Speaker 1: Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys
Speaker 1: are your favorites, so like to say subscribe and rade
Speaker 1: it five star s and me rights on yesterday and listening,
Speaker 1: oh watching always keep its watching.
Speaker 2: And now your hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.
Speaker 1: Hey, Bobo, how you doing today?
Speaker 3: All right? How's going? Cliff?
Speaker 1: Pretty awesome? I'm super excited. I have one of our
Speaker 1: favorite bigfooters and people in general on the line with
Speaker 1: this for today's podcast.
Speaker 3: I know who it is, and I'm pretty stuck. The
Speaker 3: guy's a.
Speaker 1: Legend, absolutely had written one of my favorite books on
Speaker 1: the subject because it's so out of context for the subject.
Speaker 1: But instead of just teasing and stuff like that, I
Speaker 1: want to jump right into this because I know that
Speaker 1: an hour or even two hours is going to be
Speaker 1: too short of a time to speak to the gentleman
Speaker 1: Bobo and everybody else listening right now, please welcome doctor
Speaker 1: Robert Piles, or Bob as we call him, Bob Pile,
Speaker 1: who wrote Where Bigfoot Walks Beyond the Dark Divide and
Speaker 1: has a new movie out where Actually David Cross, you
Speaker 1: know that dude from OSAs Show, arrested development and a
Speaker 1: million other things. The comedian actually plays this gentleman right here,
Speaker 1: Bob Pile Bob, welcome to Bigfoot and Beyond.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, Cliff and Bobo, Hi, do you too.
Speaker 4: It's a pleasure. I'm I am a It's a great
Speaker 4: cliche to say one of your biggest fans, but in
Speaker 4: both of your cases, it's absolutely true, and it's an honor,
Speaker 4: beyond honor to be on the podcast.
Speaker 5: We do both speakings. Very nice of you to say, Bob,
Speaker 5: thank you so much for.
Speaker 3: Having That's the thing that's been said about us ever, Cliff.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about Bob. Whenever he says anything, it's
Speaker 1: the nicest thing anyone's ever said. It's like every word
Speaker 1: that drops from his mouth is like a honey wrapped
Speaker 1: in gold.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you this, Cliff. Life is too short for flattery,
Speaker 4: So I never give false praise and never give false oaps.
Speaker 4: So don't expect that from me. So if you hear
Speaker 4: it from me, you can take you to the bank.
Speaker 1: Well well, Bob, for people who don't know who you are,
Speaker 1: and because we have a lot of listeners who are
Speaker 1: kind of new to the Bigfoot field, or perhaps you know,
Speaker 1: haven't been stewing in it for the last few decades,
Speaker 1: like Bobo and I and you have. Let's start a
Speaker 1: little bit with like how you became acquainted with the
Speaker 1: subject in general? Is this like a lifelong interest or
Speaker 1: did it? Was it spurred by something? Or how did
Speaker 1: how did? How did you become one of us?
Speaker 4: Well, it's not quite a lifelong Sure, that's a good
Speaker 4: place to start clifts. It's not lifelong. I am a
Speaker 4: lifelong naturalist, an observer of the natural world, although I
Speaker 4: have to tell you that I don't consider there to
Speaker 4: be a fine line of any kind between humans and
Speaker 4: the rest of nature. And so when I say to
Speaker 4: the natural world, I include people in that, and naturally
Speaker 4: include what I consider to be likely our closest living relative.
Speaker 4: So they all run together. But my first attention to
Speaker 4: natural history as a boy in growing up in Colorado
Speaker 4: was seashells. Now that sounds counterintuitive, You're right. It was
Speaker 4: a stupid place to be a young concologist in Colorado,
Speaker 4: and diminishing returns quickly set in after I spent all
Speaker 4: my allowance buying seashells at the Denver Museum of Natural History,
Speaker 4: I belonged to the Shell of the Month Club and
Speaker 4: so on and so forth. But there weren't many seashells around.
Speaker 4: I've soon discovered there were more butterflies around. I mean,
Speaker 4: there weren't any more seashells around than there were Bigfoot
Speaker 4: and there were Colorado in nineteen fifties and sixties, But
Speaker 4: there were a lot of butterflies. So very early on,
Speaker 4: at the age of eleven on, I became a lepidopterist,
Speaker 4: a person who is serious in his or her or
Speaker 4: their pursuit of butterflies. And butterflies were reading my big
Speaker 4: window on the world. And the other part of the
Speaker 4: window on the world old ditch outside Colorado, and that
Speaker 4: ditch was my my wilderness. Got out of my subdivision
Speaker 4: out on this old, tangly wet ditch, and that's where
Speaker 4: the life was. That's where the butterflies were, and of
Speaker 4: course that's where the imagination went. And I always imagined
Speaker 4: that I might see something that nobody else had seen.
Speaker 4: Occasionally I'd find a rare butterfly, and that was pretty satisfying.
Speaker 4: But later on, when I went to college up in
Speaker 4: the Pacific Northwest, I started hearing about something that really
Speaker 4: might be out there that most people had not seen,
Speaker 4: and that was Sasquatch, Bigfoot, oh mah se Latis. I
Speaker 4: had the most wonderful introduction to the subject. Now, mind you.
Speaker 4: Prior to that, I'd read some of the some of
Speaker 4: the early crypto books that a lot of boys read,
Speaker 4: that Ivan Sanderson and so on and so forth, and
Speaker 4: the Yeti, the early Yeti things and so on. So
Speaker 4: I had an interest, but it wasn't greater than an
Speaker 4: interest in many other things until I took three wonderful
Speaker 4: classes at the University of Washington from Bill Holme. Bill
Speaker 4: was a Cherokee Norwegian dude who became a quak Utile Indian.
Speaker 4: Through the Hamits dances and his great study, he became
Speaker 4: the greatest authority on Northwest Native American art and culture anywhere,
Speaker 4: all the way from the Athabascans to the Hoopa, through
Speaker 4: the Ballabellas and Bellaiculas and Macaws and Nukahs and everybody else.
Speaker 4: He knew their art, he knew their culture, and he
Speaker 4: knew the people, and tot three classes in it, one
Speaker 4: on totems and carving some masks, one on their flat art,
Speaker 4: and one on their dance and tradition and lucky boy,
Speaker 4: I got to take all those classes, and one of
Speaker 4: the strongest elements in my memory from them was the
Speaker 4: presence of the Bigfoot cognates and all those cultures do
Speaker 4: Naquah Book was merging in bak Baquali, Nuxi Way, and
Speaker 4: all the others, and how powerful the Bigfoot traditions were
Speaker 4: and remain in those Native American cultures, those first people's cultures.
Speaker 4: And here was the thing that really got me, Cliff,
Speaker 4: was when Bill told us that not only did every
Speaker 4: single Northwest Indian culture have these stories and traditions, but
Speaker 4: they were considered to be part of their natural history,
Speaker 4: not necessarily restricted to their spirit world. Along with set seed,
Speaker 4: the sea serpent in Thunderbird. Of course the two run
Speaker 4: together for a lot of Native Americans, but they also
Speaker 4: have us a recognition of the animals that they encountered
Speaker 4: regularly in the woods, skunk and weasel and raven and
Speaker 4: barn orca in the water, and Bigfoot was among those.
Speaker 4: The other thing he told me was that he did
Speaker 4: not know a single Indian in the woods or in
Speaker 4: the waters that is still living in the villages, living
Speaker 4: in the countryside from Alert Bay all the way to
Speaker 4: the Hoopa, who did not have a personal belief not
Speaker 4: only that the animal lives among them, but that we,
Speaker 4: the whites, are foolish to even ask the question of
Speaker 4: them does it exist as a real animal. So those
Speaker 4: things made a powerful impact on me, followed by encountering
Speaker 4: Peter Burn a few years later. Peter had an enormous
Speaker 4: impact on me, and then it went from there. My
Speaker 4: own studies grew out of that, and we'll get to
Speaker 4: that later. I'm sure that was my beginning, really was
Speaker 4: the early crypto books, followed by being up here in
Speaker 4: the Northwest and then going to build Holmes classes, and
Speaker 4: then on Halloween night camping on the snows of Mount
Speaker 4: Saint Helen's ten years before the eruption in nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: and hearing the cries all through the night that I
Speaker 4: believe we're likely the cries of telatics.
