Sasquatch
A creature of the wild, Sasquatch may be out of sight, but not out of mind, for our interest in his life and adventure continues. A cryptozooid, or a non-confirmed species, he affirmed our fascination with the unknown, evidenced by search parties, live videos and plaster castings of "Big Foot."
I myself was an unofficial member of the original search party in 1967, which came with a black tee-shirt. I also watched on cable television any Sasquatch update, with the inevitable witnesses. My connection with Sasquatch began unknowingly during the "psychedelic" era. I joined the search party because the searchers of 1967 were in new territory with Sasquatch. They got "real" about it. The year was important to me because I graduated from high school and began my freshman year in college at Tulane in New Orleans.
More important than my graduation, however, was the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Beatles in June, 1967. I experienced my first "contact high" during the playback of the groundbreaking LP. The experience was ecstatic and mind-bending. Like the magazine "Rolling Stone," I felt it was the best album ever made.
With the emergence of Big Hand many years later and the retirement of my karmic identity, a work ensued on "Song of the Sasquatch." We shared a complex dialogue, between the narrative dialogue. I considered him a metaphor until a dream revealed his otherwise real existence.
I lived a redwood forest near a waterfall and creek in northern California, which Sasquatch loved as a habitat! With boulder outcroppings and centuries old trees, it was a question of how a man-beast escapeed notice within the riparian zone of the watershed. My dream gave me a glimpse into the answer.
Asleep at night, I awakened in the dream to hear activity near my cottage. I opened the front door to peer at many silver forms who glowed blue darting between redwoods. For being giants, they were fleet-footed and nimble. Also, they were not lonely, solitary creatures...many Sasquatch wandered together.
Obviously, I was seeing their astral, or dreambody, form. Moreover, they were very intelligent with a high degree of environmental awareness. Any aggression against them would have been futile.
From the dream, the narrative and chorus in the song morphed into a relationship of warmth and trust. We shared our sense of destiny and talked often about the subjects of life and death. We laughed when happy and cried when sad. We were not unlike a friendship between Prince Hamlet and the Steppenwolf of Hermann Hesse. Sasquatch especially wondered to himself why "quartz (was) his mother lode."
On Sgt. Pepper Day in 1967, my friends thought I had "flipped out." After my contact high with "Sgt. Pepper," I asked them at a graduation party if they were aware of "something" that had happened during the day? None of them, including myself, had a clue beyond, "We graduated!" Nevertheless, it had, I slowly discovered! It was the start of the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. It was a sign of the psychedelic revolution (wheel-turning) to come.
It was inevitable Sasquatch and I would meet someday, perhaps in San Francisco or the Bay Area. I yearned to go West in the the intervening years, when I studied Zen Buddhism and read quasi-fictional stories of the first "dharma bums" and "Zen lunatics" of Jack Kerouac. As my person matured, I became sophisticated enough to become a good friend of Sasquatch, or as he knew me, "Big Hand."
