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| Bigfoot probably doesn't live in my woods, but anything is spooky when you photograph it in black and white! |
The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I believe the people who say that they saw Bigfoot, even though I also think that Bigfoot is not real. I get the cognitive dissonance of having an encounter completely unexplainable except by an impossible reason. This is the only thing that explains your encounter. And yet this thing is not real.
Because when I was twenty, I definitely met Santa Claus.
At the time, I was a Senior in college. Everyone I knew was a college student, a professor, or one of the few townies also into punk rock and also too young to get into the good clubs to hear our favorite bands play. I spent a lot of time loitering downtown outside of said clubs, in class, or at house parties.
I hit the books a LOT less than my own children do, but don’t tell them that. I work very hard on my “I want you to have fun at college, but remember that you’re there to study” face.
One afternoon in early December, when I should have been studying for finals, my boyfriend and I instead found ourselves wandering around the local mall. I needed to buy Christmas presents, ideally for less than five bucks a person, and if some pretzel bites also happened to find their way into my possession, well then so be it. My boyfriend was keeping me company because hey, any excuse not to study!
The Santa Claus spot at this mall was set up like an ice castle, with the line snaking towards the castle and Santa himself inside it. There were open windows all around the castle so that you could look in and see the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, but I imagine that when you were inside it you felt sort of cozy and private and like you had Santa all to yourself.
As my boyfriend and I walked past, I peeped through one of the windows and saw that Santa was sitting there all alone, nobody on his lap, so I impulsively called out, “Hi, Santa!”
He looked up, smiled, and I swear he gave a jolly, “Well, hello, Julie!”
I don’t think I even replied or responded in any way, because my flabbers were too ghasted. My boyfriend heard our exchange, but he didn’t respond either, because he said later that he just assumed that random guy and I knew each other from somewhere and that’s why I’d called out to him in the first place. But Y’ALL. I did not know that old guy with the white whiskers sitting on Santa’s throne! None of my professors were at all Santa-like, and this college I went to was the kind of place where the professors weren’t moonlighting as Mall Santas. My college friends were very much college-aged, and my three or four local friends were around that age, as well, with the addition of lip piercings and neck tattoos, etc. I did not know a single other soul in the entirety of Texas.
I've told this story dozens of times, to friends and acquaintances, to kids who believe in Santa Claus and to kids who don't, and I always tell it about the same (occasionally leaving out the punk scene and or my lack of studiousness, depending on my audience), and I'm always all, "I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa."
Like, yes, I recognize that logically it wasn't Santa. Logically, the person wearing the Santa suit in that mall on that afternoon did randomly know my name, or he said something else and I just thought I heard my name. It obviously wasn't actually Santa, because Santa isn't real. But also: I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa.
So that's what I think a lot of these Bigfoot hunters are feeling. Logically, they know Bigfoot isn't real. But they have an encounter that is best explained by Bigfoot being real, so now they're all "I dunno, guys"ing around reddit and maybe going on the odd Bigfoot hunt and attending the occasional meet-up with other people who've had encounters best explained by Bigfoot being real. And then other Bigfoot hunters are more woo about it and have psychic links to Bigfoot and use crystals to communicate with it, etc.
And then other Bigfoot hunters… Honestly, based on O’Connor’s book, other Bigfoot hunters just seem like they want something where they can be right and everyone else is wrong, where they’ve got the truth that’s out there and everyone else is a sheeple. O’Connor compares them to Trumpers, which many of them already are, in an interesting and alarming and kind of obvious-when-you-really-think-about-it way.
Ultimately, I think that O’Connor did the work of writing an ethnography of the search for Bigfoot in a world in which Bigfoot is not real. It does mean that the book feels like a lot of… well… nothing, but that’s because ultimately, there’s nothing to tell. Bigfoot isn’t real, and the search for Bigfoot is just a bunch of people poking around the woods, finding out that Bigfoot isn’t real, and ignoring that in favor of continuing to wonder if maybe Bigfoot is real. I think O’Connor could have made the storytelling more dramatic, but likely only at the expense of the individuals who I think he was trying his best to treat respectfully. It reminds me of The Cold Vanish, in which the author has more dramatic stories to tell, but those stories often involve tearing apart some extremely vulnerable moments in the lives of vulnerable people, in ways in which he ought to be ashamed. This book, on the other hand, toyed with being boring, but nobody was victimized by the telling.
I think O’Connor’s most interesting and most important point is this:
“The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition.”
In O’Connor’s worldview--and mine!--everyone wants, or should want, a meaningful life. A life that understands, perhaps, its place in the world. A life, perhaps, that understands the world itself. Personally, I’d love it if the world and everything that happened in it made sense and had a greater purpose to it! It doesn’t, and I find my meaning elsewhere, in my husband and children, in the pursuit of knowledge, in writing and in creating, but I’d love it if it did. Is it those who cannot find their meaning elsewhere, and who cannot take comfort in the meaningful fiction of organized religion, who find it in conspiracy theories and tempting untruths like these? Are they the ones wearing Trump hats and protesting floridated water and insisting that Forrest Fenn’s treasure is still out there and searching for Bigfoot?
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