Speaker 1: So it really it sounds like your interest is born
Speaker 1: in the same way with many others, kind of just
Speaker 1: having a curiosity about the natural world combined with frequent
Speaker 1: trips to the library. I think rober apps that certainly
Speaker 1: the beginning, yes, yeah, and then add to that an
Speaker 1: influential person or two to kind of guide you along
Speaker 1: the way, and then finally some personal experience on the
Speaker 1: end of it all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I expect this does pretty well mirror a lot
Speaker 4: of your guests experience in the generals is not the specifics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But to just to be clear, though you're you're expert.
Speaker 1: You are an expert in butterflies and moths, right, I
Speaker 1: mean that's what you have a doctorate, It is that correct?
Speaker 4: Correct, I'm one of the I don't mean to sound
Speaker 4: like it's some kind of an elite thing. It's just
Speaker 4: another trade. But I do happen to be one of
Speaker 4: the few trained biologists in our field I think, I
Speaker 4: mean they're there are a lot of good biologists. There's
Speaker 4: a heck of a lot of magnificent autodidactic biologists and
Speaker 4: naturalists in cryptozoology. There aren't many who have had the opportunity,
Speaker 4: the great privilege that I've had to have a pretty
Speaker 4: rich academic background in biology, and in my case, it's
Speaker 4: centered on ecology and ultimately on the ecology of rare
Speaker 4: and endangered species of butterflies as my thesis project. But
Speaker 4: I've always been a general naturalist, and my training was
Speaker 4: in general natural history and biology, and then ultimately in
Speaker 4: butterflies and into writing.
Speaker 1: Well, that's one of the things about Bigfoot that I
Speaker 1: find so accommodating for the lay person and other scientists
Speaker 1: and just people in general, is that Bigfoot isn't it
Speaker 1: isn't exclusive to one discipline. It's so multidisciplinary. And one
Speaker 1: might think that while we're studying butterflies, what does that
Speaker 1: have to do with sasquatches. Well, I mean to understand butterflies,
Speaker 1: you have to understand the ecology. You have understand seasonality
Speaker 1: of animals and all sorts of stuff. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: look at me, I have a degree in music. What
Speaker 1: good is that? You know? Like, well, I incorporate that
Speaker 1: into my big foot stuff when I get I.
Speaker 4: Can't imagine many many degrees that would be more valuable
Speaker 4: than that in the field in which audiology is so
Speaker 4: very important, right.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean, I guess I could have majored in
Speaker 1: something like you know, painlea anthropology, but you know, then
Speaker 1: i'd be over in you know, in Eastern Africa somewhere
Speaker 1: digging rocks, rocks up aground, or Eastern Idaho.
Speaker 5: Or Eastern Idaho. That's true, But you're absolutely right, these
Speaker 5: fields are they've run together. I mean, really, isn't that
Speaker 5: what we should be? I mean, I've been freelance for
Speaker 5: most of my life. I never took a hold in
Speaker 5: a job too well. I've been an academic, I've been
Speaker 5: a professor, I've been lots of other things. I've done
Speaker 5: a lot of teaching and lecturing, this.
Speaker 4: That and the other. But I've never I've never been
Speaker 4: one to sit in one job for too long. So
Speaker 4: I've been freelanced for a long time. And I consider
Speaker 4: myself I like the term acket of independent scholar. I
Speaker 4: like the independence of it, But I also like the
Speaker 4: whole question of scholarship going forth in the world as
Speaker 4: a perpetual student, which is exactly what I think we do,
Speaker 4: and it's exactly what I think you two guys are
Speaker 4: all about, our scholars of the wilderness and its inhabitants.
Speaker 4: So butterflies were just as good a portal for an
Speaker 4: interest in Bigfoot as I think any other subject might
Speaker 4: have been. These are animals that live by the same
Speaker 4: constraints and ecological opportunities as any other living things, and
Speaker 4: so you study those constraints and opportunities with whatever group
Speaker 4: of animals you work on, and they're applicable to others
Speaker 4: if you apply the broader principles. You know, for years
Speaker 4: I went up every March until this year of the
Speaker 4: Germ and gave a couple of evenings lectures or talks,
Speaker 4: conversations really with sixth graders at an outdoor school at
Speaker 4: the Cispas Center in Washington, which is pretty cool because
Speaker 4: that's where I began my trek for crossing the Dark Divide.
Speaker 4: But those kids were hungry for this information, of course,
Speaker 4: but I wanted them to have their vegetables as well
Speaker 4: as their desserts. So I'd give them one night of
Speaker 4: butterflies and one night of Bigfoot, and then I would
Speaker 4: put them together and I'd say, now, you tell me,
Speaker 4: when I've taught you all these things about butterflies and
Speaker 4: they're seemingly miraculous metamorphosis, you tell me that butterflies are
Speaker 4: not just as weird as Bigfoot. In other words, that
Speaker 4: Bigfoot isn't just as natural as butterflies.
Speaker 1: Right. And you know, one of the things that I
Speaker 1: think I appreciate about you, Bob, is that you kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know if the word transcend is right,
Speaker 1: I'll say it transcend the role of scientists again, transcend
Speaker 1: doesn't work because really you're rolling it back to before
Speaker 1: there were scientists, because you're a naturalist, and back in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, before science was a thing, really there
Speaker 1: were naturalists studying the natural world. And eventually these naturalists
Speaker 1: became specialized, and that's how science was kind of born
Speaker 1: in some ways, these various arms. But really you're a
Speaker 1: student of the world, the natural world, and you happen
Speaker 1: to specialize, you know, in mods and butterflies, But really
Speaker 1: you're a student of the natural world with a curiosity
Speaker 1: that will never be satisfied. And I think that is
Speaker 1: just so cool, And that's part of the reason we all,
Speaker 1: Bobo and I and everybody else listening are interested in
Speaker 1: the sasquatch thing because of the mystery of it all,
Speaker 1: just to know that the world is not as not
Speaker 1: a solved puzzle. It is full of wonder and grace
Speaker 1: and beauty waiting to be discovered. And I think you
Speaker 1: and your writings really embody a lot of that.
Speaker 4: Oh, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: And then where you learn just the more questions you get.
Speaker 3: To Tigos, it's exponential, it.
Speaker 4: Is exponentialist, And to Bobo, it just goes on and
Speaker 4: on every question asks more question, every answer asks even
Speaker 4: more questions.
Speaker 1: And of course you're also a poet.
Speaker 4: Well yes, but before you get to the poetry, let
Speaker 4: me just say what you've just said is beautifully put.
Speaker 4: I wish I had it all in print in front
Speaker 4: of me. I guess I'll have the recording that deserves
Speaker 4: being passed on the way you embodied all that. But
Speaker 4: I'm so glad to see you re honor the word naturalist,
Speaker 4: because that word sort of fell out of fashion. But
Speaker 4: you're quite right. I'm Humboldt and Asa Gray and Legacy
Speaker 4: and Audubon and all the others right up to Darwin,
Speaker 4: the chief naturalist of all they were naturalists, and yet
Speaker 4: that word fell out of favor, particularly between the Wars.
Speaker 4: It was really's spot Neck that did it. In used
Speaker 4: to be the American nature study movement was active all
Speaker 4: over the country, and learning something about our local flora
Speaker 4: and fauna was a regular part of elementary education in
Speaker 4: this country. And then as things began to become more specialized,
Speaker 4: more technological, that began to fade a little bit in
Speaker 4: favor of hard science. And then between the Wars, when
Speaker 4: there was such an emphasis on armaments and instruments of
Speaker 4: warfare and hard science. Driven by that, it became even
Speaker 4: more so. And then when sput Mac went into orbit
Speaker 4: in fifty six, I think it was the first Russian satellite, Well,
Speaker 4: that really was the nail in the coffin of natural
Speaker 4: history in the schools because we really had to catch
Speaker 4: up with the Russians on science and the space race,
Speaker 4: and so natural history went by the bye in the
Speaker 4: schools until environmental education came along later. And by that
Speaker 4: time they had lost a lot of the basics of
Speaker 4: the flora and fauna because the teachers didn't know it anymore.
