Gone Squatching
I caught it all on camcorder, close-ups, some running action, everything. It’s not just a Squatch-shaped shadow or some rando in a good costume. It’s the real deal.
The footage is shaky: for almost the entire three minutes, I’m chasing the Squatch, running slightly to the right of it and trying to get it to move in the direction of my neighbor’s floodlights. It worked, but the best shot is still at the beginning of the video, the moment the Squatch stops swinging its head from side to side and looks straight into the glow of my headlamp.
I guess it’s logical there would be a Sasquatch in this area. They crossed over from Russia on the land bridge, back when the land bridge existed, and there have been lots of sightings in British Columbia, just north of here. Maybe something about the landscape is familiar to them. I haven’t seen too many pictures of Russia, but I imagine there could be some similarities.
I learned a bit of Russian a couple summers ago. We had this exchange student at our school, Nina. She was Georgian but her family lived in France. She was accepted to a congressman-sponsored program just to end up stuck with us. I don’t know why I didn’t try to learn Georgian or French or any of the other languages she spoke. We would use a few Russian phrases with each other, especially over text, back when we talked more often.
I wasn’t the only one in the friend group to have a crush on Nina. Quite a few of us tried to date her, or dated her briefly. I thought it wouldn’t have any effect on our friendships, but I might have been wrong.
I remember, sometime early Junior year, Eric posting a picture of the whole group at his house. I had suspected they were hanging out, but this was the first confirmation that I wasn’t getting the invite any more. I felt like confronting them or maybe just calling them and cussing them, but I never did.
I’ve heard that the Sasquatch is a non-violent creature. Most people who have encountered one didn’t feel threatened by it. In every legit sighting, the Squatch is just trying to get away as fast as possible. Squatches are vegetarians, and occupy a strange place on the animal food chain: not a predator, not prey.
A couple weeks ago, the group turned up at school wearing these brown T-shirts that said “Gone Squatching” on them. I’m guessing they were merch from the TV show Finding Bigfoot. We used to be obsessed with that show. I know they probably got them as a joke, but they all have them—the whole extended friend group. When Aram and I were paired up for lab work, I tried to bring up the shirts in a joking sort of way. He sort of half-laughed but kept his eyes on the lab paper.
It’s not like we’re really avoiding each other. We always say hi and hang when we’re at the same parties. Tomi was a bit cold for a while, but now she’ll wave when we see each other in the athletic complex or in the hallway.
I can’t really picture myself walking up to the group and showing them the video. It would feel too planned or something, as if I’m trying to get their attention. Maybe I’ll just show one of them, casually. If the others are curious, they can come find me.
We used to go Squatching as a group, usually in the woods behind my house. Nina could hardly believe this is what we did for fun on the weekends, but she agreed to come along. We had a whole strategy, dividing the forest into sections and splitting up into teams of two. Each pair had a camcorder with them. Before dispersing into the woods, Tomi would get everyone psyched up.
She brought face paint and made up weird chants told crazy versions of the Sasquatch story: a CIA weapon developed during the Vietnam War, an early Neanderthal which didn’t evolve due to the limited genetic diversity on its island, a cloning experiment gone wrong.
It was Tomi who teamed me up with Nina. Maybe she regretted this at some point, thinking it must have been the reason our relationship started when it did, just weeks after she and Nina got together at a party. But nothing happened between us that night. Hornets to God, it didn’t.
If there had been a Squatch in the forest, we had definitely scared it away; Nina and I couldn’t stop laughing and loudly shushing each other. We were all high on that feeling: the dark forest, all of us listening for the sounds of one another as much as anything else. It would go on for hours with no one initiating the “come back” signal until our hands were too cold to hold the camcorders.
Now that I’ve seen a Squatch in our woods, I wonder if anyone else from the group saw it too. They could have kept it a secret. It’s possible that I’m not the only one with camcorder footage of a Sasquatch in that exact spot. We were there pretty frequently, and what are the chances it only took me a little bit of solo Squatching to find one?
Maybe there was some unspoken thing about it, our search for Bigfoot. No one was looking that hard. No one was a true believer. The camcorders are full of videos of us filming each other from odd angles and doing dumb stuff like putting one foot on a tree and yelling “parkour!”. In the end, we were out in those woods searching for nothing, thinking nothing would find us in return.