Camp Monsters - Sasquatch - Part One

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Our third full season of Camp Monsters will start in September, thanks to our sponsors at YETI. In the meantime, we figured we'd give you a handful of stories to tide you over. And while you think you might know everything there is to know about Sasquatch, this is a personal account. A story that'll have you crawling under the covers questioning whether or not you really believe in monsters. Season sponsor: YETIArtwork by: Tyler Grobowsky, @g_r_o_b_o 

This is an REI Co-op Studios production. You'll be safe, if only you can make it to the campfire. There it is, up ahead through the trees. We're waiting for you, but... Will you make it? This is the Camp Monsters Podcast. Our third full season will start in September, thanks to REI and our sponsors at Yeti. But to help fill the time between now and then, we thought we'd tell a story that we've been saving since before our first season, because, well, because it's too long and strange to fit into a single episode.

And because it's too long and strange to fit into a single episode. And because it's personal. In fact, it's the experience that started me down the path of cryptids research. The story that sparked what would eventually become the Camp Monsters podcast. But there are parts of it that... Well, you'll see what I mean when we get there. The story features a very familiar creature. Sasquatch. The Bigfoot.

The wild man of the northern woods. But this story, this isn't like any Bigfoot story you've ever heard before. Over the next four months, we'll release a show per month, and I hope you'll listen in and... help me piece together just how it all unfolded. See if you can help me understand what actually happened. The story begins... Well, where it begins is one of those things we'll have to figure out as we go along. But it began for me on a dark, narrow path with branches pressing in close all around.

No, I guess we'd better go back further than that. Back some years ago into a different kind of wilderness than the ones these tales usually start in. A wilderness of words and an urban jungle. A bookshop in the middle of San Francisco. We'll call it a bookshop for lack of a better term. It was part cafe and part local library. At different hours of the day and night, it was a concert hall, conference room, a tent for revival meetings of the more fantastic faiths.

And the couch in the back had made it a temporary home for more than one vagabond poet. It was a sort of community nest, feathered with old books on every subject imaginable, which were stacked on every flat surface, spilling into piles on the floor. That was my kind of place. I was there as often as I could be.

But not as often as Roger. Roger was one of the bookshop's regulars. He stood out, but not because of any eccentricities. The shop had plenty of resident eccentrics. No, Roger was noticeable because of his blandness. In the middle of that funky, artsy place, he'd show up every day in outdated but immaculately neat business wear. White shirt, thin black tie, shiny wingtip shoes. In that bearded spot, he was clean-shaven, and his steel-gray hair was cropped close to his head.

He always sat at the same table with a big, older model laptop in front of him and dry technical books at his elbow. Somebody told me he'd been a big part of the first tech boom in the early 80s, one of the computer pioneers. He was an old man then, seemed old to me, but he was lean and sharp. When he moved, he moved quickly, purposefully, spry for his age.

Against the shop's atmosphere of studied non-conformism, he was a conformist refugee. Turns out there was a reason for that, and he hadn't always been that way. Roger intrigued me, and though he kept

himself mostly to himself, I made it a project to talk to him. It was slow going at first, but once he got to know me, I found he could carry his end of a conversation. Just light stuff, mostly. He'd make remarks about the weather, or I'd tell some kind of joke. That's how the whole thing started, actually. How it opened up. A joke. Something Roger said in passing lent itself to a little spontaneous joke I made about Bigfoot. I don't even recall what the joke was, but it was funny and harmless, and Roger laughed at it.

Riffing off his laughter, I made what I thought was an even funnier joke and for the sake of variety I used one of the other names for Bigfoot. Sasquatch. I guess Roger didn't think it was funny. His laughter trailed off and the smile died slowly on his face with him staring, staring hard at me like I just told him some horrible secret. I balked, I couldn't meet his gaze. I tried to smile, tried to form some segue to laugh it off, to dismiss whatever I'd said that he'd taken the wrong way. But before I could, suddenly, Roger started back in his chair, away from me, with this look on his face, more than fear,

like he was falling, falling with nothing to hold on to. I became really alarmed then. His eyes were pained, panicked, and distant. I leaned toward him over the little marble table that separated us, and I reached out with some vague idea of taking his arm, trying to snap him out of it. But as soon as I moved an inch, he ripped himself back away from me,

snatching up his laptop, staggering, stumbling backward over a pile of books with only the impossible balance of pure adrenaline keeping him from sprawling across the tile floor. Then he turned and ran out into the rainy night and he was gone before I could even stand up. I didn't see him for two weeks after that,

kicking myself the whole time the way a young person will for not knowing things that I couldn't possibly have known. Some evenings I'd just wander the foggy streets aimlessly, deep down hoping to run into Roger by chance, to apologize to him, to help him if I could. I spent less time at the bookshop,

but it was there that he finally turned up again. Scruffy, his clothes dirty and rumpled, looking thinner, looking nervous, harried. He was sitting at his old table, no laptop with him this time, and when he saw me he made a little gesture that invited me over. I was ready for anything, or so I thought. Anyway, I was ready to listen and empathize with him, and try to help him wrestle whatever delusion I imagined

must have gripped him. But when Roger wet his lips and spoke, it was with the quiet, even voice of a man in full command of his senses, but cornered. By what? I was about to find out. He told me this story.

