Bigfoot, the ultimate outsider, a hairier, smellier, mercifully more laconic Charles Bukowski, famous for not being famous, has been photographed again, this time in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. The images were captured in September, on a Sunday night at around 8:30, via an automatic infrared camera that hunter Rick Jacobs had set up in a tree in order to snoop on the local deer population. One image shows a lanky beast with patches of thinning fur ambling through the forest, hunched forward, his arms (or forelegs) brushing the ground, more apish than ursine. A second, more astonishing image shows the same creature clearly engaging in the popular yoga pose known as “Downward-facing Dog.”
Naysayers at the Pennsylvania Game Commission insist the mystery mammal is just a skinny black bear suffering from mange—but how many bears are interested in purifying their minds through ancient Hindu calisthenics? Bears are passionate about salmon, honey, human garbage and little else. Bigfoot, on the other hand, while notoriously reclusive, is also a well-known traveler with a seemingly omnivorous appetite for exploring new places and new cultures; one can easily imagine him turning to yoga in his perpetual quest to broaden his horizons.
Of course, it’s presumptuous to make even the most reasonable assumption about Bigfoot. His most defining attribute is his profound unknowableness. Even more than legendary ciphers like Greta Garbo and Keanu Reeves, he gives us nothing of himself, and thus, like the plain white T-shirt, he remains forever in fashion, a hulking, hairy totem for every generation to interpret in its own way.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, stoned suburban malcontents must have been enthralled by the Patterson/Gimlin film, a brief, jerky 16mm clip of a female Bigfoot beating a hasty path through the wilds of northern California. For anyone eager to drop out of the mainstream and lead a more authentic life, there was no need to muddle through the dense prose thickets of Walden anymore. The Patterson film offered a complete template in just 20 seconds or so: Throw away the Man’s razors and deodorant. Live close to the earth, far from the town. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! Thoreau may have been America’s first hippie, but Bigfoot was its most committed, fiercely self-reliant, resoundingly free, feasting on squirrels and solitude and never once sneaking back into Concord on the weekend to sample one of his mother’s apple pies.
Thirty years later, the putrid backwoods misanthrope still fascinates us, in part, no doubt, for the (ironically) tiny carbon footprint he leaves in his wake, but even more for his indifference to all that could be his: the reality TV gigs, the Right Guard commercials, the groupies melting like Slurpees in a microwave every time he entered Bar Marmont ...
Fame is our oxygen now—even if it’s just Bravo fame, even if it’s just Facebook fame. That moment on whatever metaphorical red carpet we can weave, in front of whatever motley audience we can attract, is what we ache for. We might ridicule Paris and Britney and Lindsay, condemn their silly, coke-flocked lives, but who wouldn’t like to get $1 million just for showing up at a New Year’s Eve party? Who doesn’t dream of detoxing all over the 500-thread-count sheets of Malibu’s most exclusive rehab villas every few months?
Only Bigfoot. He’s the anti-Paris, the anti-Britney, the anti-Lindsay. Even before cameras were invented, paparazzi were hounding him, and yet still we know next to nothing about his love life. He doesn’t wear a stitch of clothing, and yet he never accidentally exposes his vagina in front of Nikon-wielding peeping toms. Ten minutes on his iPhone could yield him a Pantene product line, a signature shoe from Nike, a prominent place at Al Gore’s reclaimed tiger-maple conference table, an Internet sex tape with the Olsen twins—and yet he resists.
Madison Avenue hucksters hijack his image to sell meat snacks, skateboards, ice cream, sneakers, beer, high-speed Internet access. He doesn’t sue them. Thousands of fans around the world organize conferences in his honor. He never shows. Eventually, even Bukowski came in from the cold. Bigfoot’s still out there, immune to the snares and distractions of fame, rejecting all we covet, but in a positive, life-affirming manner, the optimist’s Kurt Cobain. And, thus, while he may not believe in us, we believe in him, with such hungry faith that he appears to us, like Jesus or the Virgin Mary, in blurry shadows, grainy snapshots, the hindquarters of a sickly bear.