish, Wolfe, Smith, and friends, the BFRO has come into possession of new footage purporting to show a Sasquatch booking across a mountain meadow. Known as the Memorial Day video, it was shot in late May 1996 in the Okanogan foothills of north-central Washington. It's unfocused and grainy, but something apelike is clearly running across that field. It's just impossible to tell exactly what. It occurs to me that this tantalizing smear of pixels perfectly captures the thrilling, doomed venture that is the hunt for Bigfoot: Here is the thing before our very eyes! And yet it proves nothing. As darkness filled the space between the trees that last day, I hustled back to my car, peering expectantly around each bend in the road and over my shoulder. It's one thing to recognize that a belief in Sasquatch reenchants the forest. It's another to feel the creepiness inspired by that faith...and start to believe. Contributing editor Bruce Barcott wrote about risk and outdoor liability lawsuits in July.
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