World Building
[Went to Cincinnati yesterday for the chili, but was delighted to find a bigfoot on the ‘Campy Washington’ mural behind Camp Washington Chili. Okay, maybe it’s just King Kong.]
At the end of Foote, I had Jim say something like “Fire is an old, old enemy,” in the bigfoot world. In my view of things, this statement was more or less a direct outcome of that originary moment when my wife Rosemary and I stumbled upon the phrase that set the Big Jim world in motion: “Bigfoot, PI.” As soon as I conceived of Big Jim as a bigfoot Private Investigator, I could see that he would live incognito among the humans, and that his people would exist at the margins of the human world: they would be like humans (for lack of a better term) that had taken a different evolutionary and cultural path. They were few in number, they had never invented technology on their own, and they would necessarily have a different view of all the things that technology brings to humans. In Jim’s world, bigfoot never tamed fire—but I had them use it in funerals, to help ensure that no bigfoot bones could fall into the hands of cryptozoologists.
In a sense, the key world building I needed for the novel was done in a flash. Although I had long dreamed of being a science-fiction writer, the world-building that must go into envisaging a future world (or, indeed, a fantasy world) has always been a stumbling block for me—either proof that I don’t have enough of an imagination for that sort of thing, or proof that I have too much imagination, or maybe just the wrong kind of imagination. I worry too much about where food comes from in the future, or in outer space. I can’t really accept faster-than-light travel, because it seems to mean that effects can precede their causes—and once we allow that, narrative can have no logic at all.
From another perspective, however, the world building is never done. Each time I write a Big Jim tale, I confront all over again the central premise: Jim and the humans don’t see the world in the same terms, and the possibility that that gap is uncrossable is always there. Let’s take the issue of fire as an example.
Driving recently, I found the radio tuned to some sort of John Tesh show. I probably should have changed the station, but I listened anyway, and he suggested gazing at the flickering flame of a candle before sleep, as it supposedly aids sleep hygiene. Tesh and the guy he was chatting with were careful to urge that we use one of those flickering electric candles: the real thing, of course, is a fire hazard. I wondered whether the human brain would be fooled: would the simulated flickering be enough to yield a health benefit? And then I wondered: what would would Big Jim say?
Big Jim, of course, would note that bigfoot have nothing that corresponds to what in humans seems innate: a fascination with live fire. We humans can stare endlessly into a fire, even into a flame as small as that from a single candle. I am unable to say whether this is an evolutionarily-conditioned instinct or not, but I think it might be—and that humans have been using fire, and gazing into it, across a span of years long enough to have evolutionary effects.
More, it seems likely that across a similar span of time, humans have dealt with death by engaging in rituals of cremation and inhumation: unless they involve literal reincarnation, our cultural, mythological afterlives seem mostly to see our afterlives either in some kind of underground underworld or in a sky-realm reached by smoke. Maybe these are cultural formations, rather than evolutionary ones, but the link to fire, especially, is striking. Both dreams of an afterlife, of course, have neither traction nor attraction in the bigfoot world: bigfoot have no religion, and Jim (and the other cryptids in my fiction) may feel the impulse to curse, now and then, but they never say “goddamn” or use any other religion-based curse words.
World building, for me at least, is ongoing. And I expect that I’ll drop the ball at some point, an insight that makes it into one story contradicting some other insight built into another.
But I am never more pleased than when someone says that a Big Jim story is really (or even in part) a story about what it means to be human, because Jim surely must be as mystified by the human fascination with flame as we find it hard to contemplate an indifference to fire.
Trolling
After my most recent Substack, my friend (and fellow writer of cryptid novels) Ann Claycomb (who may not forgive me for suggesting that the mermaids in The Mermaid’s Daughter are cryptids) engaged in a comment-thread in which I rashly promised to write a Big Jim story about a troll. It isn’t the first time I’ve been struck by the similarities between bigfoot and trolls. Somewhat to my surprise, however, I actually wrote such a story last week, and (as it happens) Ann wrote a troll story, too. She even hinted to me that she will be publishing all or part of her story on her own Substack, Fairy Tales Will F— You Up. Subscribe now, and get her tale when it comes out! (But also subscribe because her writing is marvelous, and I am always envious of what she can accomplish with her words.)
Anyway, I was prompted to think about world building (see above) because in the process of writing my troll story, I found myself contemplating what Big Jim would make of a fairy-tale opening like “Once Upon a Time.” Since Jim and the bigfoot world have a different relationship to time and history than humans do (again, see above, but note that it’s also a plot point or theme in Foote), I decided that a bigfoot fairy tale wouldn’t start out “Once upon a time.” Given my own position in writing Appalachian fiction, I decided a bigfoot fairy tale would be about place, rather than about time. And thus another brick of world building has now been placed.
