B | Terminal Cruise

BIGFOOT

This is me at Mt. St. Helens, in a vast wasteland that used to be one of the most beautiful places in this world. I grew up in Vancouver, Washington, only forty miles to the south, and when the volcano blew in 1980 I was fourteen years old. I saw it all. During the summer the year before I was with the last batch of Girl Scouts who got to stay at our camp at Spirit Lake before it was destroyed. During my stay at the camp we hiked over Windy Pass to Ape Canyon, which was very deep, but at one point the rock walls draw to within eight feet of touching each other. And that’s where we heard the story of how the whole Bigfoot thing got started.

In 1924 there was a little cabin at the bottom of this canyon where some gold prospectors lived for a while, but you couldn’t see it because it was hidden by the trees. And up on the rim some boy scouts or YMCA kids (but not girl scouts because we didn’t get to camp there until 1937) were having a little fun throwing light rocks made of pumice down into the abyss. These were very naughty boys, they should have known better because you could never know whether or not someone was down there camped amid the trees.

Anyway these boys were screaming and giggling, and the acoustics of the gorge echoed and distorted and morphed their voices into a sustained unearthly howl. And the sunrise was behind their backs, which revealed only their silhouettes to the miners when they looked up to see who was throwing rocks at their cabin. They had heard the Native American legends of Sasquatch which predated 1924, of course, and being superstitious men, they told everyone who would listen to them in the saloon that they were attacked one morning by angry rock-throwing monkey men with horrible inhuman screams. And the legend was off and running.

Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner