A Buddhist Takes On Bigfoot

I don't know about you guys. but our household is as prepared for the Coronavirus as one can hope to get without getting into fights with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin.  We created a Plague Box (actually, it's two boxes) filled with canned goods, most of which we already had, and pasta, oatmeal, chocolate and other essentials (chocolate is, of course, an essential).  We've ordered an extra bag of cat food and litter, extra laundry soap and extra other essential cleaning products.  We're not going full-on survivalist about this, though.  I'm shunning water purifiers, firearms and other things that take up space and wouldn't really help anyway.  We have books galore, Netflix and of course a treadmill. And we're both working from home.  So we should emerge from quarantine rested, well-read and possibly even buff. Except for prescription drugs, which is a problem.

Nearly every CDC bulletin has been letting us know that we should have two extra weeks of prescription drugs in our arsenal.  That's nice, but the insurance companies only let you pick up a new prescription when the old one runs out, give or take about three days.  In my case, I couldn't get extra refills even if the insurance companies wanted to help, seeing as I have Controlled Substances in my pill box.  So unless both the insurance companies and the DEA are willing to play ball, I will spend my two weeks in quarantine going bananas.  I can't imagine that would be safe for my three housemates (one with two feet and two with four feet, for a total of ten feet) but that's where we are.  Oh, and because they're made in China, I may run out of them even if we don't get quarantined. There simply May Not Be Any, which has actually happened before. Ask me about calling 4-5 pharmacies before I found one that had extra stock. That was fun.  I can hardly wait to do it again.

So because there's nothing I can do about any of that, and things that you have no control over have people fighting with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin (sorry, but it's a really compelling little video), let's talk about something else.

Let's talk about Bigfoot.

Yes, I'm talking Sasquatch, or Yeti, or Yowie, or anyway, the guy who scares hell out of Boy Scouts and makes grown men with trail cams look like fools.  I don't know about you, but I've become way too fond of the Travel Channel lately.  Especially on Saturday night, when we have back to back These Woods Are Haunted, Haunted Hospitals, the Dead Files and Ghost Loop.  Which have very little to do with travel, by the way, and I'm wondering if the Travel Channel should just rename itself the Supernatural and Gruesome Reality Show Exploitation Channel and get it overwith.

By far my favorite of these supernatural themed shows is Supernatural Caught on Camera, where people send their alleged ghost videos, their UFO sightings and their blurry, grainy cell phone shots of Bigfoot to be examined by experts and commented on by supposed supernatural Experts who get interviewed in front of a nice blue screen that usually has geometric shapes portrayed behind them, for reasons I'm unclear on.  And some of this stuff is actually pretty convincing. The office chairs captured rolling around by themselves by the after hours security camera, for example.  The gurneys traveling around in the hospital video.  And of course who could forget the Saudi Arabian guy in the abandoned beach house, scaring hell out of himself while looking for djinn (and possibly finding one).

And then there are the Bigfoot videos.  Usually these are accidental; a couple is riding upriver on a pair of ATVs and filming themselves, and they happen to film a big hairy thing crossing the river in front of them.  T'aint a bear. T'aint a wolf walkin' upright.  T'aint a human being and it sure t'aint a guy in an ape suit because they don't make them ape suits that big.  Surely this is proof that Bigfoot is real, right? Surely 9,000 trail cams can't be wrong?

Well, I'm of two minds about this, actually.  For one thing, if there really are hairy woods apes that have managed to evade detection by modern humans for all this time, their days are numbered. Homo Sapiens have managed to reach almost every part of the planet now, and in our wake is mass extinction through disease, habitat destruction and, well, greed.  The hairy woods apes don't stand a chance.  Sooner or later some trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist is going to shoot one, and then we'll know.  Or maybe the same trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist will disappear, prompting a massive manhunt that finally ends when the local sheriffs find the activist and a Bigfoot in the honeyoon suite of a local Holiday Inn.   Seriously, I would give Bigfoot about ten more years, if he's real.  And we should find out one way or another before they go extinct, but there are no guarantees.

However, if he's not real, I think I may have an explanation for the recurrent sightings, and it starts long, long ago, when we had just become homo sapiens.  For a long time there, we shared the planet with Neanderthals and homo synovius and homo florensis and a couple of other animals that were like us, but were not us.  At the time, we had no civilization, no crops, no writing, no sense of how big the world was. We were just bands of hunter-gatherers, probably never more than 30 or so individuals. We ran into other bands from time to time, and we probably ran into those-who-were-like-us-but-were-not-us from time to time, too, but for the most part, it was Just Us and our 30 or so friends and family members.

We didn't have written language then and maybe not much of a spoken one either, but scientists are pretty sure we did communicate, even if just through gesture, because we obviously hunted and ate pretty big animals that would have been impossible for one guy to take down acting alone.  We had to be able to organize and break ourselves up into groups in order to do this big-game hunting thing (I mean hell, we didn't even have rifles; just spears and primitive bows and arrows.)  If we communicated, that means we also told stories around the campfire at night.  The stories we told then were probably not much different than the stories we tell now; good guy, bad guy, both fighting over something each wants, the good guy winning in the end (but not without some cost, like a bad injury or something), and the bad guy vowing to come back and fight another day.  I mean, we're creative, and we've come up with at least two or three more plots since then, but our stories tend to follow the same patterns.  And what had to be the hottest tale told around the campfire in those days was The Time I Was In The Woods And I Ran Into Some Others Who Were Like Us But Were Not Us.

In those days, we were pretty small guys.  The average male was maybe 5'4 and the average female proportionally smaller.  The average Neanderthal, on the other hand, was huge. Easily six feet or taller, very broad through the chest and shoulders, and hairy.  Much hairier than homo sapiens.  A big scary hairy guy with a spear (yes, Neanderthals also had spears) in the woods was not something you wanted to run into when you were a little homo sapiens.  It made for a great campfire story, though, if you happened to survive it.

Now, let's think about this for a second.  Big hairy scary guys in the woods. Is that sounding at all like something we see blurry, grainy photos of now? Something like us that is not us? I propose, and I could be wrong, that when we see something in the woods and we don't know what it is (or a picture of something that we don't know what is), our brains go back in time to the stories around the campfire.  We still tell the same stories today about strange creatures in the woods, though we call them fairy tales and think they're for children.  (Thanks, Brothers Grimm.)

And so we see Bigfoot.  Or maybe we remember him, through some kind of collective unconscious memory.

That is, if he's not real.

(Incidentally, homo florensis, were only about three feet tall.  You know those stories about fairies and pixies and elves? Well, there really were little people at one point.  And we modern humans probably encountered them, at least occasionally.  There are stories on Sumatran islands about these little guys stealing food and animals and, in at least one instance, a human baby, and the elders who were questioned by scientists about these things said they happened "so many lives of men ago," which translated into roughly the 1700s. So Captain Cook feasibly could have seen or even met a homo florensis.  Imagine.) 

Anyway, stay safe, everybody, and if you encounter a Bigfoot, try to get decent video.  Thanks!