Years ago, in the 70s, Roger had left San Francisco to live with a like-minded group of young people on a piece of land in the mountains of Northern California. I knew the area where the last lush green of the Cascade Range crashes into the heat of the Sacramento Valley, and the mix makes a dusty, dense forest of fir trees and yellow rocks baked in the sun. Those were good days for Roger, even better than they'd felt to him at the time. He learned a lot about himself, about who he was, and when he came back to the city he brought those lessons with him. But when he came back to the city, there was a specific reason for that. There was an experience that he'd had out there in the mountains that he was trying

to get away from. It had been on the first warm night in spring. It had a campfire, as they often did, and the night passed pleasantly as the laughter and singing gradually damped down into conversations and thought. The night had felt so perfect that Roger wanted to be closer to it, so he walked away from the fire and up the face of the familiar hill behind it. He didn't go far. From the quiet, dark spot where he chose to sit at the foot of a tree, Roger could see the shadows his friends cast moving around the fire clearing.

He could hear their voices shape words that were just barely lost to distance. The smell of wood smoke was faintly everywhere, as much in his hair and clothes as on the night's cooling air. Roger looked beyond the fire, saw one or two dim lights from houses across the valley, and above that a path of stars spread bright and cold and still in the sliver of sky that he could see before the boughs of the tree above him cut it off. Roger was in a philosophical mood that night,

and the stars didn't do anything to bring him back to Earth. He danced along their path with his eyes, and he began to whirl at the thought of all those many massive suns swirling around out there, billions of them, and the worlds that circled those suns, and the creatures that might, or that must, inhabit those worlds. And the mystery of all that vastness scooped him up, and then settled his mind back on the mysteries of the forest around him, on the things that some people said they'd seen right in this very area. He wasn't far from where Patterson and Gimlin had pulled their big prank a couple of years before. They'd shot a short, shaky film of a grainy figure that they claimed was a Bigfoot, a Sasquatch.

They'd made plaster casts of huge footprints, they said they'd found. Huh. A nice little publicity stunt, Roger thought. And it had brought business and tourists into the area, which he supposed was good for those people who depended on business or tourists for their living. But since moving out here, Roger had been all through these woods by night and day and every kind of weather. New to the forest, he'd looked at it with fresh eyes, and some of the strange and wonderful things he'd seen had been so surprising as to frighten him at first. A black bear ambling around the bend of a trail in the first light of morning, or the carcass of a deer in the hollow behind a fallen log he'd jumped. But always, Roger had ceased to feel

afraid once he understood what he was seeing. And those were the thoughts that were running through his mind when he first saw it. It was a figure running across the hillside straight at him.

No. No, that was just a shadow from the firelight. But there was a figure casting that shadow, and that figure was moving toward him. Walking, apparently, but covering more ground than seemed possible with each step. All that Roger could see of it was the silhouette. Well, there must be somebody coming up from the fire. Roger didn't want company just then. If he had, he would have stayed down by the

firelight. He decided he'd let whoever it was walk right past him, go on wherever they were going. They wouldn't see him in the darkness of the shadows under the tree where he sat. But as the figure strode right up toward Roger, his mood suddenly changed. The chill of the night bit into him and suddenly he thought he might like someone to talk to. Maybe someone to walk back down to the fire with. Now the figure was really close, almost right up to him. He'd have to call out to them now,

or let the person walk right by. And here, Roger, the old, troubled man, paused in his story. And he turned to me, in the little bookshop, turned red-rimmed eyes onto me with a plea in them,

a plea for me to step into the past, to undecide what he'd decided to do and change everything that had happened to him since. What do you think Roger decided to do that night? What would you have done? Called out to the figure or stayed quiet in the shadows? What do you think would have been the right decision? Leave a review with your choice of action in the comments section

if you're using a service that allows comments or email your choice to podcasts at rei.com who knows Roger might even take your advice should he call out or stay quiet and remember to subscribe so you can listen in next month and find out. Once again, special thanks to Yeti for sponsoring the upcoming full season of Camp Monsters Podcast.

Check out Yeti's coolers, mugs, camp chairs, and other high quality stuff at your local REI or online at yeti.com. And we'll see you next month month right here at the campfire