Speaker 4: And by the way, Cliff and Bobo, during that time
Speaker 4: when I was at the University of Washington as a
Speaker 4: lucky student, there were a lot of good naturalists left
Speaker 4: on the faculty, but they were all being farmed out,
Speaker 4: retired off to the pasture, and not being rehired in
Speaker 4: favor of all hard science. The hard science was good,
Speaker 4: but it was done at the expense of the naturalists.
Speaker 4: I called the time of the purge of the naturalists,
Speaker 4: and I was one of the last students to come
Speaker 4: in to really get the advantage of all those old
Speaker 4: naturalists on campus. Which let me put those great stories
Speaker 4: of Bill Holme and the Indians into the context of
Speaker 4: a lot of different kinds of plants and animals. So yes,
Speaker 4: I have been always a general student of natural history,
Speaker 4: and I deeply, deeply admire and am grateful for the
Speaker 4: legacy that we have all the way back to Darwin
Speaker 4: and everybody before.
Speaker 1: It seems like a studying natural history, it's just a
Speaker 1: lot more organic way to move forward, especially especially with
Speaker 1: the study of sasquatches and other things like that, because
Speaker 1: science has a reputation, and it's certainly possibly even a
Speaker 1: deserved reputation of being a little cold, shall we say,
Speaker 1: you know, a little perhaps reductionists like you know, it's
Speaker 1: instead of figuring, like looking at a clock, we've got
Speaker 1: to take that clock apart in order to figure out
Speaker 1: how it works. Whereas if you study natural history, you
Speaker 1: see how that clock fits into this environment and what
Speaker 1: role it plays in a larger scale. And I think
Speaker 1: perhaps studying things as a natural historian might serve what
Speaker 1: am I trying to say, I might serve the subject better,
Speaker 1: especially when we're dealing with subjects like sasquatches or people
Speaker 1: or something that is sentient and it certainly has emotions
Speaker 1: and fits in and it has relationships, as opposed to
Speaker 1: let's let's, you know, dissect the arm to see what
Speaker 1: how thick the tendon is what.
Speaker 4: We don't need one or the other, dew were really
Speaker 4: in fact, I think we do need both. Science is reductionists,
Speaker 4: and that's not necessarily a bad word. We don't ever
Speaker 4: get a bridge that works or a rocket that works.
Speaker 4: That might be better if we don't reduce the elements
Speaker 4: to their basics and understand how they work. The reduction
Speaker 4: isn't in itself a bad thing. When it becomes negative
Speaker 4: is when it becomes the whole picture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little out of balance.
Speaker 4: Perhaps the breadth and the encompassing holistic view that a
Speaker 4: naturalist has, which is one that the mountain man had,
Speaker 4: and it's one that the wise women and the women
Speaker 4: with the knowledge of the herbs add, and it's the
Speaker 4: knowledge that takes in the hole that's absolutely essential too.
Speaker 4: And so rather than setting them up against one another,
Speaker 4: which I know you're not doing, we really need both.
Speaker 4: We need a hard, intelligent, skeptical, critical and rigorous view
Speaker 4: of the natural world. And by the way, I had
Speaker 4: to come back and do some more medial on all
Speaker 4: that because I so much rejected it in college and
Speaker 4: went within natural history. In order to do graduate work
Speaker 4: and to do a doctorate an e college, I had
Speaker 4: to come back and re educate myself on some of
Speaker 4: the hard stuff that I had blown off. That necessary too,
Speaker 4: But if you put it in the context, as you say,
Speaker 4: of the broader natural world through its working parts, yes,
Speaker 4: but also through the sensations and the emotions, then you
Speaker 4: have a much more meaningful whole. And that's where we
Speaker 4: get to the poetry. And that's why, yes, I am
Speaker 4: a poet as well, because I feel in fact, I
Speaker 4: think I don't mean better in the sense of quality,
Speaker 4: but I think I'm probably more naturally a poet than
Speaker 4: a scientist actually, because I find it impossible to distance
Speaker 4: my emotions and my reactions and my opinions. Fortunately, as
Speaker 4: a poet and an essayst and a novelist, I don't
Speaker 4: have to do that. On the other hand, when I
Speaker 4: put on the headgear of the scientists and the journalists,
Speaker 4: which I don't do very much. I still do some
Speaker 4: science with butterflies, and I still do write some material
Speaker 4: that I try to err on the objective side. Then
Speaker 4: of course, I have to abide by the very same
Speaker 4: principles of rigor that a scientists or our journalist would
Speaker 4: have to, you know, if it really serves us well,
Speaker 4: and I know this would be Bobo's experience out in
Speaker 4: the woods. To have more than one arrow in our quiver,
Speaker 4: we need to be broader than narrow. We need to
Speaker 4: be we need to take a broad view instead of
Speaker 4: be single minded about these things.
Speaker 3: We don't want my opium. You're a poet, Yes, A
Speaker 3: challenge you to do a slam poetry competition or done
Speaker 3: with this interview?
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sure you knock me down on that. I've
Speaker 4: never really done slam because I don't know. Slam has
Speaker 4: a competitive aspect to it that somehow strikes me as
Speaker 4: wrong for poetry. But I enjoy watching it, don't get
Speaker 4: me wrong, But I don't know how I do. I
Speaker 4: also don't do very well and remembering poetry. I usually
Speaker 4: have to read my own scripts. But poetry is important
Speaker 4: to me. I've got several published collections of poetry. I've
Speaker 4: just come out with a new one that's entirely about
Speaker 4: the Columbia River. There are forty four poems about the
Speaker 4: Columbia River the Lower Columbia. The estuary part published together
Speaker 4: with photographs that one of my favorite photographers, and it's
Speaker 4: given me a way to look at the river that
Speaker 4: the science never has. Through the lens, the personal lens
Speaker 4: of the emotions.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bobo will be right back after these messages.
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Speaker 1: Tell us about UH and again. This is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite bigfoot books, and partly partly because it's not
Speaker 1: really specifically about bigfoot. I mean, you can read doctor
Speaker 1: Krantz's book and get into the nitty gritty and doctor
Speaker 1: Meldrum's book to learn about all the evidence for the subject, etc.
Speaker 1: Lauren Coleman's book to talk about the history and the sightings.
Speaker 1: But yours isn't really about that. Yours is a different
Speaker 1: take on the subject, and it was kind of it's
Speaker 1: just refreshing to read through. But tell us how that
Speaker 1: how that book came about?
Speaker 4: Thank you, thanks for those kind words. It's true. I
Speaker 4: did hope that it might be somewhat different from, and
Speaker 4: therefore complimentary to a number of the other great Bigfoot
Speaker 4: books that I had read and been inspired and entertained
Speaker 4: and educated by. It came about in the following way.
Speaker 4: In the eighties, I left my job at the Nature Conservancy,
Speaker 4: where I was the Northwest Land Steward, the manager of
Speaker 4: the Northwest Nature Reserves of the Conservancy. Prior to that,
Speaker 4: I'd been a researcher in Papua New Guinea on the
Speaker 4: giant bird wing butterflies, which are the bigfoot equivalent. They're
Speaker 4: the biggest species of butterflies in the world, there about
Speaker 4: as big as a bigfoot's foot. Enormous butterflies and the
Speaker 4: jungles of Papua New Guinea. And that was my first
Speaker 4: job out of graduate school, and that was a pretty
Speaker 4: wonderful job for a young naturalist. From that, I went
Speaker 4: to work for the conservancy, and when I was really
Speaker 4: ready to leave that job, I wanted to go to
Speaker 4: the country and try writing full time, which was a
Speaker 4: crazy thing to do without any visible means of support.
Speaker 4: My wife was an artist, and we thought we'd try that.
Speaker 4: We did, and I've been in this house here in
Speaker 4: Gray's River, Washington, this old Swedish farmhouse ever since then,
Speaker 4: over forty years. I have had to go out elsewhere
Speaker 4: from time to time to make a book, and I
Speaker 4: did back then too, But part of the time I
Speaker 4: got to write. And I wrote a book called Winter
Speaker 4: Green about these hills here and their wildness. In spite
Speaker 4: of being private timberlands that have been very heavily and
Speaker 4: very often log Do you realize a certain wildness persists,
Speaker 4: including some Bigfoot stories from these hills. But I was
Speaker 4: in between books and I was looking for my next
Speaker 4: topic for I'd actually written another book after that, called
Speaker 4: The thunder Tree, about the ditch I told you about
Speaker 4: where I grew up and found nature in Colorado. Then
Speaker 4: I needed a new book, and I was hoping to
Speaker 4: write a book for which I could find a little
Speaker 4: bit of a support too, maybe some grant support to
Speaker 4: help pay some bills, so I could really get into it.
