I Want to Believe

by Miki Howald

I grew up in wooded and rolling hills deep in south eastern Ohio, where the treeline in places breaks for patches of farmland, only to spring up again a few miles away. In the woods behind my house I discovered caves, waterfalls, and ravines that could only be crossed by vine, and deep pools the color of everything, where one could swim in the summer—but only after throwing rocks in the water to ward off snakes. The largest state park was only a county to the east, and there were miles and miles of hiking there, shaded trails under a canopy of deciduous leaves with destinations like the Old Stone House and a couple of forgotten cemeteries from the time before the state owned the land.

Eastern Ohio strangely is both groomed, like the farmland my extended family lived off of, and wild like those dark woods. This is the place where Native American tribes from hundreds of miles around came in truce to gather flint. This is where the people before those tribes buried their dead in mounds shaped like serpents. But there could be an even older presence under those trees, something so old we’ve stopped believing in it. Eastern Ohio, where I grew up, the edge of Appalachia, is also Bigfoot country.

According to the Eastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Center, run by a man my father briefly worked for in the early 1980s, there have been numerous documented sightings and stories of Bigfoot going all the way back to the Delaware tribe in the mid 18^th century. The bulk of sightings occur in the three county area of Coshocton, Guernsey, and Muskingum Counties, known as the Sasquatch Triangle. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the middle of this triangle that I became so interested in the search. Were time and money of no concern and were I able to passionately pursue anything, my dream would be to become a cryptozoologist. 

I’ve always been fascinated with the unknown and uncatalogued; when I was little I left every trip to the library with a new stack of books about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other cryptids. I knew more about the various theories behind Nessie—strange wave patterns caused by underwater caverns, plesiosaurus or other prehistoric aquatic reptiles, or a sturgeon living out its old age in a lake (sturgeons can live over 200 years and grow to massive sizes. The largest known sturgeon was 27 feet long and weighed roughly 3,000 pounds)—than I did about Madonna or Cyndi Lauper.

The scientific community does not, for the most part, take cryptozoology seriously. Perhaps it has merit in folklore or regional studies, but it holds nothing for marine biologists or mainstream zoologists. Dr. William Montagna, former Director of the Federal Primate Center in Oregon, wrote in a 1976 article that:

The scientist who is reviled because he won't listen to fantasy goes securely on his way, knowing that life is so full of real wonderment and mystery that he does not have to fantasize. But perhaps I ought to add that man's need to fantasize is a vestigial remnant of his past. It created mythological characters, good and evil; visions of miraculous events, heaven, purgatory and hell. It created the oracles, the art of palmistry, phrenology, astrology and all sorts of other occult sciences. And finally, it peopled man's world with monsters.

My curiosity about undiscovered and somewhat mythical creatures is probably amusing to some, but I’m very serious about it. I want to travel the world in search of the unknown. Is the Abominable Snowman alive in the Himalayas? Is El Chupacabra killing livestock in Mexico? Is there really a devil in the Pine Woods of New Jersey? It’s more than just the folklore I want to know. I want to find and hold physical evidence in my hands, categorize it, place it in context. I don’t know if any of these creatures exist as much as I want them to. I could search my whole life and never find anything more than a muddy footprint, a strange wave pattern or photographs that are almost—but never quite—in focus. 

Those who know me well can see the paradox in my passion: how does a woman of no faith, characterized by her own lack of belief, believe in this? If I wanted so much to believe there is something unknown, then why not believe in God? There is no proof that there is a god, and there is no proof that there is not a god. But placing oneself in that agnostic middle ground still assumes that the existence of God is part of the paradigm. To truly be an atheist one has to exist outside of that paradigm altogether, just as scientists like Dr. Montagna have completely removed the possibility of Bigfoot and Nessie from their own. 

I want these strange creatures, perhaps forgotten and lost remnants of another time, to exist. Like the poster above Fox Mulder’s desk in his basement office says, I want to believe. It’s the possibility that intrigues me. They could exist, couldn’t they? Isn’t there some some paradigm, some system that could account for lake monsters in Scotland and Bigfoot in my hometown? You see, it’s the system that I have to find in order to believe this. That is where my faith lies—in systems and in my ability to understand, create, deconstruct and then rebuild them. In this way, life as a cryptozoologist makes perfect sense. I would forever be searching for clues of the unknown—analyzing and categorizing them. I would create a system that could account for the unbelievable, the supernatural and the bizarre; I would allow for possibility.

But that system already exists; that paradigm is evolution. From my understanding of the theory, it makes so much sense; it’s so perfect and completely unpredictable at the same time. Because it doesn’t mean that the creatures I seek must exist, or that they do, here and now; all it does is allow for their possibility. Through natural selection Yeti could have evolved, just as through natural selection Yeti could have become extinct. 

This is not a fantasy born of a vestigial need to populate my world with gods and monsters or good and evil; my monsters belong here on this earth. They are as natural to it as you and I, as the goldfinches on the tree outside my window each morning, as the coelacanth—long thought to be extinct before reappearing on the shore of South Africa in 1938. My desire for these unknown, undocumented creatures isn’t about something outside of this world. The unknown I seek is the unknown here with us, now. And this unknown can keep on expanding forever.

Comments

[karen]

i enjoyed reading about where you were raised in southeastern ohio. it gave me a glimpse of my roots
because my dad was raised in washington county and has his initials carved in a covered bridge that crosses the little muskingham river. awhile ago i started a song with this in mind,
tails wagging, birds singing, friends laughing, daffodils waving, breezes cooling, sun warming, waves
crashing, ponies prancing, rain watering, 'surely the Lord was in this place'.