THE ROOT OF ALL
By
Anthony Bevilacqua
We as humans have evolved with an intelligence rivaled by very few other species on planet Earth. The two main traits of our intelligence that cannot be challenged by any other species are our analytical abilities and our creativity. As many would claim that we have been blessed by such intelligence, with this blessing also comes a curse. As our natural analytical abilities drive us to seek answers based on logic and science, we are cursed with the intellectual condition of extreme discomfort when faced with the unexplained.
How often in the history of our evolution have we encountered things which defied logic; things which science was never able to explain, until it did? When early man saw the sun for the first time, or the moon, or encountered fire, there was no way for our primitive minds to make sense of what these phenomena were or how they came to be. When a lightning strike set a tree on fire, we didn’t know what or how it happened. Suddenly, there appeared before us a supernatural force. It lit up the night. If you touched it, you felt pain. Even when we learned how to create it, harness it, and use it to our benefit for things such as cooking and warmth, early man’s limited intelligence still could not explain the chemical reactions and atmospheric conditions which scientifically explained the forensics of fire. For hundreds of thousands of years, fire remained mystical, supernatural, and by a stretch of the imagination - spiritual.
It is that imagination, spawned from our intellectual creativity which provided us with answers to the unexplained, when our analytical abilities were still in their infant stage. If we were faced with something we could not explain scientifically, our imagination and creativity provided us with an answer. It might not have been the right answer, or the scientific answer, but it was an answer we were happy with. In regard to the human species today, not much has changed. Though our analytical minds have evolved, we still possess that discomfort with the unexplained. And until science provides us with the answers we seek, we are content in making up our own.
The story of Bigfoot starts not with a spirit, or a god, but with a plant known as the Puget Root. This plant, indigenous to the pacific northwest and northern territories can be found growing in extremely damp, heavily-wooded areas where the canopy of vegetation shields the ground from direct sunlight. If you were to find yourself in such an area where the trees are heavily overgrown with moss on their lower trunks, chances are you could look down and find the wide, greenish-brown leaves of the Puget root growing nearby. But the prize isn’t found in the leaves, rather, the large turnip-like root from which the leaves sprout. Unlike the infamously bland turnip, the Puget root harbors a flavor that would be as sought-after as a Tuscan black truffle. The flavor itself holds hints of rosemary and sage with an aftertaste of rich duck fat. It’s a taste that awakens the taste buds, makes one’s mouth water, and leaves you craving more.
The modern-day discovery of the Puget root came in the Fall of 1968 during a hunting expedition in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest just east of Arlington, WA. In celebration of opening his twelfth restaurant on the Las Vegas strip, master chef Frederick Lamont had treated three of his executive chefs to a two-week-long stay at an upscale hunting lodge and a wild game expedition. Lamont had built a culinary empire out of his flare for adventurous cooking and unique dishes that wouldn’t be found on the average run-of-the-mill menu. What made his recipes unique was his use of exotic herbs and produce. Whenever he would visit a new region of the world, he would always research the indigenous vegetation and hunt for new flavors. What he found on that hunting trip in 1968 promised to revolutionize his kitchen.
Lamont returned home from his hunting trip with 60lbs of venison and two large crates of a plant he had dug out of the ground himself. None of the other chefs he was hunting with knew what it was, nor did anyone else at the hunting lodge. After extensive research, he could not match it to anything in his botany books. For the time being, he named it “Puget root.” When he stumbled upon it in that forest, he was drawn to the pungent, herbal aroma of the leaves. He tasted a leaf, but was put off by the fact that it didn’t taste like it smelled. The taste was a rather ordinary flavor of chlorophyll which dominates almost anything growing in your backyard. But when he dug up the root, he took out his knife, sliced off a piece and knew that he could not just leave that naturally savory flavor buried in the earth.
Frederick Lamont found the Puget root to be a big, frustrating catch-22. The flavor was astounding, however, he was at a loss for how to prepare the vegetable. Boiling it dulled the flavor into almost non-existence. Roasting or grilling it changed the smell of the vegetable from a fragrant aroma to an unbearable odor. Sauteeing it with other ingredients such as onions or garlic would just overpower the flavor of the Puget root itself. After weeks of experimenting, Lamont concluded that the only way to maximize the unique, savory flavor was to eat it raw. The problem with that was that the uncooked texture was exceedingly tough, as if you were eating a raw turnip. But Lamont refused to give up. The taste was highly addictive especially to a refined palate, and he was determined to find a use for it.