Speaker 4: I had this idea and that idea, and then I'm
Speaker 4: not sure what it was. I think it was Sir
Speaker 4: Peter Scott in England, a son of Scotch of the
Speaker 4: Antarctic and the founder of one of the founders of
Speaker 4: the World Wildlife Fund, with the which I was in Ball.
Speaker 4: Peter Scott was very interested in NeSSI. In fact, just
Speaker 4: as gorover Krantz applied a scientific name to bigfoot Gigantapithecus candidadensis,
Speaker 4: Peter Scott, based on a mini submarine photograph of a
Speaker 4: seeming pleaseias or finn from Lockness depths of Lockness, applied
Speaker 4: a sign of a name to that animal too. He
Speaker 4: called it Rombopterix. That was the genus oh ron Bopterix
Speaker 4: nes citrus. The diamond finned animal of Lake Ness is
Speaker 4: what it means. Neither of those names, of course, achieved
Speaker 4: scientific acceptance because they were not accompanied by what a
Speaker 4: scientist calls a type specimen to go along with the name. Nonetheless,
Speaker 4: Peter's interest in lacustrine plesiosaurs, one of the other great
Speaker 4: rich fields of cryptozoology, re enlivened my interest, and I
Speaker 4: remembered that night on Mount Saint Helens at Halloween in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy and I remembered Peter Burn's book. I had
Speaker 4: actually run into Peter Burn in nineteen seventy five. I
Speaker 4: was doing butterfly research and I went to the DALs,
Speaker 4: Oregon and there was a double wide it's actually very
Speaker 4: just single white trailer on the docks at the dolls
Speaker 4: had a sign said Bigfoot Information Center. So I dropped
Speaker 4: on down there met Peter for the first time, and
Speaker 4: I was impressed by his credo, which was when in doubt,
Speaker 4: throw it out. I had no idea that time about
Speaker 4: the extremely contentious and polarized nature of the Bigfoot world
Speaker 4: and the many opinions that the top people and had
Speaker 4: had of one another, and so out. I wasn't biased anyway,
Speaker 4: and so I actually brought him back to Yale to
Speaker 4: give a seminar. I was on the seminar committee at
Speaker 4: the Forestry School, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale,
Speaker 4: and I got permission. I had to get permission from
Speaker 4: the vice president of Yale, not even just from the
Speaker 4: dean as usual to bring a Bigfoot speakers to campus,
Speaker 4: but they ponied up the money and we brought Peter
Speaker 4: back to Yale, believe it or not, and he gave
Speaker 4: a very arresting talk. As you know, he's full of
Speaker 4: charm and very convincing speaker. And he had this extraordinary
Speaker 4: audience of distinguished Yale oh primatologists and zoologists and archaeologists
Speaker 4: and anthologists, and many students and graduate students wrapped around
Speaker 4: his finger. And when he concluded, a lot of them
Speaker 4: had come really to make fun and to just have
Speaker 4: a lark, and I didn't hear a single person behaving
Speaker 4: in that manner. Now, I won't say that he convinced
Speaker 4: anybody that day in such a rarefied academic environment, but
Speaker 4: he did open some minds, and that to me was
Speaker 4: extraordinarily impressive. So people going out of their scratching their
Speaker 4: heads thinking, well, maybe there's something to be looked at here,
Speaker 4: just as we've seen in very recent years with the
Speaker 4: collection of scientists organized around Oxford.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bobo will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 4: So the act of opening a scientist's mind was very
Speaker 4: impressive to me, and so that all came back to
Speaker 4: me and I thought, huh, what if somebody were to
Speaker 4: try to write a book. First I thought about cryptozoology,
Speaker 4: but it was too big none. I thought about Bigfoot then,
Speaker 4: which was different from all the other Bigfoot books in
Speaker 4: that a it wasn't being written from the standpoint of
Speaker 4: a true believer, because I was not. I was deeply interested, hopeful,
Speaker 4: open minded, but I would not say a true believer
Speaker 4: trained after all as a biologist and a skeptic had
Speaker 4: not seen personal evidence at that point except for the
Speaker 4: one night of Calls. But also not from the standpoint
Speaker 4: of a professional skeptic, as some of the other books
Speaker 4: were too. Most of the books either tried to advocate
Speaker 4: for or advocate against, or tell a history, or like
Speaker 4: John Napier's book, to give a founded picture of it,
Speaker 4: but without actually being in the field with it, a
Speaker 4: scholarly approach. And that was a good book, but not
Speaker 4: the book I wanted to write. I wanted to write
Speaker 4: a book by a naturalist, an actual biologist who could
Speaker 4: be skeptical from that standpoint, but who is also a
Speaker 4: decent Woodsman, which by the way, does not come across
Speaker 4: in the movie quite the opposite, but also a person
Speaker 4: who was a literary writer, not writing journalism and not
Speaker 4: writing strictly history. I wanted to write it from the
Speaker 4: standpoint of creative writing and yet attentive to fact, which
Speaker 4: is what the essayskts to do both those things, and
Speaker 4: that was my approach. So I needed to have some
Speaker 4: support for it, and so I applied for a oh
Speaker 4: Lindbergh grant, which I did not get, and then some
Speaker 4: other grant and some other grant, and then someone said
Speaker 4: why not try for a Gugenhem And I said, oh, yeah, sure,
Speaker 4: you know, one of the most sought after and competitive grants.
Speaker 4: I'm going to apply to write about Bigfoot. And they said,
Speaker 4: well why not try? So I did try, and damned
Speaker 4: if I didn't get the thing. I mean, you guys,
Speaker 4: that is the weirdest thing about all of this, Bobo,
Speaker 4: wherever you're sitting, if our friend walked in the door
Speaker 4: right now and sat in your lap, and you're one
Speaker 4: of the few people I know who could actually probably
Speaker 4: support it and started feeding you bond bonds and reciting
Speaker 4: Italian poetry from the seventeenth century. Now, I think we
Speaker 4: could agree would be strange, but it would be no
Speaker 4: more weird than a person getting a Gougenhem grant to
Speaker 4: write about Bigfoot, now, would it. It just wouldn't. I
Speaker 4: think that's the weirdest thing about the whole deal. And
Speaker 4: then once I got the Gougenheim, therefore assuring me of
Speaker 4: a year's support for study, then I went to Holton Mifflin,
Speaker 4: my publisher, and said, hey, look, fellas, the John Simon
Speaker 4: Guggenheim Foundation is taking this seriously. How about you too?
Speaker 4: And they did, and they gave me a book contract.
Speaker 4: So armed with both the book contract and the and
Speaker 4: the GG I still laugh when I think about that fact.
Speaker 4: I went to work. That's how it all began.
Speaker 1: And what year was it finally published?
Speaker 4: Well, my year of Bigfoot studies was eighty nine ninety
Speaker 4: in ninety one, and then I wrote for about a
Speaker 4: year and a half or two years, and then it
Speaker 4: was published in nineteen ninety five. And I'll never forget
Speaker 4: the formal publication day it was. It was my big
Speaker 4: Cinderella day as an author. The day it was published
Speaker 4: in July of nineteen ninety five by Holding Fun grand
Speaker 4: old American publisher. It was also reviewed in the New
Speaker 4: York Times Review Books, my very first book ever to
Speaker 4: be reviewed there, and it wasn't a bad review. It
Speaker 4: was a little bit snide, and they made it difficult
Speaker 4: to pull out a good pull line from it, but
Speaker 4: it was generally positive. The publisher was over the moon
Speaker 4: about it because it wasn't a kill job. That same day,
Speaker 4: I was doing promo all around Seattle. I had a minder,
Speaker 4: you know, a driver who took me around all my
Speaker 4: interviews and TV and radio back in newspapers, back when
Speaker 4: all those things existed. And then I was taken to
Speaker 4: dinner at the Alexis Hotel by the book reviewer of
Speaker 4: the Seattle Post Intelligence or newspaper, and I had a
Speaker 4: wonderful hotel room. And that night I gave a reading
Speaker 4: from it at the Elliott Bay Book Company, which was
Speaker 4: the premiere stop on any author's book tour in the country,
Speaker 4: and it was packed with a couple hundred people. And
Speaker 4: the climax of it all was at the very end,
Speaker 4: I noticed there were a group of Native Americans in
Speaker 4: the room, and they were in the back of the room,
Speaker 4: and at the end of the reading they all stood
Speaker 4: up together. They were twelve or fifteen of them, and
Speaker 4: everybody became silent as a stone. I didn't know what
Speaker 4: was going on, and their spokesman said, we came tonight
Speaker 4: from La Pushe, from the Quillia Reservation to make sure
Speaker 4: that this subject was being treated with respect. And at
Speaker 4: that point I was just paralyzed because about a third
Speaker 4: of the book is about Native American traditions and the
Speaker 4: stories that I was given and talks I had once
Speaker 4: I finally learned the politests of speaking to the first peoples,
Speaker 4: which I did terribly at first, and I was very
Speaker 4: very concerned that they would respect what I wrote and
Speaker 4: that they would felt the feel that I respected them.
