In Search of Big Foot

In the last blog, I talked about how I love to watch game shows. Well, when John has the remote, the TV’s tuned to football, old movies, or programs about aliens, or Big Foot. He was watching “Finding Big Foot” on Animal Planet a few months ago. I walked through our family room when the team of investigators howled and “Big Foot” howled back. They were all excited. I thought it was just some campers fooling around.

         Our family has had some pretty good discussions about whether Big Foot exists or not. I want to believe that Big Foot is out there. John, with his degree in Biology, argues against it pointing out that nobody has ever caught one, shot one, or found the remains of one.

   I think Big Foot is highly intelligent and manages to avoid humans. After driving around Mt. Rainier and on the Olympic peninsula, I could easily picture Big Foot living out there undetected. In fact, when we moved here in 1990, it was much less developed, and wilder. The population then was 23,878 (compared to 37,022 in 2010). It seemed feasible to me that Big Foot could be living right here in Puyallup.

A couple of months ago, John gave a talk to US Fish and Wildlife in Stevenson, Washington. I tagged along with him. There were quite a few Big Foot souvenirs in the hotel gift shop for tourists.

          The second night we were there, we went out to dinner with a group of scientists. I confess to tuning out a lot at the “scientific” functions when they start talking shop. But this time, the conversation turned to Big Foot. Apparently a few years before this meeting, the invited speaker was an expert on Big Foot. They asked me if John had told me about this. I shook my head no.

They filled me in. They thought this man was a flake. They couldn’t believe that he had been chosen as the guest speaker, and had some fun at his expense by asking him questions that they thought would prove Big Foot was a myth. John was the lead questioner. The poor man didn’t know that John had plenty of experience arguing against Big Foot with me. I’m pretty sure it didn’t change the man’s belief in Big Foot, or these scientists’ disbelief.

I kept fairly quiet as they reminisced about how funny the whole incident was. I only chimed in to prod John into disclosing a fellow WSU professor’s explanation for why no Big Foot bones were ever found: the soil around here is so acidic from all the fir trees, the bones dissolve. And I pointed out that there was a WSU professor whose whole career was spent looking for Big Foot. They were polite.

         Today, Sarah and I took a relative who is visiting from Virginia, to Tacoma, supposedly to visit the Tacoma Art Museum. We left late and made a few stops before getting there. We walked through the Chihuly Glass Tunnel and tried to get into the glass museum, but it was closed for their annual auction. We stopped in at the Washington State Museum store to find out what time the art museum closed and were told that it closed in 15 minutes, so instead, we browsed through the store.

That’s where I found a book titled The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot. I snatched it up and bought it as a joke for John and we left. He laughed when I presented it to him at home, and said that he thought the author, John Green, was the man who talked at the infamous meeting.

A few hours later, I started looking through it. There is a map of Washington sightings and tracks.  Puyallup had 12 reports. The only place with more reports was Mt. St. Helens, with 16. Hmmmm.

I looked up “Puyallup” in the index. On page 128, there was something extremely interesting:

“Sasquatches may do a lot of screaming, but screams don’t necessarily mean a sasquatch. If they did Puyallup would be the sasquatch capital of the world . . .The screams were most often heard in an area of mixed woods and subdivisions southeast of town . . . They first came to public attention in July, 1972, when a resident of a new subdivision called Forest Green wrote to the Tacoma News Tribune about hearing loud screams one or two nights a month in the woods behind his home.”

The book goes on to say that people recorded the sounds, and that the “unidentified noise is not an ‘eeeee’ scream, but more of a long ‘whooOooOooOoo” or “woopwoopwoop” at a high pitch and with immense volume.”

Background information on why this was so intriguing to me: Forest Green is the development next door to ours. It’s the same distance from our house, as the elementary and junior high school that the kids’ walked to. Our house was built in 1979. If Sasquatch has the same lifespan as a human, he/she could still be around. There have been bears sighted nearby, and a pack of coyotes have been eating pets in our neighborhood. A newspaper article said that they coyotes are living nearby in Wildwood Park. The satellite view on Google Maps shows that there’s still a fair amount of wooded area near us.

John actually unknowingly provided the best piece Big Foot evidence this past winter. He told me that he went out to get the mail, and he heard a strange sound come from our back yard. He said it was really loud, and it sounded like a monkey. He ran back to the house to look out back for it, but didn’t see anything.

I talked to my friend Carol about it. Her back yard and mine are back to back. She said that she had heard the same sound, several times. We still haven’t figured out what animal was screaming.

Big Foot sighting at the Puyallup Fair 2011.

So, does Big Foot exist? Is he roaming around in my own neighborhood? I don’t know, but while I was writing this blog, the dogs went ballistic, and I got jumpy. I’m keeping binoculars, and a camera handy.

