I was driving home through the August heat soup to an ice cold Bombay Sapphire and Stirrings tonic when my Blackberry cut loose with my latest ring tone. I didn’t answer it, of course, since doing so would turn me into a particular sort of person I despise – that jerk driving down the road with a cell phone stuck in his ear. But as soon as I did get home and park the car, I had a look at my call log and saw who it was: my brother Rob Roy.
Now, Rob and his son Jason are not supposed to be calling me on my Blackberry. For months, Rob had plotted and planned to steal away this summer, deep into the wilderness with Jason for what might possibly their last father-and-son bonding experience, and, for the last nine days, they have been traipsing around Olympic National Park, just the two of them, many, many, leagues away not only from another person, not only from civilization, but also, for Christ’s sake, supposedly many, many leagues away from the nearest cell phone tower, and, what’s more, not being due back until the day after Labor Day, they were supposed to still be out there. Naturally, as I contemplated this conundrum, my Blackberry blurted out the first four bars of “Carmina Burana” again.
Tom: Rob?
Rob: Tom! You’re not going to believe this…
Tom: What, that you and Jason can’t go ten days without text messaging?
Rob: Look, Tom, I know, I swore we’d stay away from technology for three weeks before we touched it again, but you have to understand the incredible circumstances here!
Tom: Right – too much fresh air, too many clear mountain springs, too many Alpine meadows in full bloom, too many inspiring vistas of purple mountains’ majesty…
Rob: Tom!
Tom: … sure, it’s obvious – you two probably overdosed on Mother Nature and started exhibiting acute Internet cold turkey inside of seventy two hours. I’ve got to hand it to you guys, though, managing to last as long as you have without the Internet, wireless connectivity, video games, microwave popcorn or indoor plumbing…
Rob: Tom! Shut up and listen! This is serious!
Tom: What?
Rob: We… that is, Jason and I… we found something.
Tom: True father and son love?
Rob: No! No! Of course not!
Tom: No, of course not.
Rob: How could you even say a thing like that?
Tom: Sorry.
Rob: What I mean is, we found something in the woods. Back there, in the deep woods. Tom, you can’t imagine what it was like. On our third day, as we hiked south into the heart of the interior, we made camp for the night. Then, around two in the morning, we heard it.
Tom: What? A bear? A wolf? A badger? A bobcat? A lynx? A…
Rob: Absolutely not! You think I don’t know what those animals sound like?
Tom: Oh, check this out – Rob Roy Martini of Manhattan Island and Fairfax County, Virginia, the great woodsman! Two or three nights under the stars and bingo – he transforms in to freakin’ Mark Trail. Hey, listen, Mr. Naturalist, just because you can identify some of the noises those animals make, that by no means qualifies you to rule all of them out when you hear a noise in the woods you can’t associate with one of them, okay? And I don’t believe I even got to mention cougars, moose, wolves, coyotes, elk, bison, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, antelope…
Rob: Damn it, Tom, on Night Four, it approached our camp! We could smell it!
Tom: Oh, come on, you two after five days without a bath? Skunks take a whiff of you coming their way and run off, I bet!
Rob: It reeked, I tell you! It didn’t smell like any animal we’ve ever smelled before!
Tom: Which, in the case a couple of city boys like you and your son, would be wet cats caught outside in suburban thunderstorms, dogs that rolled around on piles of poop in Central Park, and maybe some horses at the race track. I mean seriously, Rob, are you telling me you’ve actually gotten close enough to a bear that you could smell it?
Rob: I’ve been close to bears.
Tom: At the zoo, maybe.
Rob: Well, hell, those are bears, aren’t they?
Tom: Okay, and what did they smell like?
Rob: Ah… uh… look, I donno, they smelled like friggin’ bears, okay?
Tom: And you’re sure this thing that started following you two, it wasn’t a bear?
Rob: Absolutely. And we’re sure it wasn’t any of those other animals you said, either. You know why?
Tom: Why?
Rob: Because none of those animals throw rocks.
Tom: Rocks?