Speaker 4: And then he said, and we concluded that you have
Speaker 4: treated it with respects. I was extremely relieved.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, sure, you can't get that back. If you
Speaker 9: pull you cannot. And then he said, and we have
Speaker 9: a recording with us that we would like to play, not.
Speaker 4: To lure you people out to the reservation, but just
Speaker 4: to let you know that we live among these people
Speaker 4: and we consider it ridiculous that anyone should even ask
Speaker 4: whether they really exist. But we also know that they
Speaker 4: need to be treated with respect and Rick Simonson k
Speaker 4: who he ran the book story. He had a he
Speaker 4: produced a boombox, We threw the cassette in there, and
Speaker 4: these couple hundred people were treated to an extraordinary set
Speaker 4: of recordings that in places very close resembled what I'd
Speaker 4: heard on Mount Saint Helens in nineteen seventy and also
Speaker 4: what I heard toward the end of my time in
Speaker 4: the Dark Divide at the conclusion of my Bigfoot studies.
Speaker 4: So that was quite a conclusion, quite a publication day.
Speaker 4: And then of course after that I turned into a
Speaker 4: pumpkin again. But that was my Cinderella day with the
Speaker 4: publication of that book.
Speaker 1: And so out in the woods, you know, in the
Speaker 1: Dark Divide, which for people who are listening to other
Speaker 1: parts of the world, is in Gifford Pinchot National Forest
Speaker 1: in Washington, Scamania County is a lot of it in it.
Speaker 1: There's probably overlapping in Lewis County and a few other places.
Speaker 1: Scuka Meadows is in the hearts of it. It's really
Speaker 1: in between Mount Saint Helens, Mount adams Son, Mount Saint
Speaker 1: Helens on the west, Mount Adams on the east, and
Speaker 1: then Mount Rain near to the North. I think that's
Speaker 1: a fairly good rough estimate of its size. There you
Speaker 1: were out there alone for how long?
Speaker 4: Four month?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Now I'm so glad you came around to that, because
Speaker 4: the Dark Divide itself is that this center of our discussion.
Speaker 4: It's the place. It's all about the place. Of course,
Speaker 4: it's about the animals and the people in their lives,
Speaker 4: but it's about the place. And not only that. Let
Speaker 4: me say this, I don't think I would have got
Speaker 4: either the grand or the book contract and certainly not
Speaker 4: the movie if it hadn't been for that really cool name,
Speaker 4: the Dark Divide. How cool a name is that? Where
Speaker 4: could you get a better name for a place than that?
Speaker 4: Because just think it sets up any kind of divide
Speaker 4: you might want to have, the divide between belief and
Speaker 4: non belief, between spiritual versus physical, between life and death,
Speaker 4: between the supernatural and the entirely natural of you know,
Speaker 4: between belief and those who are hardest bones against belief.
Speaker 4: You just can't get a better name than that. It
Speaker 4: sounds good, the Dark Divide. Well, what is the Dark Divide?
Speaker 4: As you say, it's this range that occurs in between
Speaker 4: Patois or Mount Adams and lou Witt or Mount Saint
Speaker 4: Helens and Tahoma or Rainier and Mount Hood also known
Speaker 4: as Why East. Across the river to the south. They
Speaker 4: form more or less a crucifix, and the crossbar is
Speaker 4: the Dark Divide. It's a black rock, rugged, rugged, scregly
Speaker 4: range of basalt extrusions that runs perpendicular to the main
Speaker 4: axis of the cascades. Of course, Adams and Saint Helens
Speaker 4: are offset from that main axis, opposite one another, leading
Speaker 4: to all manner of wonderful Native American stories about the
Speaker 4: love affair between them and the triangle with Batwa Mount Hood,
Speaker 4: and so on and so forth. The Dark Divide runs
Speaker 4: between them, and along the Dark Divide runs the very
Speaker 4: old and important Indian Trail, the first great trading freeway
Speaker 4: of the people there known as now known as Boundary
Speaker 4: Trail number one, the very first trail designated in the
Speaker 4: Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and that runs the center of
Speaker 4: the Dark Divide. The divide part refers to the watershed
Speaker 4: divide between the Cispus River on the north and the
Speaker 4: Lewis River on the south, and the dark part, well,
Speaker 4: I'll give it, shall I give it away?
Speaker 3: Here?
Speaker 4: Cliff why not give it all. I'll give you a
Speaker 4: little exclusive air. We'd like to think that dark referred
Speaker 4: to mystery, mystique. I don't think there's a mystical bone
Speaker 4: and Bigfoot's body, but I think there's plenty a mystery
Speaker 4: it could refer to that. It could refer to darkness
Speaker 4: or dark that. But sad to say that is just
Speaker 4: named for some dude named Dark Prospector by the name
Speaker 4: of John Dark, who was up in those parts and
Speaker 4: lots of things got a named for him, the Dark Mountain,
Speaker 4: Dark Meadow, and ultimately the Dark Divide. But that's okay,
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter. It works just as well as this
Speaker 4: great evocative, mysterious name, the Dark Divide. And so that's
Speaker 4: the place I decided to go. I mean, I spent
Speaker 4: several months in deep Bigfoot study with people. I studied
Speaker 4: with John Green, I studied a little bit with Reneeda Hinden,
Speaker 4: certainly with Grover Krantz, with Peter Byrne, with lots of people.
Speaker 4: I went to meetings. I went to all the archives
Speaker 4: and the transcribes transcriptions of the Bigfoot symposia that have
Speaker 4: been held, like the Great win at UBC.
Speaker 3: I read everything.
Speaker 4: From David Bobson in the late eighteenth century forward all
Speaker 4: the way through Sanderson and all the others writing into
Speaker 4: the twentieth century. I studied everything I could about Bigfoot
Speaker 4: during that year of intensive scholarship, including the tabloids. I'd
Speaker 4: go out and I'd say, this is my Bigfoot Swiss
Speaker 4: army knife, this is my Guggenheim canoe rack I'm buying,
Speaker 4: And these are my research tabloids that I would buy
Speaker 4: at the supermarket. Because there's a whole chapter in the
Speaker 4: book called Bigfoot Baby Found in Watermelon as Elvis sneer,
Speaker 4: and it's all about the tabloids and how they've done
Speaker 4: their best to make just a silly joke out of
Speaker 4: this very very powerful and consequential set of stories in
Speaker 4: our midst and I take that to task. So I
Speaker 4: did all that study, and then ultimately, and this became
Speaker 4: the heart of the book. I had to take it
Speaker 4: to the forest. I had to take it to the woods,
Speaker 4: as you two always did in the program. You always
Speaker 4: went to the forest with your colleagues. And that's what
Speaker 4: we have to do. We have to take it out
Speaker 4: to the real land and confront our book knowledge and
Speaker 4: our experiential knowledge in scholarship and studies with the actual
Speaker 4: facts on the ground, that's where it matters. And so
Speaker 4: I chose the area known as the Dark Divide not
Speaker 4: only for the cool name, although as I say, that
Speaker 4: turned out to be extremely consequential for me, but also
Speaker 4: because it's an area of deep and abiding Bigfoot lore
Speaker 4: from the clickitats Yakamas and so on, and put all
Speaker 4: that together, including John Dark. I mean, those prospectors had
Speaker 4: had their own Bigfoot low as we know from the
Speaker 4: Portland and Kelso posse of nineteen twenty three and earlier.
