I'm a big fan of Bigfoot, and I always have been. He's easy to root for, you see. Ten thousand lunatics with shotguns and Polaroids looking for him every year, and he still manages to stay hidden. A footprint here, a broken branch there, the occasional impression of titantic hairy buttocks into mud and grass, and that's all we've got. And you know what? I like it that way. I started rooting for Bigfoot back when I was a kid. The Yeti was too far away for me to have a connection to, the Loch Ness Monster had already been claimed by a friend of mine, and I was too young to know anything about aliens who liked giving anal probes to their hapless victims. As for Mothmen, Chupacabras and the like, well, those guys hadn't made enough headlines to filter down to the books I was able to get my hands on. Dinosaurs in Africa were fine for precocious little lunatics like myself (Ah, memories of the Mkole-mbembe -- and try pronouncing that three times fast when you're a ten year old kid with double retainers), but mysterious flying critters that chased menstruating women1 and foretold bridge collapses weren't. It's just as well, really. If I'd known about Mothman in those days, no doubt I would have pestered my parents endlessly for a trip to West Virginia so we could poke around the critter-bearing hills. Somehow, I suspect that's not the sort of vacation my mother would really have gone for. But Bigfoot was there for me. Scarily close (in the person of the Florida Skunk Ape) yet sufficiently far away (I didn't know then that every state in the continental US has some sort of Bigfoot legend), he was just the right sort of monster for a bookworm with an overactive imagination. Every trip into the woods along the local creek was a trip into what just might be Bigfoot territory, and that added an element of delicious fear to my frantic 3-speed races up and down what I thought were paths into the unknown. These days I go back and see how dreadfully close those paths are are to a row of houses and the local arts center, but I didn't know that then, and neither did my imaginary Bigfoots. Or Bigfeet. Or whatever you want to call them. I soon learned that the proper term for the animals -- if animals they were -- was Sasquatch, which had the twin benefits of having the authenticity of sounding like it was from a Native American language and also belonging to a member of Alpha Flight2. It wasn't until much later that I learned the word "Sasquatch" was in fact made up, a combination of two local words for the beast. But unaware, I pressed on in my amateur cryptozoological fixation. I saw the Patterson film. I watched In Search Of religiously. And I dreamed of someday, somehow, someway seeing a Bigfoot all for myself. Of course, I was sensible enough to admit to myself that if I actually did see a giant, hairy shape shambling through the trees toward me, I would either: A)Scream like a little girl B)Run like hell C)Lose control of any and all bodily functions D)All of the above Smart money was on D, though in my prouder moments I held out for B and a fervent prayer that Bigfoot was a vegetarian. But I was tucked away in the suburbs, and that didn't matter. Somewhere, out in the woods, Bigfoot was waiting. That was a long time ago, but even at the ripe old age of 31, I find the Bigfoot fascination remains. It's grown, of course -- I now read all sorts of material on things cryptozoological, usually with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, but with something of that little boy still there. Why can't there be critters still lurking out in the woods, in the wild places where smart paleontologists never go? Why shouldn't we believe people whose ancestors have been seeing these beasts for generations, just because some biologist with a degree from Yale hasn't stuck a body on a slab and thought up a sufficiently cute Latinized name3 for it? And most important of all, why not believe in the impossible, just for the sake of doing so? Not, of course, that I believe that the survival of something like Bigfoot is necessarily impossible. People say that it can't be real because by now, one would have to have been caught? Well, the FBI's still chasing the Atlanta bomber around backwoods North Carolina, and Bigfoot doesn't need to come into town for gas, cigarettes and NASCAR updates. Hell, it's even a little bit thrilling to know that North Carolina has its own flavor of Bigfoot legend -- alternately called "Boojum" or "Woollybugger" or "Chikly Cudly," from the Cherokee -- and that a friend of a friend supposedly saw one not too far from oh-so-civilized4 Chapel Hill. Do I believe? I'm not sure. I am sure, however, that I do enjoy this