Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle

Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle stopped my recent cryptozoology obsession right in its tracks, almost as the female bigfoot with the 'pendulous breasts' stops, mid-stride, in the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage. Prior to this, I had breezed through several crypto-themed books, including Darren Naish's excellent Hunting Monsters at the usual speed I apply when I'm going through one of my periodical obsessions. But Pyle's book forced me to slow down. Not because it's bad, but because it is in fact a vast, many-chambered take on the Bigfoot mythos that simply demands that you take your time with it. It's big, yes. It's long, yes. But that's not the point. It's heavy.

Where Bigfoot Walks is unlike any book on cryptozoology you'll ever read. I mean, plenty of great books (Naish's among them) take the time to examine not only whether cryptids exist (spoilers: they probably don't) but why we need to believe in them. It's pretty common for thoughtful but science-minded writers to be skeptical on the subject of 'ol Biggie, and yet still admit a fascination with him. It's only Pyle, however, who seems to have taken this attitude to it's greatest extreme. Pyle examines Bigfoot as a real ecological possibility, as a symbol of the wild and our relationship to it, and as a classic image of mid-20th Century America. The sheer breadth of this book is astonishing. It is simultaneously a monster hunt, a psychological investigation of those who would hunt monsters, a spiritual examination of Bigfoot and the true nature of reality. How Pyle could focus on a (probably) fictional animal to create his celebration of ecology on Earth, and make this never for a moment feel inappropriate, is unbelievable. Where Bigfoot Walks is, incredibly, mostly a legitimate ecology book.

The book chronicles Pyle's attempts to hike across the Dark Divide, a mountain range in southern Washington state, a region that is awash in Bigfoot lore. He's not looking for Bigfoot per se. He's more interested in considering whether Bigfoot could be possible, from an ecological point of view. Where would it live? What would it eat? He's also interested in the people who believe. Why do they need this? Are they capable of being truly scientific? Whatever would they do if they actually caught the bloody thing? It turns out that the ethical ramifications of this are more complex than you would think. And it turns out that some believers wish to remain exactly that - believers, such that if actual proof was brought out into the cold light of day, another of the world's mysteries would be dead to them.

Pyle sympathises with this take, though he does not share it. For him, the scientific discovery of Bigfoot would force governments to place vast areas of the creature's forest home under strict protection. For Pyle, Bigfoot would be the ultimate protected species: one close enough to man to make us uncomfortable.

Where Bigfoot Walks takes many meandering strolls into a variety of realms. As I said at the top, it's a slow, varied read: sometimes light, often heavy. I especially enjoyed Pyle's takedown of conventional European religious society as an alternative to his semi-mythical, Bigfoot-centered nature worship. He believes, as I do, that for whatever reason we have taken a misstep somewhere along the way, and distanced ourselves from the rest of life on Earth, and that this separation is damaging both to nature and to ourselves. To Pyle, Bigfoot is a noble and majestic creature that has been ill-treated by decades of supermarket tabloid ridicule. And though he's writing in the 90s, before the filter bubble age and before cryptozoology became synonymous with close-minded folks who want to believe at all costs, I think he's onto something very important. Bigfoot, and an understanding (if not an appreciation) of fringe belief is more important now than Pyle could ever have guessed when he first penned this incredible book.

Book Review: The Abominable by Dan Simmons (2013)

I guess I have a complicated history with Dan Simmons now. His last mammoth, brick-like epic novel about survival in extreme cold, The Terror, stuck around my house for months haunting me before I could bring myself to crack into it. But once I did, I became consumed by its tale of the 1845 Franklin expedition and its doomed attempts to find the NorthWest passage. The book got me through a weird, lonely time in which I returned to my house one Christmas only to find that nobody else was home, and the heating was broken. I shivered through several days before either of these situations could be rectified, eating up the pages of Simmons' masterpiece, glad only that I was at least safe from the twin horrors of cannibalism and being stalked by unknowable Arctic monsters. The book even left me with a recurring fascination with polar exploration, and the Franklin expedition in particular.

King of the Cloud Forests by Michael Morpurgo

In empire-set fiction, a classic set-up for European folks living in exotic climes is to have the main characters be missionaries. Missionaries, by their very nature, go out into the wilds, spreading their own brand of Western interference exactly where it’s not wanted. In King of the Cloud Forests, the protagonist Ashley (oddly, Americans still insist on saddling male children with this most effeminate of names) is the son of a Christian missionary in a city in western China in the nineteen-thirties.