When Ann read my story, she labeled it a “yarn.” I have been thinking of these little Big Jim and Kenny stories as tales, even “tall tales” (which is the name of the file on my computer where I store them)—but I love the idea that they are really yarns—even if “yarn” invokes the very human technology of textiles and (tale-)spinning in ways that don’t work among bigfoot. So in my human mind, I’ll think of them as yarns—but Jim will stick with tall tales: because bigfoot are tall. And maybe one day I’ll write a yarn that claims that that very human category, “tall tale,” is something we learned from bigfoot.
Trolls: A Big Jim and Kenny Hetrick Tall Tale
Sometimes I think Kenny Hetrick spends far too much of his spare time trying to think up new ways to wind me up. I suppose I do the same to him, in my inimitable bigfoot way—but then again, such similarities are a necessary (if uncomfortable) reminder that humans and bigfoot aren’t always so very different from one another.
“I was watching those terrible Lord of the Rings movies again last weekend,” he began.
“You don’t have to watch them, if you think they’re terrible.”
“It’s like a cruel itch, if you know what I mean. Scratch it once, and you eventually have to scratch it again. Anyway, I had forgotten about the trolls, and I wondered if you thought they were supposed to be bigfoot.”
“The ones that Bilbo freezes into stone by getting them to argue until the sun comes up?”
“That’s The Hobbit,” Kenny said. “These ones are in the mountains, throwing rocks at each other during the storm.”
“More like internet trolls, I’d say.”
“Hah, yes! Throwing rocks!”
“Not caring who gets hurt, as long as something breaks. Nah, that seems more like a human thing to me. The bigfoot way is something different.”
“Yeah? Tell me.”
I hesitated, not sure I knew how to put it.
“Put it in the form of a story,” Kenny suggested.
+ + +
At least in the hills of Appalachia, a real bigfoot story doesn’t open up with “Once upon a time.” Time may seem like a powerful force in the world, but it’s not. Change is the powerful force, and change can happen either slowly or quickly, and some changes creep across the landscape with astonishing slowness—one holler, one mountain ridge at a time. And sometimes the really important changes only happen inside. In the Appalachia of the bigfoot, the stories that matter aren’t about some long-ago time: they’re about a place, somewhere just over the next ridge.
“I was visiting with some cousins,” the Appalachian bigfoot story begins.
So that’s where I’ll begin: I was visiting with a cousin.
This was all down in the Booger Hole Homeland, you know, down in Calhoun County. It’s where my boy Freddy was raised up, after the whole ‘Booger Hole Heist’ fiasco. After some of those folks down there decided they’d rather hole up entirely, cut themselves right off from the humans, as if the whole attempt to live alongside the human world had already proved itself a failed experiment.
And the cousin in question wasn’t really a cousin, actually. Mac Williams always did things his own way, probably still does. He ended up taking over his sister Peanut’s house, a little log cabin barely big enough for him to stand up in, right in the middle of the human town of Grantsville. “Jim,” he called me when I showed up, and I was glad he remembered I wasn’t going by ‘Jamie’ any more.
“Just a quick visit, Mac,” I promised him. “Nothing major.”
He nodded. “Glad you came by, actually. I might could use your help.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but that’s the way it is sometimes. “Tell me what you got,” I said. What he had was trouble. Some of the folks in his Homeland wanted to hunker down and really go into full survivalist mode, and some just wanted things to go on like they always had. Nothing new in that: the same split had been around way back when I lived there myself. But now they wanted two separate territories, and the separatists wanted to keep the rest of us bigfoot out of what they were starting to claim were theirplaces.
“Let ‘em hide,” I said to Mac. “Just ignore ‘em. Pretend you can’t track ‘em, even if you can.”
“If only!” he said with a laugh. “They seem to want something more, somehow.”
“Like what?” I said, truly puzzled.
“They seem to think that they can’t trust us to keep the humans away from them. That their chosen way of life depends on controlling what we can and can’t do.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “Yeah, maybe I’d better go up and have a talk with them.”
+ + +
“I see what you’re up to,” said Kenny when I paused.
“Yeah?”
“This is like a little parable, and there’s going to be some twist at the end, something that puts me and all the humans in our place somehow.”
“And what if it is?” I asked.
“Well—”
“Well, what?”
“What if most of us humans don’t like any bigfoot telling us where our place is? I don’t mind, you know. But everyone else.”
“Oh, I see what you mean. But you’re making the same mistake that Rutherford was making.”
“Rutherford?”
“Yeah, the leader of the separatists, if you can call them that.”
+ + +
It would have to be Rutherford I’d talk to: the others would listen to him, as much as they’d listen to anyone. Of course Mac knew perfectly well where I could find him, and I set out first thing next morning, looking for this supposed Homeland in a Homeland.