delicious state of uncertainty, every so often picking up a new book to alternately go "Hmmm" or laugh at the obvious hoaxes and misidentifications. Is the Bigfoot clan a relic population of Gigantopithecus blackii? Who knows, but it's a fun notion to kick around. But if they ever find Bigfoot, or if they ever prove he doesn't exist, all of that fun goes away forever. I also know that I don't ever actually want anyone to find Bigfoot. Part of it is selfish, of course -- the day Bigfoot gets tagged is the day he loses his magic. Who gets excited about coelocanths any more? Part of it, too, is pity -- pity for the souls who've poured so much of their lives into the search for the Chewbacca of the Northwest. After all, the sad truth is that once someone conclusively proves that Bigfoot exists, the professional scientists are going to descend on him like locusts on a field full of bad Biblical allusions. And the amateurs, the amiable and passionate zhlubs who've been kicking around the woods for thirty-plus years with their homemade sasquatch calls and their tins of cat food bait, their plaster footprint kits and their unshakeable faith, are going to be out of a job. Worse yet, they're going to be out of an obsession. And unless someone figures out a way to make Sasquatch tours the forest-bound equivalent of Cape Cod whale watching, they're all screwed, seduced and abandoned by the hairy man of the woods. But most of all, I don't want Bigfoot found for the sake of Bigfoot himself. The only way science is going to believe in Bigfoot is if some Chuck Heston wannabe puts a round of 30.06 into the big guy's navel and then ties the corpse to his front fender. (He'd better hope he doesn't do it in Washington state, incidentally -- if memory serves it's illegal to shoot Sasquatch up that way.) Presumably the guy won't have a Bigfoot license (or will shoot one out of season) and thus will have to pay a hefty fine, but at that point science will have its specimen and Bigfoot will have regrets that it didn't buy a better life insurance policy. It's much more charming to think that one of these days a Bigfoot is going to come strolling out of the woods, following a trail of Reeses' Pieces leaking out of some six year old's backpack, but you, me, and John Keel all know that it isn't going to happen that way. Nope, the only Bigfoot that's going to get taken seriously is one that's auditioning for a job as a throw rug. And then the debate heats up. Is Bigfoot just an animal, a big monkey? If so, expect the usual squabbling over protecting his habitat, as logging advocates attempt to turn him into a job-slashing, hairy snail darter, treehuggers fight to get him listed as an endangered species, and Steve Irwin tries to pick one up by grabbing onto a sensitive location and shouting "You're all right, mate!" a lot. If, on the the other hand, science decides that Bigfoot is suitably human, you can measure the time in nanoseconds until some whacked-out ambulance chaser files a class-action suit on behalf of the Sasquatch Nation -- on his own initiative, of course - and demands the right to open a casino in the middle of the wilds of the Cascade Range. I expect the pro-Bigfoot protests on college campuses to be massive, right up until the time the Sasquatch themselves pick up enough English to tell everyone -- especially the lawyer - to go the hell away5. So maybe it's selfish of me, but I don't want Bigfoot to be found. I want it to stay a creature of sightings and footprints, of stories and legends. I want lunatic Bigfoot hunters to get their pleasure playing scratchy tape recordings of "Sasquatch mating calls" over the mountains for years to come. And most of all, I want it to be something we can wonder about, for its sake as well as our own. Because if Sasquatch does get found and those lunatics relocate here to look for Woollybugger, I'm leaving.

1. That's one of the bits of the Mothman legend they left out of the Richard Gere movie. I find myself deeply, deeply shocked by this ommission. 2. Though any comics geek can tell you that Sasquatch was nothing more than a cheap Hulk knockoff, distinguished chiefly by the fact. that he kept his human brain while in monstrous form. Even worse, he was covered in orange fur so bright he could have been buried up to his neck in asphalt and used as a superheroic traffic cone. Needless to say, Alpha Flight got its ass kicked a lot. 3. Someone named a species after Mark Knopfler a while back. Cultosaurus Erectus can't be far behind. 4. In the eyes of anyone who didn't attend Duke, at least. 5. I give it three years until some college, somewhere, has a "Sasquatch-American Studies" Major. Just wait.