Be Very Afraid, a book review Options

[tugboatwa]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/re....html?ref=books

Be Very Afraid

By FLORENCE WILLIAMS
Published: June 5, 2009

Because I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some “real” footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts.

Illustration from The Press-Democrat, Santa Rosa, Calif.

BIGFOOT
The Life and Times of a Legend

By Joshua Blu Buhs
Illustrated. 279 pp. University of Chicago Press. $29

Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in “Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.”

Devotees of Sasquatchiana won’t be disappointed. Buhs takes us on a long and windy tour of the early sightings, footprints, fur tufts, droppings and even abductions (at various times, Bigfoot was said to have kidnapped many women and children and at least one man). As amusing as these accounts are, Buhs’s more serious interest lies not in the ape but in the white working-class men who were the beast’s advocates, hoaxers, hunters and most ardent consumers.

His main characters are drifters, loggers and a small-town newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest. He is condescending to them at times, but also compassionate. These were the true believers even in the face of scads of evidence of faked footprints and wigs. Buhs argues compellingly that Bigfoot’s heyday in the 1960s and ’70s was a difficult time for white, rural men in Ameri­ca. They were threatened by women’s rights, civil rights and service-oriented, materialist culture that didn’t value working with one’s hands or backwoods know-how. Believing in Bigfoot was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Hunting him re-engaged their imperiled backcountry survival skills. And the hoaxers? Well, they were having a laugh while manipulating a hostile consumer culture. Sometimes, Buhs writes, they dressed as Bigfoot “to touch their essential selves.” Bigfoot, even in its fakery, was “representative of the really real, the world beyond the facade, a world of life and death and vital things.”

Viewing predator-fantasy through a class lens is fresh and interesting, but Buhs overdoes it. Everybody loves a good monster tale. To the extent that Bigfoot transcended race, gender and geography, we have the human brain to thank. We evolved with predators, and there’s something in our primitive core that cannot forget the fear of the hunted. Where predators don’t exist, we invent them, and we always have, from Grendel to Godzilla.

We’ve overcome our natural predators, and so most of our monsters now are de-fanged. They eat cookies and sing to small children and channel Mike Myers in Hollywood blockbusters. We’ve imbued them with romance. In his waning years, as more claims were exposed as hoaxes, Bigfoot came to symbolize “the green man,” Buhs notes, bearer of the dying ways and mysteries of the wilderness. That, and he was great at selling beer.

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine.

[billgreen2005big...]

hey tugboatwa everyone gm wow... very interesting new article. ty bill