Speaker 4: So yes, I went to the Dark Divide, which at
Speaker 4: that time was considered by Need to be the richest
Speaker 4: area within the epicenter of the Mount Saint Helens center
Speaker 4: of the universe for Bigfoot. And I spent a month there,
Speaker 4: And that gets back to your original question. I was
Speaker 4: out there for a month.
Speaker 3: You're a hiking during that That was a pretty contentious time.
Speaker 10: I remember, because I was logging back then and there
Speaker 10: was a lot of the Earth First protesting, and the
Speaker 10: loggers were really getting if you're like a naturalist, you know,
Speaker 10: an environmentalist, you're on the wrong side of the deal
Speaker 10: with those guys.
Speaker 4: Back then, You're quite right, Bobo, that's perceptibly put. I'd
Speaker 4: worked in the woods myself a little bit when I
Speaker 4: was much younger, but also been a college conservationist, you know,
Speaker 4: and we were pretty radical, and we were also pretty
Speaker 4: pretty damn self righteous. We're also pretty stupid and naive
Speaker 4: in some ways because living in the city and not
Speaker 4: living in a timber dependent community. Of course, we were
Speaker 4: quite sure we were right about things, and we were
Speaker 4: right about a lot of our conservation principles, but we
Speaker 4: were also deeply, deeply naive about the nature of forestry
Speaker 4: and the nature of logging communities and the culture that
Speaker 4: takes place in them. And so it wasn't until later
Speaker 4: when I actually went to forestry school, and ultimately when
Speaker 4: I came out here to live in grays River, that
Speaker 4: I got a much more relevant education about the logging community.
Speaker 4: So by the time I went up to the Dark Divide,
Speaker 4: I had already written my book Winter Green, which is
Speaker 4: subtitled Rambles in a Ravaged Land. The Willebaugh Hills where
Speaker 4: I live are very heavily logged and multiple times because
Speaker 4: they're all private lands, no national forests, very little state land,
Speaker 4: and so that of course has come back to haunt
Speaker 4: the people of the woods as well as the woods themselves.
Speaker 4: A lot of erosion, a lot of the salmon streams
Speaker 4: are badly silted up. And not only that, but when
Speaker 4: the big trees were gone, and when the big when
Speaker 4: the older second Girl was liquidated in the nineties, Warehouser
Speaker 4: and Crown moved on and they broke the unions and
Speaker 4: no longer were their good family jobs in the woods here.
Speaker 4: And it's been kind of a depressed timber economy ever since.
Speaker 4: But not because of spotted owls, but because of bad
Speaker 4: management on a long period of time. So in my
Speaker 4: book Winter Green, it's not an anti logging book at all.
Speaker 4: You know, I know what my book's published on. It's
Speaker 4: published on the rendered flesh of trees through the pulpe nolls,
Speaker 4: for God's sakes, And also came out of two different
Speaker 4: forestry schools. I'm no longer naive about that. And I
Speaker 4: also live in a timber town where a lot of
Speaker 4: people's livelihoods really do depend in the woods. So I
Speaker 4: had a kind of an inside view by that time
Speaker 4: of the timber Wars, and yet I understood the biology
Speaker 4: of the spotted owl and all the other old growth
Speaker 4: organisms too, And of course the spotted owl, as comes
Speaker 4: out in the movie, became a scapegoat for everything else
Speaker 4: and became target of people's very very justified frustration when
Speaker 4: the jobs ran out. And of course, the as you said, Bobo,
Speaker 4: the antipathy toward people who look like me, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of along haired backpackers out of the woods. They
Speaker 4: were bound to make the assumption that I was opposed
Speaker 4: to the way they made their their lives and their livings,
Speaker 4: though I wasn't. And so yeah, there were some kind
Speaker 4: of tense encounters now and again, ultimately I think we
Speaker 4: have some good conversations and one of those is extremely
Speaker 4: well enacted in the movie with the actor Gary Farmer,
Speaker 4: who plays a logging boss. But you're right now, and
Speaker 4: those were tense times. That was really coming out of
Speaker 4: the worst of the Timber Wars.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Speaker 1: Bobo will be right back. After these messages, I kind
Speaker 1: of found it.
Speaker 3: I know you're a great kind of like you watched
Speaker 3: the movie David cross is Port Trivia, like I wanted.
Speaker 3: I wanted you to like fall off him out.
Speaker 4: I didn't I didn't like you.
Speaker 3: You know that the way he came across, I was
Speaker 3: like one of those loggers didn't like him, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: He punched him out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about the movie,
Speaker 1: because that's that's one of the most exciting things that's
Speaker 1: going on at this point, at least in Bigfooting, I think,
Speaker 1: is that your book has been turned into a movie
Speaker 1: with some big name starring in it, and I think
Speaker 1: that's so cool. Tell us about how that came across.
Speaker 1: And then then Bobo and I can nitpick about how
Speaker 1: David Cross played you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll join you in that, but you know, also
Speaker 4: i'll praise him also.
Speaker 1: Oh, of course he did a great job. It just
Speaker 1: not the Bob that we know.
Speaker 4: Sure that came about an interesting manner. The book had
Speaker 4: been out for guys twenty years already, and it had
Speaker 4: a lot of people who liked it, and one of
Speaker 4: those was a filmmaker in California by the name of
Speaker 4: Tom Putnam. I didn't know him, but he got in
Speaker 4: touch with me. He mostly made documentaries. He made one
Speaker 4: big Hollywood film with Paris Hilton, which was kind of
Speaker 4: a kick. I guess, he said, she was charming, but
Speaker 4: he didn't really like the Hollywood process. So he started
Speaker 4: making documentaries and he made some extraordinary ones. Probably the
Speaker 4: best known is called Burne. It's about the Detroit Fire Department,
Speaker 4: an amazing movie. Don't know how he filmed it. He
Speaker 4: sent me a bunch of his movies and I love them,
Speaker 4: and he said, I want to make a movie based
Speaker 4: on We're Bigfoot Walks. And I said really, He said, yeah, documentary.
Speaker 4: He said, when I read the book, a friend of
Speaker 4: mine said, you're going to love the book, but don't
Speaker 4: even think about making a movie. It'd be impossible. But
Speaker 4: then he said, I had been thinking about it anyway,
Speaker 4: I want to go ahead and try, so I said, okay. Fine.
Speaker 4: So my agent wasn't really interested because he was independent.
Speaker 4: They didn't have a big budget and it was a documentary.
Speaker 4: The film department of my agency in New York said
Speaker 4: they don't have enough money. Don't worry about it. So
Speaker 4: I said, well, heck il I'll do it myself then,
Speaker 4: because nobody else is going to make a movie out
Speaker 4: of my book. So I negotiated a contract myself. Tom
Speaker 4: optioned the rights to it, and every year re knew
Speaker 4: the option This went on for six or eight years,
Speaker 4: and then finally he started getting some support, but not
Speaker 4: until he changed his mind from making a documentary to
Speaker 4: making it into a narrative feature film semi fictionally. And
Speaker 4: at that point he started getting support especially. The most
Speaker 4: important one was from a fellow named Jory Whitz, who
Speaker 4: was the main producer of the movie A Napoleon Dynamite,
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, wonderful movie and a successful independent film. And
Speaker 4: Jory loved Tom's script he was beginning to develop. So
Speaker 4: once he got him behind it, he started getting some
Speaker 4: other support and was able to start attracting money and
Speaker 4: a cast. And so he informed me it was going
Speaker 4: to be a narrative instead, and I said, okay, that
Speaker 4: means there's going to be changes, and he said, well,
Speaker 4: of course. So he started sending me the script, and
Speaker 4: I realized I was going to have to make my
Speaker 4: peace with some fairly significant changes from how it actually happened.
