The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (9 page)

After dinner, well after the sun had set, we sat around the campfire again. I was sort of expecting to spend the evening debating the existence of Bigfoot (and after listening to Gunnar these last few weeks, I was already sort of dreading it). I at least expected them to talk more about their trip to the viewing site that afternoon. Hadn't they said they were going to show us the plaster cast they'd made of that partial Bigfoot print?

But to my surprise, Ben and the others mostly talked about their kids and things like kitchen remodels. Ben and Katie were Microsoft millionaires—they'd worked there during the nineties boom, then cashed in their stock options and retired early. Clive really was a college professor, and Leon was a high school librarian.

At one point, Clive said, "Remember the expedition to Lookout Mountain? Man, what a climb."

"Oh, yeah," Ben said. "But it sure was worth it."

Why?
I thought. Had they seen Bigfoot? But they didn't go into any detail about that trip either, just went off on a story about how Ben, Katie, and their daughter had once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. No one even mentioned the Bigfoot blimp, which I was actually sort of curious about. Maybe Bigfoot never came up because they all spent so much time talking about it online, and also because they all already
believed
in Bigfoot, so there wasn't really any point in rehashing the evidence, and they didn't feel the need to convince skeptical listeners like me.

Weirdly, the more the group didn't talk about Bigfoot, the more I wanted to know what they had to say. So finally, when the fire had died down to sputtering embers, I just asked.

"Have any of you ever actually
seen
Bigfoot?"

They all exchanged glances over the flames. Ben puffed on a cigar. Gunnar looked over me, and I wondered if I'd embarrassed him. Maybe that was a question you weren't supposed to ask, like a straight person asking a gay guy if he's a top or a bottom.

But then Ben exhaled a cloud of smoke. It flowed into the smoke from the campfire. The embers whined.

"I was fourteen years old," he said. "My family and I had gone up to Stehekin, the little town at the very end of Lake Chelan. The only way you could get there was by ferry all the way up the lake, and that's still the only way to get there short of hiking in. We were staying in this little cabin, and for some reason I woke up really early. I went out to use the outhouse. It was just barely light out, and the whole world was crisp and clean and green. When I opened the door to walk back from the outhouse, there was a deer right outside. It stared at me, and I stared at it for a long time. Like, ten minutes. I actually sat down in the grass, and neither of us moved. It finally wandered away, and I stood up and started to walk away. And right in front of me, watching me exactly the way I'd been watching the deer was this thing—covered with hair, standing upright. I looked right into its eyes, and I just knew that it was intelligent, like it was human. It definitely wasn't a bear or an elk or a deer. But it never even occurred to me that it might be a person. It was intelligent, but it wasn't human. It wasn't scared, and I wasn't scared either. It was just like it had been with that deer—I felt this connection. And after a couple minutes, it turned and just walked into the woods."

(Side-note? It was actually fun to listen to Ben go on like this, because let's face it: he was kind of dreamy, and his talking gave me a chance to stare openly.)

"At that point, it was like a storm broke in my head," Ben went on, "and I went inside all excited and shouting, waking up my family. And they went out to see, but by then it was gone. So of course they all said that I'd dreamt it. They were so certain that I must have been sleeping, that I'd mixed up a dream with reality, that after a while I started to think they were right—that I really
had
dreamt it all. It wasn't until about an hour later that I realized that it might've left tracks. And so I went to where I'd seen it, and sure enough, there were tracks."

"Did you show them to your family?" I said.

"I thought about it. But I knew they'd think I made them myself. So I didn't say anything. And ever since then..."

"You've spent your life looking for Bigfoot, trying to get another look."

"Pretty much."

At that, we all fell silent again, staring at the fire.

I have no idea what Ben actually saw all those years ago, but I knew in my bones that he wasn't lying to me, that he absolutely believed what he was telling me was the truth.             

*   *   *

That night, outside Gunnar's and my tent, things fluttered and skittered and hooted and scratched. At one point, something even huffed like a horse. It was like a joke how much stuff was going on. And yet, when I stuck my head out the flap of our tent, all I saw was a few insects swirling in the light of my flashlight. It was no wonder that human beings have always been so quick to trap and prune and zap and kill nature. It was unnerving.

And then there was the matter of Bigfoot itself. It occurred to me that even the most hardened Bigfoot skeptic, even Min, might at least reconsider her beliefs while lying in a flimsy tent in an area where the creature had recently been spotted. And then there was the question of bears, which I knew for a fact lived in the area—or maybe extinct polar bears that didn't turn out to be extinct after all.

"Gunnar?" I said.

"Yeah?" he said, lying next to me in the tent.

"You said that Bigfoot are nocturnal, right?"

"Probably."

"What does that mean exactly?"

"Are you worried about one of them attacking us?"

"Would you think I'm an idiot if I said yes?"

Even in the dark, I could tell he was smiling.

"Well, if that happened," he said, "we would be the first recorded case of a Bigfoot attacking a human in the history of the world."

That was definitely reassuring. On the other hand, I couldn't help but note the little tone of glee in Gunnar's voice, almost like, on some level, he'd actually be happy about it.

*  *   *

Gunnar was up early the next morning, raring to go even before the sun had come up. It took the others a little bit longer to get ready. Okay, a
lot
longer. Ben cooked a rousing breakfast, Clive and Katie did some fishing in the creek, and Leon checked the images on his motion-activated wildlife camera from the night before (he didn't find anything interesting, which was surprising given that I'd personally heard a whole herd of mastodons pass by).

One bad thing about this impetuously-decided Bigfoot expedition into the woods? There was no outhouse in the vicinity. Which meant shitting in the woods like a bear.