Rob: That’s what I said, Tom – “throw rocks.” Bears don’t throw rocks. Neither do wild cats, moose, elks, bighorn sheep, buffaloes or any of those other animals you said, and you know why? Because they don’t have hands, that’s why!
Tom: So you guys were being followed by a big, stinky person who lurked in the shadows of your campfire, made weird noises and threw rocks at you?
Rob: Yes – I mean, no!
Tom: You mean, it couldn’t possibly have been a lonely, feral Evangelical Pentecostal who was separated from his church Bible camp group as a child while hiking in the deep woods, decades ago? Somebody like those Japanese soldiers, hiding out in the Pacific, who thought it was still World War II when tourists stumbled over them in the nineteen-sixties; only this guy, he thinks Ronald Reagan is still President?
Rob: Look, Tom, we yelled at it! We yelled all kinds of stuff at it, and all we ever got back was this horrible, guttural howling; a gut-wrenching, spine-chilling gibbering that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up!
Tom: That’s it! Definitely a feral Evangelical Pentecostal! Have you ever heard those bozos when they start speaking in tongues? And they don’t even have to get lost in the deep woods for years to sound like that, either; come to think of it, some of them never really got out of the deep woods to begin with.
Rob: Forget about it! I swear to you Tom, this… this… thing that trailed me and Jason around for days and days… it’s definitely not human.
Tom: Speaking of Jason, where is he?
Rob: Why, he’s right here with me.
Tom: Let me talk to him, then.
Rob: Sure. Here.
Jason: Tom? How you doing?
Tom: Better than you and your dad, apparently. Look, I just want you to answer “yes” or “no” to a few simple questions, okay?
Jason: Yeah.
Tom: Did you and your dad backpack any booze or weed into the deep woods with you?
Jason: Ah, no.
Tom: You’re sure?
Jason: Yeah.
Tom: How about ‘shrooms? I know for a fact that six species of dynamite liberty caps grow all over the place in the Olympic National Park. You or your dad do any, ah, foraging for natural provender?
Jason: No.
Tom: You just ate that trail mix your mom made for you?
Jason: Uh-huh.
Tom: Just drank that cool, clear Olympic spring water?
Jason: Yeah.
Tom: And you heard stuff you never heard before?
Jason: Right – I mean, yes.
Tom: And you smelled something really horrible, lurking in the shadows just beyond the light of your campfire?
Jason: Yeah.
Tom: And someone – or some thing – threw rocks at you from out of the impenetrable darkness?
Jason: Sure did, ah, I mean, yes.
Tom: Fine. So, tell me, in your own words – now that you and your father have hiked back out of the deep woods, what do you two want to do?
Jason: Hire a helicopter.
Tom: What for?
Jason: To fly back in…
Rob: That’s right, Tom, we’re going to fly back in, find the body and airlift it out!
Tom: Body?
Rob: About sixty hours ago, while we were hiking, during the daytime, Tom, during the day – we saw one of them, lying there, about twenty yards from the trail. We think maybe it’s a male and got killed during a mating season fight over a female, maybe, or…
Tom: Male? A male what?
Rob: A male Sasquatch, you idiot! A male Bigfoot! You know, looks like a giant gorilla, lives in the woods, stinks to high heaven, makes incredibly weird noises, throws things at hikers, hunters and campers…
Tom: So, you got close enough to make a positive identification?
Rob: Well, no, the body was snagged up in a rock outcropping, on the other side of a really deep ravine. That’s why we need a helicopter to get it out.
Tom: I see. Look, Rob, I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, but something having extreme, ah, significance for your current situation has occurred while…
Rob: Extreme significance?
Tom: … ah, while you two were away and out of contact with the world, as it were…
Rob: Our current situation?
Tom: … it’s like this – last week, a couple of Georgia rednecks announced to the world that they had found a Bigfoot up in the Appalachian mountains…
Rob: On the east coast?
Tom: I’m afraid so. But they did fly to the west coast for their big press conference.
Rob: Press conference?
Tom: Yeah. There was this picture of the alleged corpse. It got huge play, ridiculous play, actually, all over the Net.
Rob: What did it look like?