Speaker 4: For purposes of the narrative. You know, you've got to
Speaker 4: have in ninety minutes. You've got to have sufficient drama,
Speaker 4: you've got to have conflict, you've got to have room
Speaker 4: for the character to grow and so on. So the
Speaker 4: first thing that was hard was he wanted to change
Speaker 4: the timeline of my late wife TIA's illness with ovarian
Speaker 4: cancer and her death and move that up so that
Speaker 4: my trip into the wilderness was partly a grief trip,
Speaker 4: partly in response to my grief over Tea. Well, that
Speaker 4: wasn't the timing of how it actually happened, but it
Speaker 4: made a much more interesting and compelling story, and it
Speaker 4: was completely consistent with how my life went a little
Speaker 4: bit later. And what did I do. I went to
Speaker 4: the wilderness for you know, my sucker and my support.
Speaker 4: So it was in character, it was consistent, and I
Speaker 4: proved it. The second big change was that he wanted
Speaker 4: and this part may have I don't know how this
Speaker 4: part struck you two, but I'm sure a number of
Speaker 4: our of our bigfoot friends found it disappointing in a way.
Speaker 4: But I hope they'll see the point of it, and
Speaker 4: that is they changed the emphasis from being bigfoot toward
Speaker 4: toward butterflies. Now, as you said earlier, Cliff, my book's
Speaker 4: a little bit different from a lot of the other
Speaker 4: books because it's not entirely about Bigfoot. I mean, it
Speaker 4: is about bigfoot, but it's not trying to find Bigfoot,
Speaker 4: and when I went into the dark divide, It's important
Speaker 4: to specify that I wasn't trying to find the animal. Obviously,
Speaker 4: I had my eyes and ears open, and it did
Speaker 4: end up with a very consequential auditory and track experience
Speaker 4: for me, even near the very end. That made all
Speaker 4: the difference. However, what I was really looking for in
Speaker 4: the dark Bide should have said this earlier is was
Speaker 4: my sense of Bigfoot after my year of study, after
Speaker 4: learning so much about it from so many people and
Speaker 4: books and so on, and now finally from the wilderness itself,
Speaker 4: from the habitat, which is how a naturalist must always
Speaker 4: ultimately do it. What do I think? Not really about existence,
Speaker 4: That's not the main question here. I mean, Bigfoot obviously walks.
Speaker 4: Bigfoot exists, whether or not it walks in flesh and blood,
Speaker 4: we know it exists powerfully in the culture. But that
Speaker 4: wasn't my question. My question was what does it mean?
Speaker 4: What are the consequences? Does it have consequence for us
Speaker 4: the way it did for the Native Americans and still does,
Speaker 4: And ultimately what does it mean for the wilderness? My
Speaker 4: point of the book ultimately, and you'll find it on
Speaker 4: page eleven is Bigfoot and the wilderness are, in many
Speaker 4: senses equivalent to one another. And if we manage to
Speaker 4: preserve an appreciable portion of Bigfoot habitat, then along with it,
Speaker 4: we will protect everything that goes with it, including the
Speaker 4: possibility of its actual physical existence. But if we allow
Speaker 4: the land to become so tamed outright that we can't
Speaker 4: even imagine the presence of giant, hairy monsters out there
Speaker 4: beyond the campfire, then we will have lost everything. We
Speaker 4: will have lost something truly profound. That was the point
Speaker 4: of the book, and ultimately I wanted to be the
Speaker 4: point of the movie, and Tom convinced me that it was,
Speaker 4: and so by shifting the balance toward butterflies, he was
Speaker 4: able to highlight Bigfoot in a much subtler way. Think
Speaker 4: of it. If it had been really about Bigfoot in
Speaker 4: the same sense that the book was, chances are, gentlemen,
Speaker 4: that it would have been sidelined as excuse me, yet
Speaker 4: another silly Bigfoot movie. And we all know there have
Speaker 4: been some real, slocky, stupid Bigfoot movies. There've also been
Speaker 4: some that have been perfectly entertaining and really not bad,
Speaker 4: like Harry and Anderson's. But they don't get any critical attention,
Speaker 4: they don't get any real reviews, They certainly don't get
Speaker 4: the degree of screening that we've been getting. We've been
Speaker 4: on hundreds of screens already during the plague of all
Speaker 4: things that wouldn't have happened. And yet by changing it
Speaker 4: so that I get the googanem for the Butterfly for
Speaker 4: Butterfly Studies, and then I go out and Bigfoot comes
Speaker 4: into the story almost tangentially, It comes in subtly and
Speaker 4: yet ultimately profoundly and totally changes him, as does the
Speaker 4: whole experience. Well, I think it's much more powerful that way,
Speaker 4: so I could go along with that change too. And finally,
Speaker 4: this is the one that was a little bit hard
Speaker 4: to take it, and it still is. I admit it,
Speaker 4: And Bobo, you put your finger on it. It's not
Speaker 4: the Bob Pyle that I see myself a haz or
Speaker 4: that my nearest and dearest and people who know me
Speaker 4: see me as. David's a little bit different from that.
Speaker 4: He's dweeby. He's he's a dufus in the woods, naive, annoying,
Speaker 4: he's annoying, and he's kind of self righteous. With the loggers,
Speaker 4: and he's he doesn't know very much. But and I
Speaker 4: said to Tom, I said, Tom, it's not how I am. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I know, but he said, You're not going to have
Speaker 4: a story unless the main character has room to grow.
Speaker 4: I mean, in every single vision quest you're ever going
Speaker 4: to find, from the Bale Wolf, through the Odyssey, through
Speaker 4: a walk in the woods, to go from the sublime
Speaker 4: to the ridiculous, the main character has to have a
Speaker 4: room to grow and change. And I think David comes
Speaker 4: out at the end a bigger person, a better person,
Speaker 4: a more open minded person, certainly more adept in the
Speaker 4: woods than when he went in, and I hope more likable.
Speaker 3: You know. I actually I haven't rid your book for
Speaker 3: like fifteen years. In my mind now, I just recently
Speaker 3: saw that Reese Witherspoon trail movie, Hiking the PCT, and
Speaker 3: I mix it. I get these confused like images. They
Speaker 3: kind of blur together for me. Now the movie that's
Speaker 3: those two movies, like Bob Pyle and Reese Witherspoon.
Speaker 4: You know, we've never been mistaken on the street for
Speaker 4: some reason, but when we get up in there woods.
Speaker 4: I was always getting people say, Hey, Rees, how you doing,
Speaker 4: you know. But I guess that's because of all. You know,
Speaker 4: we get pretty scusy on the trail and you can't
Speaker 4: tell a spart I will say though, that probably nobody's
Speaker 4: going to mistake David crossing me for each other. But
Speaker 4: we have certain things in common. And he's a city boy.
Speaker 4: He's a cool guy. I got to go out in
Speaker 4: the field with him for one day to teach him
Speaker 4: how to catch butterflies, teach him how to use a
Speaker 4: butterfly net in the Columbia Gorge with the director Tom Putnam.
Speaker 4: But we had a ball. I mean, he's extraordinarily funny.
Speaker 4: I mean just in person. It's not like he's trying
Speaker 4: to put on a stand up act all the time.
Speaker 4: He's not. He's just plain funny. And he's got quite
Speaker 4: a different take on things from most people. Not really
Speaker 4: a woodsman, he said in an interview. I saw afterwards
Speaker 4: that he loves the out of doors, he loves wildlife,
Speaker 4: he loves nature. But he doesn't see himself as becoming
Speaker 4: a backpacker or ever doing anything like this again. And
Speaker 4: yet it was an extremely demanding role. It wasn't easy
Speaker 4: at all, you know, all that blood and gore, and
Speaker 4: cuts and scratches he's got on him at the end,
Speaker 4: And most of that was not makeup. Most of that
Speaker 4: was absolutely real. They were down in those cold, sharp
Speaker 4: lava caves for hours at a time, falling on the rocks.
Speaker 4: He did his own stunts in every case except one
Speaker 4: rolling down the rock side in the cave. Somebody else
Speaker 4: did that. But where he falls into the stream and
Speaker 4: he's underwater and they filmed that. He did that twice,
Speaker 4: two takes, and he he damn near was hypothermic. Quen
Speaker 4: it was over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say, because I know how long
Speaker 3: those shoots are on, how long a scene takes, and
Speaker 3: how many times you have to do it that I
Speaker 3: was watching every man David Cross. I think it was
Speaker 3: being like a whimpy city guy, but that was tough
Speaker 3: business there. I be like, he was really doing that stuff.
Speaker 3: I know how many hours like to see like a
Speaker 3: five second scene, the four hours of freezing or whatever
Speaker 3: it is.
