LAHAR
I couldn’t include this in the report. As a geologist, I only know pressure, heat, and time. But standing in that trench, I understood something I had never been trained to articulate.
There were charred tree trunks everywhere, only pointing at the volcano in horror. They were a reminder in the lush green regrowth. Today is September 14, 1980, and Mount St. Helen had erupted about four months ago, on May 18. We were mainly cataloguing debris deposits: the layers of ash and pumice, until a section of the trench gave way.
What we uncovered though, was not a fossil.
The best word I can say is that it was a husk.
At first glance, it was just a hole. There was a delicate imprint of something much more intricate. My associate suggested that it was a tree. Trees don’t have necks, or bend like shoulders, or curl like fingers though. We had our hammer and chisels ready to get the imprint out of the ground, and naturally the outline became bolder with every strike.
“Stop,” I said, before I understood why.
It was massive, but the form was undeniably human. It stood in front of us, double our height. The proportions were wrong in subtle ways though. The arms were too long, and the torso too dense. The eyes were closed, a simple expression of basking in a dream that ended a while ago.
It would be expected that this “husk” had some texture like stone, but it was more like a fiber. The glassy obsidian color-like material tore from its resting place like a vegetable, celery if I must give an example. And the patterns, oh, the patterns. The alteration of the fast and slow cooling obsidian, pumice and ash produced repeating patterns so intricate that they could only leave you in awe of nature. I wish I could attach a photo, but my supervisors have insisted against it.
Anyway, we worked even more carefully after that. Photographs. Measurements. The language of documentation came easily, even as the object resisted categorization. No charring. No collapse. By all known models, anything inside the blast radius should have been obliterated. This clearly wasn’t.
Preservation is not survival. Preservation is passive, just a memo of acknowledgment. This felt….adaptive.
When we left the site and went back to the labs, I knew exactly what to look through.
Sightings clustered near fault lines. Near landslides. Near places where the earth had shifted violently and then settled again. I flipped through the files. The descriptions were similar, but never identical. Some were broader. Some shorter. Some described movement; others described stillness. They were all filed under the same name.
Bigfoot.
That is exactly why I can’t report this. Not to the public at least.
The term had existed long before this eruption. I knew that. Everyone did. It was a convenient label coined in the 50’s, for anything large, upright and unexplainable that preferred trees to people.
Officially, we documented the find as a geological formation that happened to contain organic material. There were discussions about excavation, preservation, and removal. Maybe plans to even pour wax and have a model. Eventually, funding shifted and naturally so did attention. The mountain was still restless. There were other priorities.
If the land could do this once, it could do it again. I get goosebumps at the thought of witnessing another event like this. Another trench. Another face.
The area was marked off limits at my discretion. I am only thankful I never met this Bigfoot face to face.