(a portion of)

Four Stops on a Bigfoot Hunt

By Jeff Parker

1.

We are not two minutes into our hike, the monthly sojourn of the Tri-State Bigfoot Study Group, when travel coordinator Marc Dewerth stops and shushes us. "Listen," he whispers. And because the six mostly average-looking middle-aged white men I'm with take his command so seriously, I do too.

The sound is the wind blowing through the trees, quiet basically. Then an odd groan from somewhere in the hills. Everyone looks at each other. Their eyes grow and grow. They extricate cameras—each researcher carries at least two-from holsters and shirt pockets and point them up and around. Dewerth shushes us again, the noise of cameras distracting him. He doesn't move. You can tell by his squint he's a little annoyed the others don't hike, like him, with cameras at ready.

Nowadays Dewerth keeps his video camera in hand at all times so he doesn't miss the beast ever again. If you're near him when he stops like this, and if you're on a Bigfoot hunt, you stop too and try to see what he sees, hear what he hears.

The sound registers once more, clearer this time: a guttural roar. Dewerth's eyes tighten at the corners.

Admittedly I am a little freaked out by this, having not seriously expected to run across anything. I have done time in woods, and this I've not heard. So I rationalize: this must be a trick. The sound is that weird.

On the way out here, as our minivan trailed a caravan of two other vehicles—one bearing the license plate Yeti 2-into the boondocks, past a big red barn with Sasquatch Valley painted on the side, I asked Bruce where exactly we were heading.

Bruce is 55. He drives the six hours from Michigan to tromp around the woods outside of Newcomerstown, Ohio, researching Bigfoot. He is an avid reader of Fate magazine (a publication that chronicles UFOs and Yetis and Devil Monkeys, among other unexplained phenomena) and proudly boasts that he was born in the very year the magazine was first published. He is a model Bigfoot researcher. In the car he listens to CDs of "vocalization recordings." The creature sounds sometimes like a screaming banshee, sometimes like Yogi Bear. For no apparent reason Bruce is given to proselytize on Bigfoot-related topics, such as the possibility the creature moves through creekbeds: "They say gorillas and chimps are afraid of the water. I believe the Sasquatch is a better swimmer than the average man."

"I don't know where we're hiking today," Bruce replied. The locations of the hikes are always kept secret from he and the other hunters, "in case there's someone who'd try and throw down some bogus tracks or something." So—this is before I understand the true nature of their ritual—maybe they're hoaxing me. You don't bring up hoaxing, I figure, standing there amid this strange bleating, unless you hoax.

I'd met Marc Dewerth several months back at the annual Newcomerstown Bigfoot Conference. It's what makes Newcomerstown the Vatican City of Bigfoot research east of the Mississippi. This year it attracted 350 people from all over the world, the biggest gathering of Bigfoot aficionados anywhere. He invited me to come sometime on their monthly hikes, and maybe, just maybe, we'd run across something, he said. I couldn't help but thinking that these hikes were like their Sabbaths, and he was trying to convert me.

This realization excited me because I'd been doubting the concepts of belief and faith in general. I hadn't grown up in a religious household and found myself starting to feel something was missing from my life. I wanted to be converted. I wanted to believe. Not that there aren't certain things I do believe in. Love, for one, I suppose. But then again, love is a far more tactile thing than a Bigfoot. At least you know when love is there in the woods with you. As far as religious faith goes, that's more intimidating, something people work at all their lives. It made sense in a way, to start with something small. Or in this case big.

"What is it?" Bruce asks Dewerth, who is looked up to by researchers much older than him, being the only one in the present company who's actually seen it. In every Bigfoot outfit around the world there's a guy or two who's run into the thing. The Bigfoot researcher equivalent of a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, but less spiritual; the slots player equivalent of hitting the jackpot, but more spiritual. In any case, he's seen it, so he's the deacon.

"To me that sounds like a coyote," Dewerth suggests. "It doesn't sound like a Bigfoot. It doesn't sound like a primate call."

The group pauses for a moment to consider this.

"Could be an engine," Bruce offers. "It's too regular."

"Well, let's see," Dewerth says, and so just like that, with doubt cast, he pushes on. Everyone gallops after him.

"Before you step in any soft mud, take a look," Bruce reminds us.

I witness a groundhog barreling through the brush away from us and point it out to Dewerth. "Look," I say. "Groundhog." They don't have groundhogs where I'm from, and they're something to see. Dewerth could not be less impressed. He is more interested in the ubiquitous volume of fresh deer and turkey tracks in the mud, and the fact that we have not and will not see a single deer or turkey today. He points out the density of the woods, how difficult it is to see anything in there. He emphasizes size. The toes on the turkey tracks, some of them—just the toes now—approaching three inches. Even the anthills are big as boulders. "There's all kinds of wildlife out here," he says. "Badgers, bald eagles, turkey vultures. And they grow huge. Some of the biggest deer taken from Ohio come from Coshocton and Muskingum Counties, monsters." Every now and then he mutters to himself about what in the hell that noise was.

To continue reading this article, please find Tin House #16.