Speaker 4: You're absolutely right, it takes hours to make those scenes,
Speaker 4: take after take after take. And he he was tough,
Speaker 4: according to Tom, and he's got a better body than me,
Speaker 4: and he's certainly a lot younger and a lot stronger.
Speaker 4: I never could have I never could have done it.
Speaker 4: In fact, there's another actor they were going to hire
Speaker 4: before him, and that didn't work out. And I'm glad
Speaker 4: it didn't because I saw him in the movie recently.
Speaker 4: He couldn't have acted.
Speaker 1: He did do a really good job. And the film
Speaker 1: is just so well made, and I so appreciate that
Speaker 1: it was made in the Gifford Pinn Show and the
Speaker 1: surrounding areas and the Cascades and wherever else like up
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest. It is a beautifully shot film.
Speaker 1: That's It's just a high quality film. Yeah, the cinematography
Speaker 1: is wonderful, isn't it. It's funny that things like this
Speaker 1: would happen to me now, isn't it, isn't it? Cliff
Speaker 1: and BOBOI man seventy three years old. I'm an old fart,
Speaker 1: and you're supposed to start winding down, I think at
Speaker 1: this age, and physically physically, I'm winding down a little bit.
Speaker 1: I don't have the energy. I couldn't do some of
Speaker 1: the things in the field. I couldn't do that Dark
Speaker 1: Divide Trek now the way I did it in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: That's not surprising, but I still get out there. But
Speaker 1: to have this kind of thing happening to me as
Speaker 1: an artist, also still getting some biology done with butterflies,
Speaker 1: and got a few butterfly projects I'm still working on.
Speaker 1: I feel incredibly privileged and gifted, and to have friends
Speaker 1: like you, and to have people of your stature paying
Speaker 1: attention to some of what I'm doing is a greater
Speaker 1: honor than I can possibly express. I'm I feel like
Speaker 1: a very lucky boy. So I just try to navigate
Speaker 1: this plague these times with an attitude of gratitude, and
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm having a much better plague than
Speaker 1: a lot of people are having. Happy plague to you,
Speaker 1: Happy plague to you.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you about how people can access this movie.
Speaker 4: Is that all right?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Please do that. A lot of people are want
Speaker 1: to see this, especially after hearing you. We had Tom
Speaker 1: Putnam on the show a few weeks ago or whatever.
Speaker 1: But you know, now that they know you better, I
Speaker 1: think that this is really going to stirp a lot
Speaker 1: of about the film.
Speaker 4: The movie is called The Dark Divide. It's based on
Speaker 4: the book called Where Bigfoot Walks Crossing the Dark Divide.
Speaker 4: That book is in print right now in paperback new
Speaker 4: paperback from Counterpoint Press, but of course you can order
Speaker 4: it through I'm a Monster or any of the usual suspects. However,
Speaker 4: I recommend going to an independent bookstore if you possibly can,
Speaker 4: because they really need support during these times. So if
Speaker 4: you're anywhere near a community or downtown or main street bookstore,
Speaker 4: please please get it there. Or you can go online
Speaker 4: to Powells dot com, pow E L l s dot com,
Speaker 4: Powells dot com, great independent bookstore in Portland that has
Speaker 4: this book in stock all the time and can easily
Speaker 4: supply it supply you with It is cheap. I think
Speaker 4: it's about sixteen bucks. But the movie itself was east
Speaker 4: in September. It's called The Dark Divide. It's produced by OREI,
Speaker 4: the Great Outdoor Equipment store has a new studio. This
Speaker 4: is their first movie called OREI Studios. That's one of
Speaker 4: the major partners and with the company that Tom Putnam,
Speaker 4: the filmmaker, put together. It is an independent film, but
Speaker 4: it has had about as much exposure since it came
Speaker 4: out as just about any independent film has during these
Speaker 4: COVID times. It's remarkable they managed to get it onto
Speaker 4: more than one hundred screens actual cinema screens, as well
Speaker 4: as a bunch of drive ins around the country. It's
Speaker 4: still playing on a few screens here and there, but
Speaker 4: it has gone to a video and demand and it
Speaker 4: is now available on many of the streaming services and
Speaker 4: standard ones. It's on Prime, it's on Voodoo, It's on
Speaker 4: Google Watch or whatever it's called. It's on half A,
Speaker 4: but it's not on Netflix. It's very hard to get
Speaker 4: on Netflix, but it's on many of the others, So
Speaker 4: check your service, whatever you've got, and you can also
Speaker 4: find out where it's playing by going to the website
Speaker 4: for the movie. Also at the website you can see
Speaker 4: the trailer, which should get an award itself. It's a
Speaker 4: wonderful trailer, and a bunch of other extras. You can
Speaker 4: have access to various interviews and zooms and things about it,
Speaker 4: little concerts by some of the members of the soundtrack.
Speaker 4: Also on the Facebook page for the Dark Divide, you
Speaker 4: can do that if you just search go to Facebook
Speaker 4: and search Dark Divide. You'll get to theirs that gives
Speaker 4: you a lot of entries to stuff about the movie.
Speaker 4: But the Dark Divide website is this darkdividefilm dot com.
Speaker 4: That's a lowercase and it's all one word, Darkdivide Film
Speaker 4: dot com.
Speaker 1: Well, all right, Bob, it has been such a pleasure
Speaker 1: talking to you far too long.
Speaker 4: I just love the work that you've done in the
Speaker 4: world and the respect you've bought, the respect that you
Speaker 4: have brought to the big Glut, you know, to our joint,
Speaker 4: our joint love here this wonderful, wonderful animal and the
Speaker 4: habitat it occupies. And if we ever see a Dark
Speaker 4: Divide wilderness area protected, it will owe to you as
Speaker 4: well as to the movie and the book, I hope,
Speaker 4: but it's going to owe to all the people who
Speaker 4: care about this animal that we care about and the
Speaker 4: habitat that supports it. So thank you for that. And
Speaker 4: once again I thank you at the bottom of my
Speaker 4: heart for honoring me with your attentions and your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Bob.
Speaker 1: The honors all ours, honestly, Bob. And just to call
Speaker 1: you a friend as a treasure in itself, I don't
Speaker 1: say that lightly. You've been the model for the Bigfoot
Speaker 1: community in general, not only in just your work your
Speaker 1: perspective on the subject. But you're I don't know that
Speaker 1: your delicate words that that encapsulate not only the subjects,
Speaker 1: but the context of the subject of the wilderness areas
Speaker 1: themselves and their importance has been great for me as
Speaker 1: an individual, and I think the community in general. And
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for all the work you've done,
Speaker 1: and also thank you for coming on with Bobo and I.
Speaker 1: I cannot wait to buy you a beer and sit
Speaker 1: down and talk about stuff when we're not recording.
Speaker 4: I'll drink to that. You're welcome and I thank you.
Speaker 1: All right, Bob, thank you so much. You take it
Speaker 1: easy and you both be safe. Both be well, Okay, Bobo,
Speaker 1: what do you think, man, how great was that? It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like coming up from being submerged in
Speaker 1: water for too long to have Bob on the show
Speaker 1: and just hang out with them and talk with them
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 3: I'm going to be stuck in this room for a
Speaker 3: while because my head got something with all his comments,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to get through the doorway.
Speaker 1: He is a true measure in the community and it
Speaker 1: was just so nice to have him on.
Speaker 3: I think I got to talk to Bob as much
Speaker 3: as I want to. Like I've said it on group
Speaker 3: talks with me. You know, and it's just always you know,
Speaker 3: I'm just over. I'm more just listening, you know, because
Speaker 3: he's got so much information. But yeah, I'd love to
Speaker 3: fill us spend some real time with him. And if
Speaker 3: I do move up, it sounds like I might be
Speaker 3: moving close to him, so I'm sure I will at
Speaker 3: that point. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, it's this whole plague thing passes. And if
Speaker 1: you go up to if you come up to Oregon here,
Speaker 1: we'll be sure to get together.
Speaker 2: Oh definitely, all right, Bob, take us home man. All right, folks, Well,
Speaker 2: thanks for tuning in listening. We appreciate it. Check out
Speaker 2: the Dark Divide movie. It's a good one and IF
Speaker 2: and I thought we recommend it. And until next week,
Speaker 2: keep her squatching.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
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