WHERE BIGFOOT WALKS: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle (review)

298 WesternAmerican Literature The mostpoignant aspects ofthe book are memories ofPyle’sboyhood experiences at the ditch. On one outing a sudden storm takes Pyle and his brother by surprise. As walnut-size hailstones pelt their shivering bodies, the boys take shelter inside a hollow cottonwood tree, which they later name the Thunder Tree. As an adult, Pyle returns to visit the tree that saved his life, but the cottonwood is gone, having been split in a lightning storm, then leveled and hauled to the dump by cityworkers. This note of loss resonates throughoutthe bookas Pyle bearswitness to his parents’divorce, to his father’s death by cancer, to his mother’s fatal infection, and, always, to the cancerous growth of the city that plot by plot gobbles up the last remaining bits of country. Pyle is a dedicated scientist, a careful researcher, and an accomplished writer. He seems to be agenuinely nice person who isdoing his bestto speakforour fellow creatures in what he calls “the postindustrial wasteland.” CHERYLL GLOTFELTY University ofNevada, Reno WHEREBIGFOOT WALKS: CrossingtheDark Divide. By Robert Michael Pyle. (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 331 pages, $21.95.) ‘The search for hidden animals is a skirmish in our continuing war against the death of wonder.” —Peter Steinhart, in Audubon Robert Michael Pyle, Yale Ph. D. ecologist, world-class lepidopterist, Guggenheim fellow, andJohn Burroughs medalist (Wintergreen), takes up his butterfly net and goes in search of one of the natural world’s most intriguing preternatural phenomena: Bigfoot. But as the big book’s title foreshadows, Pyle is as interested in the terrain Bigfoot is thought to walkas he is in the mythical megapod itself—aswhen he examines the dismal state of forests and forestry in the Pacific Northwest and pronounces, “In my conversa­ tions up and down the redwood coast . . . I heard a lot more about the monstrous behavior ofLouisiana Pacific than I did about Bigfoot." In a chapter dubbed “Bigfoot Baby Found in Watermelon, Has Elvis’s Sneer,”Pyle deplores the supermarket tabloid press for sensationalizing Bigfoot research and evi­ dence. “How,”he asks, “are we to consider Sasquatch seriously when his cohabitants are dead presidents, revivified rock stars, and pregnant pumpkins?” To help us take the hairy man seriously, Pyle drops such eminently credible names as Peter Matthiessen and George Schaller, both ofwhom “have open minds aboutseveral Asian species”ofman-ape. But perhaps Pyle’smostconvincing piece ofevidence isafirstperson account related to him by a trusted friend who spotted a large, hairy, bipedal creature urinating in the middle of a dark Washington byway. “That night,”the aston­ ished biologist told Pyle, “I went from a Bigfoot agnostic to a Bigfoot born-again in ten seconds.” Gradually we come to understand that the subtitular Dark Divide is not merely a place, but a multifaceted metaphor for human understanding and, too frequently, lack thereof. DAVID PETERSEN SanJuan Mountains, Colorado ...