Finally, around nine-thirty, we were all ready to go, which was a good thing, because Gunnar's head was on the verge of exploding.

We set off on a trail along the stream. Twigs and sticks crunched under our feet, and I realized I was the only one wearing tennis shoes. My feet slid on the slick carpet of pine needles.

"Is it far?" Gunnar asked Ben.

"Not too bad," Ben said.

"Who was it?" I asked. "What'd they see?"

"Three men out fishing," he said. "They'd been working their way upstream. One said he'd had the feeling all afternoon they were being watched. Then two of them rounded a bend, and there was the creature standing on the shore, watching them. That was three days ago. I'm just glad they had the foresight to mark it on their map."

We walked on for a second, then I said, "So do you guys investigate everything that gets reported to you?"

"No. We do if they're accessible. But sometimes the best sightings are in the most remote areas. Loggers sometimes see incredible stuff. But we're just not equipped to do those kinds of backcountry expeditions. Not until we get the blimp built."

"How is that going?" I said, meaning the Kickstarter campaign.

Ben sighed. "Not so good. I don't understand it. We were on
Huffington Post
and everything."

At that, Ben stopped to consult his compass and a map. A few minutes later, we veered away from the stream, onto a different trail. That surprised me, since Ben had said that the site had been right along the creek.

Before long, I smelled sulfur. Now there was an even smaller stream on our left—a tributary to a tributary, I guess. And it looked like it was steaming.

"Are there hot springs around here?" I said.

"Just ahead," Clive said with a grin.

Sure enough, we came upon this pool nestled in the ferns, maybe ten feet across. Someone had encircled it with rocks, and there was a littering of trash too—all evidence that plenty of people had been here before. The water steamed and bubbled ever-so-slightly.

"I read about it online," Ben said. He smiled, even as he started unbuttoning his shirt. "What a coincidence, huh?" Suddenly the Bigfoot hunters were breaking out towels and undressing all around me.

"Wait," I said. "We're getting in?"

"Why not?" Katie said. "Now everyone turn around, please."

We all turned around, so Katie could finish undressing and slip into the water in private.

But the rest of us? We were just five guys. And only one of those guys—Gunnar—knew I was gay. And now the others (except for Gunnar) were shamelessly undressing all around me.

Shirts were shucked, and zippers slid down, showing boxers (on Leon and Clive) and boxer briefs (on Ben). Their bodies were furry, every one of them. They weren't like a lot of gay guys, pruned and shaved and trimmed. They'd all let their body hair grow completely wild (which, alas, also meant back hair, but what can you do?)

And then the undies were shucked, and the hair around me became thicker, denser, even more wild. Between their legs, members swung and jiggled, all of them beautiful snowflakes, each in their own unique way. Which isn't to say I looked. It was mostly just a question of seeing them out of the corner of my eye. (Okay, I may have peeked at Ben just a bit, and let me just point out that his didn't jiggle. It had too much heft.)

You totally know where I'm going with this, don't you? Yup, talk about your half-man/half-beast sightings! But at that point, I'm not sure that best described the Bigfoot hunters, or me, barely able to control myself.

No, not really. The whole situation was undeniably erotic, but I'd spent enough time in locker rooms to know how to deal with situations like this.

Down boy
, I said to my own penis, and apart from a bit of sullen twitching, it acquiesced to my command. Then I started to undress myself.

Gunnar, meanwhile, didn't move. He was just as stunned as I was by this turn of events, and was also gaping a little, except not in a sexual way.

"What about the Bigfoot site?" he said at last.

"Oh, we passed that a while ago," Ben said, slipping into the water, the best parts sinking into the murk.

"It'll still be there when we're done," Clive said, following Ben into the pool.

"But..." Gunnar said.

"When in Rome," I said to him, and I buttoned my own pants.

But then I did turn away, from Gunnar at least, because the last thing in the world I wanted to see was my best guy friend naked.

*   *   *

In fairness, we didn't spend the whole day in the hot springs. After an hour or so, we dried ourselves off, then headed back the way we'd come. We had to ford the river to reach the actual spot where Bigfoot had been sighted (and I'd only brought one pair of shoes). But we didn't see anything of the creatures themselves, not even any more partial footprints.

That night, Katie made another great dinner: some of the trout she and Clive had caught grilled with lemon and dill on a skillet over the fire, along with a salad of wild greens Leon had collected that afternoon. And about the time Ben pulled out a homemade blueberry pie, it occurred to me that maybe finding Bigfoot just wasn't all that important to this gathering of Bigfoot hunters—that it was more about the journey, not the destination. It was this weird combination of Unstoppable Career Drive and Passionate Aimlessness. Maybe it was like me and Kevin, when I hadn't wanted to call him, because once I did that, I knew I might have to deal with the fact that he didn't want to get together with me. Maybe it was better that Bigfoot be left a mystery too—and on some level, everyone here knew it.

The next morning as Gunnar and I were rolling up our tent, he said to me, "Ben says he's planning a trip to Eastern Washington next week. Someone found a cave in the Selkirk Mountains that could be a Sasquatch lair."

"Ah," I said. "Great."

"What?"

"Oh, come on, Gunnar. These 'expeditions'?"

"What about 'em?" His face was completely blank, innocent almost.

I lowered my voice and leaned in closer. "I'm just not sure these guys are all that hot to find Bigfoot."

Gunnar leaned away from me, even as I was leaning in, like I had some kind of contagious disease, or maybe just bad breath.

"You're crazy," he said. "Of course they are." He started cramming a down sleeping bag into its stuff sack. "Why would everyone be here if they didn't want to find Bigfoot?"