Laura Keolanui Stark is keeping an eye out for Sasquatch. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Life Is a Game Show

Whenever I win control of the remote in our house, if there’s a game show on TV, that’s what I’ll be watching. I like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but my current favorite is Cash Cab. When we visit New York City again, I’ll be looking for Ben Bailey.

         Sarah and I were watching a Cash Cab marathon one day when I asked, “How come it’s always the MAN who gets to be the one to give the answer?”

          We started getting all feminist riled up about that, “Yeah! What’s that about?”

          After a few episodes, we realized it wasn’t a gender thing. Whoever sat in the seat that was not directly behind the driver got to be the one who answered for the group. Most of the time, it was a man in that seat because men are chivalrous and let women and children get in the cab first. We felt a little stupid.

         Then I started wondering, if the winners split the money evenly when they got out of the cab, or if they divided it according to how many correct answers each person gave?  Who would I call for a mobile shout out? Could you choose based on the question?

          It’s always interesting too, if they haven’t gotten kicked out of the cab, to see if the contestants will take the double or nothing gamble at the end of the cab ride. And, it's refreshing to see how polite New Yorkers are.

          Years of watching game shows meant that I was fully prepared on one of the first sunny days of summer last year. John had played hooky from work and we went to eat lunch on Ruston Way, Tacoma’s waterfront.

           Afterwards, we walked out onto the end of a pier to look out at the water. That’s when we spotted an old piling sticking up out of the water covered with coins, mostly pennies. John dug in his pocket, and I dug in my purse for pennies. We were tossing coins, trying to make them “stick” to the top of the 6” diameter piling, watching them bounce off or miss entirely and plunk into the Puget Sound, when a couple walked up to us and issued a challenge.

          They were about the same age as we are, but not married. They were dating—long enough for the guy to feel comfortable launching passive aggressive barbs at his girlfriend and her supposed lack of intelligence. 

          Then he turned his spotlight on me, “I bet YOU can’t name the colleges in the Pac-10.”

           I had no choice but to start naming them, from north to south along the west coast. Mr. Obnoxious held up fingers as I rattled them off. The girlfriend got more excited the more I named. At eight, I stalled. He started gloating.

         John threw me a hint, “Our friends, Pat and Stephanie, moved to . . .”

         "Got it! Arizona and Arizona State!”

          Quiz guy was disappointed. His girlfriend high-fived me.

          Then I turned to him and threw my gauntlet down, “OK, now you have to name ten designer handbags.”

          His girlfriend beamed, “Yeah! Yeah! Name ten designers!”

          He looked stunned, “Calvin Klein?” I held up one finger.

          John looked at me, “What’s that one? The purse that you got for Sarah in China? Dooney & Bourke!”

          “OK, that’s two.” The girlfriend was practically jumping up and down. We waited. They had bupkis. 

         Together, she and I came up with eight more. I was glad she knew because to tell the truth, I was bluffing just to watch him sweat. I buy my purses from Fred Meyer’s or Penneys.               

         We left that day, and I thought the Ruston Way game show was an isolated incident, until a couple of weeks ago.

         Sarah and I were in downtown Tacoma to do some shopping. I was feeding coins into a machine to pay for parking. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walk up. I thought he was waiting to buy a parking ticket too, but instead, he was running his own impromptu game show.

         “I bet you can’t tell me who invented penicillin.”

         Sarah looked around for a camera. Maybe we were on Jay Leno. I was trying to figure out how many minutes we’d get for a quarter, how long we were going to be, and how much change I had. Without turning around and looking at him, I answered, “Salk.”

         “Wrong! But you were headed in the right direction. It was Alexander Fleming.”

          Dang it! I pulled the ticket out of the machine. Salk cured polio (and NOT with penicillin either). All I saw of the random quiz master was his backpack as he walked off down the street. And, I’d bought 30 minutes more parking time than I needed. Dang it again!

           So if you go to Tacoma, be prepared. As my teachers used to say, “make sure you take your thinking cap with you.”

Laura Keolanui Stark is hoping she’ll make it to the bonus round. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com. (The Pac-10 consisted of: Washington State University, University of Washington, University of Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, California, UCLA, USC, Arizona, Arizona State.)

The Story of a Cat

   I never wanted a cat. I’m a dog person.

        Thirteen years ago, a feral cat had a litter of kittens under our house. She had a litter every spring. That particular spring, she chose our house. Then, for some reason, she left one kitten behind. The kitten was too small to jump over a cement perimeter. We could hear her crying through one of our heating vents.

         Two days later, John and the yellow lab mix dog we had then, Lucky, crawled under the house. As soon as she heard them, the kitten quit crying for her mother and hid. After playing the waiting game for a long time, she started crying again, and they found her wedged in between a supporting beam of the house and part of the heating system. When John reached in to get her, she went berserk—hissing, growling, clawing.

  No fool, Lucky bailed out right away. John yelled out to us, “Get the leather gloves.”