As Mac had described it, it was a high, isolated valley, nestled up in the middle of three big mountains. There was only one way in, at least without circling the long, long way around. One way in from here, that is, which meant one easy way: if I was willing enough to engage in some more strenuous mountaineering, it was nothing but one long porous border. But the way Mac directed me, all I had to do was follow a little streambed up to its roots.
I knew I’d arrived when I heard the first of the rocks tumble down the valley beside me.
+ + +
“He was throwing rocks!” Kenny said with a laugh. “And you just said that wasn’t a bigfoot thing.”
“Oh, real rocks—we know all about throwing them. Sticks and stones will break our bones, sure enough. It’s the metaphorical ones you humans like so much—those we don’t have much use for. You’ll see.”
“Okay,” said Kenny, always willing to go along a little further. “Okay.”
+ + +
Two or three more rocks bounced down around me, the last one bigger than the others, not bouncing but just landing, getting wedged in with a bunch of other fallen rocks. A bit of shifting landscape, maybe, but nothing you’d call a change.
“That you, Rutherford?” I shouted out. “I’m coming up.” At least the rocks stopped falling.
The valley I climbed up into was no Shangri-La, but just another Appalachian mountain valley, more or less like any other: beautiful and unique. I didn’t know how many of Rutherford’s people were up here with him, but it couldn’t have been too many. Of course, even one’s enough to cause trouble, if that’s what they want to do.
“Little Jamie Foote, all the way from Morgantown!” said Rutherford, once I’d gotten up to him. The disgust in his voice was clear.
“It’s ‘Jim,’ these days, as I’m sure you know.” I didn’t expect him to bother to get it right, any more than I expected him to acknowledge that I was fully as tall as he was: I was “little” in his mind, and that was all that mattered. “I’ve got to say,” I added, “I didn’t expect to see that you had joined us.”
“I haven’t joined anybody. Quite the opposite.”
“Yet here you are,” I told him, “standing right here on your precious boundary line, doing your best to do the hard work of keeping two worlds separate. Of course, you’ve ended up standing with one foot in each world. Exact same work as I do, same work as Mac Williams does down in Grantsville.”
“Couldn’t be more different,” he said. Knee-jerk reflexes work pretty much the same in bigfoot and humans, you know.
“Of course, you probably think what you’re doing up here is a purely bigfoot concern, but I gotta say, it looks to me like you’ve swallowed the human Kool-Aid.” Apparently, Rutherford understood the reference, as I expected he would. His isolation was all in his mind, after all.
“Not as much as you have,” was his comeback; even he seemed to realize how weak it was.
“Not at all,” I said, knowing he expected me to react with my own jerking knee. “What you’re trying to do up here has ‘Once upon a time’ right at the heart of it. Couldn’t be more human if you tried. Once upon a time, bigfoot could live without humans.”
It wasn’t exactly a low blow, but I knew it must have landed. We bigfoot love our stories, and we even love some of the humans’ stories, too. But we know which is which. Mostly.
“Never!”
“Oh, you think your story up here, it starts out ‘I was visiting some cousins,’ do you?” I paused. “You’ve got to let them visit, if you want that. You standing out here, throwing rocks to keep your bigfoot cousins away, that’s not a bigfoot attitude.”
“Any bigfoot who’s not corrupted by the human ways, they’re welcome here. More welcome than you!”
“Yeah, I guess that’s why you throw the rocks first,” I told him. “Because you already know who’s too human for you.”
“You all are.”
“Fair enough,” I told him, though I hated that it had come to this. “You can have the valley. Take it, you own it, same way as a human with a title deed.” He didn’t like that jab, I could see. “And you all can stay here in your little ‘Once upon a time’ valley, where change never comes, even though it’s just a ridgeline away. You can turn right into stone, if you want. But no more throwing rocks: they give you away.”
+ + +
“He let me go,” I told Kenny. “I wasn’t sure he would.”
“You’re saying he was a troll!”
“He was more than half-way turned to stone when I left him,” I said, intentionally vague as to whether I was using a metaphor or not. “I told Mac Williams not to let anyone ever go up there, though Rutherford and his people could visit any cousins they might want.”
“You sure this hasn’t all been a parable, after all? A story where you try to teach me some kind of human lesson?”
“Oh, you mean something like this: The problem with ‘Once upon a time’ is that you can’t actually go there: it’s not the past, it’s a fantasy world.”
He almost spit out his coffee. “That’s pretty good, actually, Jim. You’re saying that our fairy tales are the thing that really f— us humans up.”
“Well,” I said with a chuckle. “Maybe one of the things. Cousin.”
Booger Hole
Yes, Booger Hole is a real place in West Virginia, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it’s not a location named after a nostril. Rather, “booger” here probably relates to Boogie Man, Bogey—and, maybe, to Biggie. There’s no likelier place in the state, I think, to look for bigfoot.
And I’m afraid that there’s no place in my Substack you’re more likely to find my requests for sharing this content with a friend you think may enjoy it than here:
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Until next time,
Tom