Tom: It looked like a rubber gorilla suit stuffed in an oversized cooler frozen in a block of ice.
Rob: And?
Tom: And after the sucker who bought the freezer from them took out the block of ice and thawed it, that’s exactly what they found – a rubber gorilla suit.
Rob: Well, what we saw sure as hell wasn’t any damn rubber gorilla suit!
Tom: Think it could have been a chinchilla gorilla suit?
Rob: Chinchilla gorilla?
Tom: Yeah. That’s what they make deluxe gorilla suits out of for the theatrical and costume trade. You remember what chinchilla fur looks like, don’t you? Mom’s great aunt Sophia had that chinchilla coat you used to go nuts over every time she came to visit, when you were like, what, three, four years old…
Rob: Oh… yeah… [expletive]!
Tom: So, these two ginks, at this press conference, they were shamelessly pushing a couple of Web sites that sell Bigfoot merchandise – you know, Bigfoot T-shirts, Bigfoot baseball caps, Bigfoot beach towels, Bigfoot welcome mats…
Rob: Welcome mats?
Tom: Hey, you and Jason want a pair of matching kitchen aprons that say “I Cooked Bigfoot?” They’re on sale for $39.99 at www…
Rob: Web sites? Merchandise?
Tom: Yep. And digital pictures of the rubber gorilla suit frozen in a block of ice, $1.99 per download – and millions of idiots paying good money for them, too. Total hysteria over the alleged Gigantopithecus blacki…
Rob: What blackie?
Tom: That’s the scientific binomial for the species of ape that, if it is still in existence, would explain Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yetis and several other crypto-zoological phenomenon. It’s presumed extinct, but, like the bison, the rhinoceros, the gray wolf, or the burrowing crayfish, Distocambarus crockeri – it could be what the biologists call a “Pleistocene relic,” you know, one of those weird animals like the giant sloth that lived during the age of huge, strange mammals about oh, one point eight million years ago, until the end of the last ice age. There are plants like that, too, you know, like Begonia lopense…
Rob: Yeah, yeah, sure, Tom, [expletive] begonias. Hold on a minute, okay?
Jason: Tom?
Tom: Jason?
Jason: Dad’s gone over to talk to the helicopter guy. Oh… oh [expletive], now Dad’s beating the [expletive] out of him.
Tom: Really? What was that helicopter going to cost, anyway?
Jason: The guy said fifteen hundred an hour.
Tom: Sure. How’s the beat-down going, then?
Jason: Dad’s knocked the guy out, I think.
Tom: Okay. Where are you two, anyway?
Jason: Some jerkwater hick town – Elwah, I think. It’s about ten miles from Olympic Hot Springs. We camped there last night.
Tom: Hold on a second… See any street signs?
Jason: I see one that says “Glacier Lane.”
Tom: All right, got it right here on my Blackberry. Head east on Glacier Lane, take your first right on Herrick Road. That dead-ends into Route 101. Head west on Route 101 – every vehicle that passes, have your dad wave a fist full of cash at them until you get one to stop and give you a ride. Tell them your mom is seven months pregnant and her water just broke – that should work. Then drive down Route 101 until you hit Airport Road. If your ride won’t take you there, get out, make a left, and high-tail it to the William R. Fairchild International Airport.
Jason: Oh, I get it! Then we pay cash, one way, and hop on the first domestic flight that lands outside Washington state, right?
Tom: Not just no, hell no! You rent a car at the airport! Drive it to Bainbridge Island and take the ferry to Seattle. Then drive to Boeing Field-King County International Airport. Drop off the car. Then buy two round-trip tickets on the first domestic flight that lands outside Washington state; and tell your father to use a credit card, for God’s sake, not cash!
Jason: Hold on a second. Okay. Dad wants to know why.
Rob: Yeah, why?
Tom: Because none of the white trash who live out in the sticks in Washington state could possibly afford a private helicopter.
Rob: So?
Tom: So you probably just decked the county sheriff’s cousin.
Rob: Oh yeah? You know what I think?
Tom: What?
Rob: I think Bigfoot hunters are what happen when cousins marry. ‘Bye.