        Just to make things more interesting, when I handed the gloves to him, I asked, “What if it’s a cougar cub?” He was not amused.

         A few minutes later, John emerged from the crawl space with a fluffy black kitten. He said she’d finally given up when she figured out that if she didn’t, he was going to pull her head off. Inside, she looked up at him with big adoring eyes as if to say, “If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have put up such a fight.”

          We fed her milk with an eye dropper. She couldn’t get enough. Of course, the kids begged, “Can we keep her? Can we keep her?” I told them I didn’t want a cat. We had a dog.

          Later, we took her to the vet because her eyes looked bad. The receptionist asked what our kitten’s name was. I explained that she didn’t have a name because she wasn’t our kitten. We weren’t keeping her.

  We asked the vet if she could tell if the kitten with no name had been weaned. The vet put some cat food on a dish down in front of the kitten and she climbed up onto the plate to gobble it up. That answered that question. She had an eye infection, so we got some medicine for that.

I asked everyone we knew if they wanted a kitten. I even announced it at the weekly Cub Scout meeting. Everyone agreed that she was adorable. Everyone held her and snuggled with her. Nobody wanted to keep her. The kids begged relentlessly. I stayed firm. No kitten.

Then one day I sat down at my sewing machine on the dining room table. I had just started learning to quilt. Suddenly, a little ball of black fluff was sitting on my lap, purring contentedly. She knew just whose heartstrings to play. My anti-cat resolve melted.

Her fur was so soft, we named her Velvet. She was sassy enough to kick Lucky off his favorite pillow, and smart enough to come and get you if she was hungry or her litter box wasn’t clean enough for her. Her tail was always twitching.

In the spring especially, she’d try to answer her feral call of the wild, making a stealthy dash for the door any time someone opened it. Most of the time, she would blend into the rhythm of our home, disappearing whenever a visitor came.

But once she took center stage. We were having a barbecue, and she kept watch so that when someone inadvertently left the screen door open, she made her escape.

We had a bird feeder about five yards away from the house. While everyone at the party chatted and ate, I spotted Velvet running crouched across the yard. Then in one incredibly athletic, graceful leap about five feet up in the air, she caught an unsuspecting bird and brought it down. Women screamed and children cried.

Velvet slinked back toward us with the bird in her mouth and ducked under the deck with her prize. I tried to comfort the kids, while a female guest lectured me about “letting our cat outside” and how cruel we were to have bird feeder and a cat.

Lucky and Velvet

When we moved to this house, she’d cry at the door leading to the garage, and I’d let her out there—a sorry substitute for the real outdoors, but a change of pace for her.

She knew not to sit on me (I shooed her off my lap when I figured out I was allergic to cats). But she’d sit with anyone else sitting on one particular chair in the family room. She’d let you pet her for awhile, and then nip you when she decided that she’d had enough. She took all the other pets in stride, and got along famously with T-Bone.

This past year, she started drinking water constantly, even drinking from T-Bone’s bowl when hers ran dry. He didn’t have a problem with that. Sometimes I’d find her sleeping with her head resting on her water bowl. She looked like a passed out drunk.

In October, the vet told me that she had diabetes. We could give Velvet daily insulin shots, but that wasn’t feasible. She said that Velvet would start to lose weight, get flat footed, and then it wouldn’t be long after that, that she would die. I hoped that she’d hold on until November, so that the kids would be able to say goodbye to her at Thanksgiving.

She lost weight, but she’d been overweight before diabetes, so she looked pretty good for awhile. She was always beautiful: sleek with big green eyes set in a perfectly shaped face, and a little lilt to her nose.

Keeping her water bowl filled and her litter clean got harder, but she came upstairs every morning to sing for some tuna, and to lounge in her favorite spots. She still kept me company whenever I was quilting. She approved every quilt I made after that fateful day when she first sat on my lap at the sewing machine.  

When we left for Italy in May, I told Johnny what to do if she died. In June, I called the vet twice and made appointments to have her euthanized, but then I couldn’t go through with it. Although she was thin, she didn’t seem like she was in pain. She was still making it up and down the stairs, slowly and carefully. Every time I had taken her to the vet before, she had been scared, but looked up to me with those wise green eyes trusting that I would take care of her. How could I “betray” that trust?

John and I went away for a weekend, and when we came back, Velvet had lost even more weight. Her body wasn’t able to absorb the nutrients from her food anymore. She was starving no matter how much she ate. She started missing the litter box. One night she climbed under my desk looking for a litter box that had never been there. It was time.

So on July 1st, more than eight months after we thought we’d lose her, we took her to the vet one last time. When I picked her up, she was so light. There was nothing to her. In the car, she talked along the way. At the vet’s she was calm. I stroked her nose, like I always had to soothe her, and the best cat ever, slipped away.  Someone who didn’t want a cat had a catch in her throat, and tears flowing down her cheeks. Good-bye Velvet, you were well loved, especially by a certain dog person.

Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.