I read this book as a child (well, most of it) and it always stuck with me as being extremely odd. Though I never finished it, it lingered in my memory as that book with the yetis. An 80’s book, it’s considered a bit of a minor classic in children’s literature, and I originally found it in my school library, but because it takes place in a rather serious and grim time and place, it was never going to be the kind of thing I would have chosen to read as a child (I hated historical fiction then, and only wanted to read about the future and fantastic alien worlds), but I ploughed through because I knew that there was going to be some cryptozoological element. But I was to be somewhat disappointed…

Before I go any further, I’d like to note that the classic, haunting cover remembered from my childhood in which a mysteriously-shrouded figure makes its way through a howling snowstorm has been replaced in the Egmont Press edition by a CGI monstrosity. A horrible font, cheesy-as-feck ‘spooky staring eyes’ and a misshapen reject from a PS1 game wandering among the Himalayas made me almost not want to open the book. You may be ‘committed to ethical publishing’, Egmont, but Christ, get your act together regarding covers.

Anyway, the story opens with Ashley (heh heh) living a relaxed life with his father, his friends and a Himalayan helper named Uncle Sung. Reading the book now, I’m impressed at how the religious element is handled. Ashley’s father is a good man who’s devoted to his faith and helping others. Too often nowadays in all kinds of fiction, the religious character is a figure to pity or mock. But the religious debates that are very briefly touched on (it is a children’s book) raise unsettling questions about the possible conflict between faithfully observing religion and being a truly intelligent and moral person. It’s played very subtly- so subtly that I doubt even religious folk would find anything objectionable- but there’s just enough there to leave the door open for debate in the mind of an intelligent child reader (it obviously flew over my pre-teen head). I like the idea that Ashley’s father is still a good man even though his own worldview may not necessarily be very realistic. He’s also not portrayed as being any better or worse than the Buddhist Uncle Sung. Sung himself is something of a realist, remaining cynical about aspects of even his own religion. None of this is idle background, either; Morpurgo is working up to something big.

Then the Japanese invade. Reading his book the first time around is almost certainly the earliest memory I have of being aware of this terrible conflict. There’s no real detail about the war or why it’s happening, and young readers are spared any mention about the many, many Japanese war atrocities committed. Instead, the war is played as a plot-device to get Ashley and Uncle Sung to leave the city and head into the Himalayas, bound for Tibet and ultimately British India, where Ashley will get a boat to England.

The hardships of their journey also stuck with me for many years. It felt like an enormous, epic quest equal to The Hobbit. The two travel across plains and high into the snow-covered mountains. The landscape is vast and cruel, the hardships broken only by rest at the occasional house or monastery. Also introduced to me by this book was the idea of Tibet as being a seriously mystical place- Ashley and Sung encounter superstitious locals, including a llama who tells Ashley’s fortune. He claims that Ashley will be a ‘king of the cloud forests.’ Sung merely scoffs. They also come across legends of the yeti, the wildman who supposedly inhabit the mountains.

The friendship between the two travellers grows until, almost unbearably, Sung fails to return from a trip to gather supplies during a snow storm. Ashley holes up in a hut, waiting for Sung’s return. Instead, he gets a very different kind of visitor…

Ashley gets taken in by a tribe of yetis, and this is where it all went south for me as a child. I remember losing interest as soon as the beasts were revealed to be a lovable, caring bunch of critters. I wanted my crypto-creatures to remain mysterious, dammit! I never have had time for the ‘noble savage’ plot, and still find it boring today.

Anyway, Ashley has a lovely time living with the yetis, and over time he comes to know them all, giving them token cave-man type names (you know the kind of thing: One-Eye, Big-Leg, No-Face, etc). True to the noble savage stereotype, they know no anger or selfishness, and live in perfect harmony with their surroundings. He stays with them for almost a year until he realised that they pretty much worship him, and after their devotion causes a disaster to the tribe, he knows that he can no longer remain as a false God; he must leave. Ah, now it becomes obvious what all that religious sub-text was for earlier! It’s subtler than I’m making it sound, and Morpurgo definitely deserves credit for getting his point across naturally without any overt God-bashing.

I loved the scene where Ashley leaves the tribe during a goat-raid on a monastery. His first contact with humans in a year does not go well, and he realises that he will probably never feel the same towards his fellow man (or woman? The mind boggles) again. And to his credit, the author allows this trait to persist without sugar-coating it: Ashley is allowed to grow up as a somewhat isolated boy who, true to his experiences, never quite fits in and dreams of someday returning to his mountain idyll.

There’s also an odd reversal when Ashley meets a man who has come to wonder if the yetis are after all not a step above mankind, given that they have managed to live a ‘better’ lifestyle than we do and exist in a sort or unspoiled garden of Eden, thereby putting themon a sort of God-like pedestal. Even though the book finishes on a note of aching loss for this departed ‘paradise’, the subtext is clearly that revering anyone as a perfect being, and surrendering reason to such worship, is an act of folly.

I would certainly recommend King of the Cloud Forests for anyone who’s interested in challenging their children (or themselves) with a haunting story that raises some uncomfortable questions, and provides no easy answers.