Heat, Bigfoot, & an Existential Rabbit Hole

What does madness feel like, or look like? Do we let our inner voices run rampant?

Written late in the evening of June 26

There’s a version of me that can compartmentalize and prevents parts of me from overlapping. Compartmentalizing lives in a version of me that I tap into when I realize that somehow I am always in certain places. In late March, I awaken some part of me that is always in the Loews Hotel bar in downtown Kansas City. During those uneasy moments that I find myself in hospitals and clinics, I realize I’m always there, giving blood and getting mixed news. In late September, I notice that somehow I am always in the Appalachian foothills in West Virginia. I am somehow always on some stretch of road descending from Ohio and across its eponymous river. Now, on a dark and stormy night, I am somehow still in rural West Virginia in late June.

I am always here.

A long time ago, in a green van, a Chevrolet without insulation, air conditioning, or a working tuning knob on the radio, I caught up on restless sleep. I was a lucky kid, in those sweltering summers, to have coworkers who could drive the Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation van while I dozed on the job. I’d been reading John Keel’s book, The Mothman Prophecies, which stirred up trouble in my life. I gobbled up the stories of unusual visitors, questionable sounds on the telephone, funny lights in the sky, tragedies, and high strangeness. I let Keel’s otherworldly claims wash over me. His paranormal Super Spectrum disregarded any grasp on truth I had and tore my reality asunder.

Faulty doorbells at my parents’ house became evidence of the unusual. Stories of shadow people in the corners of my father’s vision became fuel to believe recklessly. That odd stranger at the convenience store quickly became an otherworldly visitor. Those sounds in the apartment I couldn’t identify were definitely ghosts, or something more. Dark vehicles evolved into a certainty that someone knew I knew something. All of which culminated in attempting to sleep with a light and a radio on, while facing the wall because something was certainly watching me. My credulity was on overdrive and it sapped my life away.

A vast, humid, sky in WV

That late undergraduate version of me would have loved to visit West Virginia. It would have been a dream come true to poke around these woods and vaulting mountains. Back when the twenty-aughts gave way to the twenty-teens, I knew I’d find a way to unravel all the mysteries of Point Pleasant, the Flatwoods, and anything ever left unturned. There’s a compartmentalized true believer that lays deep inside me that would know for certain tonight’s torrential downpour and violent, blinding, lightning was a sign. Something is trying to beat me down in West Virginia. Something is trying to get me to turn back from the heart of high strangeness.

I was cooking!

Now, some fifteen years later, I’m not shocked or impressed to be in West Virginia. I have done this a handful of times before. Sure, I’ve never done a Bigfoot event before. Just getting to this event has proven so turbulent it threatens my skepticism and begs me to connect dots like I used to. Instead of resisting drawing lines to convince myself there’s a hairy monster in the woods, I am resisting connecting a series of events towards some conclusion that the universe wants me to fail as an artist.

I’ve spent a bunch of money signing up for this show, like I would normally do. I’ve spent a boatload of cash on ordering all of these “I Seen’t It” joke shirts with Mothman, a Hodag, and Bigfoot on them. I’ve split the travel up into multiple days, expanding my investment. I’m managing my reaction to health concerns stemming from a mix of heart related factors. I’m trying to be flexible in the face of changes to the plan, inclement weather, seeking help on a dry place to stay, and throwing away new, wet and ruined products. I’m grateful and lost in a hotel in Summersville, West Virginia, as I’ve abandoned my tent site less than an hour before the suffocating sky opened up to a violent thunderstorm. West Virginia Bigfoot Festival has been oppressively hot, sparsely attended, and pretty far from lucrative.

Instead of chasing monsters, I’m chasing the community and the economy these cryptids somehow invented. All the while, every factor from how my general year is going, to my questionable health, to how this event is going on day one feels like a synchronicity pointing me directly off a cliff. “A great failure awaits you in Flatwoods,” whispers a haunting voice hidden behind the beating rain, rumbling thunder, and my fingers clicking on my keyboard. I strain, as a developing skeptic, to remind myself that this voice isn’t real. It’s not formed from an ultraterrestrial being talking to me from further down the road. The voice is me. It’s my own doubt. It’s cratering my self-esteem. It’s drawing lines from events to desperately prove what I’ve known all along: I’m a failure.

Now, during another hot summer, I resist sleep because I need to write this. High strangeness in West Virginia has again kept me from bed. I was fortunate enough to have someone look out for me and offer me a hotel room to dodge the violence raging in the mountains from sun and rain. I’m grateful. But I can’t afford this on my own. So I type. I type as a desperate attempt to bury that voice and remind myself that it has no idea what the rest of the weekend might bring. I turn up the Golden Palominos to drive away those nagging words as I write these instead. I’m not as alone as I think. I know people all over the United States, and someone hundreds of miles away got me a hotel room. This isn’t a failure because I’m not melting in a tent that gradually caves to hammering rain. This is a tool to make the trip easier. I’m spending the height of my summer in Summersville, there’s got to be something to that.

There isn’t.

The grasping to link things and hunt for synchronicities is an unhealthy act each compartmentalized version of myself has in common. I need to keep breathing and accept the information I have and act the best I can. Nothing is written in the stars, strung together in a constellation of confirmation bias. There’s a chance tonight’s storm will have wrecked my vending tent down in Holly-Gray Park. All my shirts could be soaked. My tables could be collapsed. Who knows? Not me, and not that voice howling in my head. I took precautions. I staked the tent down. I tied it down. I weighed it down. I did my best. And, I am lucky to not be saturated laying on the ground of that park. I’m dry and tomorrow will be a new day. I’ll wake up, I’ll breathe, and I’ll take on whatever I encounter down in the park.

It’s in these moments in which I realize the versions of me that are always in any given place exist because I want them to. They don’t seem saddled with the noise inside my head, even if they are. In this tired, and separated moment, I understand that I am never divorced from the slumbering parts of me. The credulous kid, the savvy drinker in the Loews, the fearful hospital patient, and the confused monster artist. We’re all in this skin all at the same time all the time. I am constantly adding parts and losing parts that change me over time. It’s just bits that truly remain. I owe myself to work against the more insistent bits that tell me to drive home tomorrow morning and throw in the towel. I don’t believe that fucking voice, no matter how often I let myself hear it.

If I can hold that fifteen year past self in my head for just a minute, I’d tell him that he was right, in a sense. While I no longer agree that there’s a Mothman terrorizing the sky, or a Bigfoot lurking in these woods, there is a Mothman, and now a Bigfoot, that brought me here. A version of me that feels foreign these days brought me here. My motives have changed. I’m not hunting for monsters, but something unusual is going on in West Virginia, and I’m a part of it.

Leftover voices near Flatwoods, WV

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