Why So Many Americans Believe in Bigfoot

MSN ^ | 2/19 | Laura Miller

[nickcarraway]

John O’Connor’s The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster is a work of mourning. Bigfoot, as O’Connor, a journalism professor, illustrates, is thriving—if by “Bigfoot” we’re talking about the legend of Sasquatch and the communities that have sprung up to seek out the hairy, towering primate said to lurk in the depths of America’s few remaining old-growth forests. It’s that Bigfoot, the symbol, who, O’Connor argues, flourishes and does so because of how much we’ve lost. This Bigfoot is a black armband commemorating everything from the environmental devastation wrought on the continent to the dearth of solitude and quiet available in contemporary life to … the decline of the white working class? Yes, even that.

Before I moved to rural Maine, I regarded Bigfoot as a strictly Pacific Northwest phenomenon. Then a sublimely daffy Facebook group called Unexplained Maine informed me that quite a few Mainers believe Bigfoot stalks the forests of northern Maine, including the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the last and wildest stretch of the Appalachian Trail. (“There’s nothing but trees for miles and miles up there,” a neighbor told me after driving through the area. “And that’s when you realize that too many trees can drive you insane.”) O’Connor hits the Hundred-Mile Wilderness on his cross-country tour of Bigfoot hotspots, soaking up lore from a grizzled hiker about Bigfoots that are said to have devoured some early European explorers. This man even claimed that Geraldine Largay, a hiker who starved to death in the wilderness in 2013 after wandering off the trail and getting lost, had been kidnapped by Bigfoots as a food source. “Why would they starve her before eating her?” O’Connor asked, but his source just moved on to the next hair-raising yarn.

[Rennes Templar]

I’ve seen that. Could be a man in an ape outfit. Need something more convincing.