That New Year’s Eve, as Lamont and his wife Clara were getting ready to attend a party at their restaurant in Spokane, she noticed something different about him. The bald spot on the back of his head had shrunk to more than half its size, and his middle-age receding hairline was starting to fill in as well. In the weeks that followed, Lamont found that he would need to shave more and more frequently. Never being able to grow a full beard outside of a light, wispy goatee, his sideburns and cheek stubble were starting to come in thicker than ever before. By March of 1969, he started noticing hair on his back and chest. It wasn’t an abnormal amount of body hair for an average human, but it was hair that was never there before. People would comment that his voice was getting deeper and acne would periodically appear on his face and forehead. At the gym, he would find himself working out more vigorously, increasing the amount of weight he would dead-lift. By July he was bench-pressing 320lbs, nearly three times the weight from the previous September.
Lamont wasn’t experiencing any adverse health issues associated with any of these changes. Altogether, it was almost as if he was going through a second puberty at age 41. His doctor ran all of the standard blood tests which came back normal. And in the eyes of 1969 modern medicine, Lamont was in perfect health. What had his doctor stumped was that these changes weren’t consistent with someone entering middle-age. At the age when male testosterone was supposed to be declining, Lamont was experiencing an unexplained surge. He wasn’t taking any medication, vitamin supplements, nor had he any dietary changes. There was only one detail that he never thought to associate with these physical changes - almost every day since returning from his hunting trip in October, he had eaten Puget root; it was in small amounts while experimenting with culinary preparation, but nonetheless, he was consuming it regularly.
But Frederick wasn’t the only one consuming this tasty new discovery. He had taken his wife Clara on this quest for gastronomic viability. Even though she wasn’t consuming the amount of the root that Lamont was, she was eating it almost every day. And when she became pregnant with their first child, she was craving it all throughout her pregnancy.
Clara’s pregnancy was rough. At one point the doctors thought she was carrying twins, but could only detect one heartbeat. They even speculated that she might have been carrying twins, and one may have died in the womb. But that was quickly dismissed when no other signs of that were present. The baby was healthy and developing normally. And When Abigail Lamont was born, she was 14lbs - twice the size of the average newborn at childbirth.
Even though Abigail was a normal, healthy baby, Clara suffered a number of health consequences from the birth. Though none of them were permanent, Clara spent almost half a year recovering. During that time, when Frederick wasn’t caring for Abigail, he was by Clara’s bedside, catering to her every need. His top executive chefs along with his lawyers and business managers ran the restaurants and his holding company while he tended to things at home. His test kitchen which he had custom built on the grounds of his estate sat cold. And the crate containing the remaining Puget root was left rotting and forgotten.
The winter of 1969 was abnormally cold, with nighttime temperatures dipping down to below zero degrees. Clara and Abigail were in good health and Frederick had returned to work. Though his restaurants were thriving across the globe, there was one thing that was left neglected since Abigail was born - his test kitchen. One night when Frederick and Clara returned home from dinner, he glanced over to the far side of the property where the little cottage sat cold and dark next to the frozen duck pond. It didn’t occur to Lamont at the beginning of winter to check the heating system to make sure the water pipes didn’t freeze. He sent Clara into the house while he trudged through the snow to the cottage.
The new snow which had fallen two nights prior was pristine and untouched. When he reached the door to the cottage he took out his keys before he realized he wouldn’t need them. The door to the cottage was busted wide open and the outer screen door nearly torn off of its hinges. The floor of the cottage was covered in inches of snow. Tables were overturned and cabinet doors were torn and strewn across the counter tops. But nothing of value seemed to be missing: not any of Lamont’s expensive, state of the art appliances or cookware. The only thing missing was something that was long forgotten for months - the Puget root. The crate was broken on the floor and the plants were gone. The cottage was permeated with the pungent odor of the rotten roots, as well as a new smell which Lamont could only identify as that of a wet dog.
In the morning, the state police would be on the grounds of the estate, searching the mansion, the cottage, and the other outbuildings while questioning the Lamonts and their servants. There was no other crime committed; nothing was missing, nor any other vandalism or break-ins anywhere on the property. The only thing that raised eyebrows amongst the detectives was a set of abnormally large footprints in the snow between the cottage and the tree line of the state land at the edge of the property.
With a new baby, a restaurant empire to run, and a network TV cooking show in development, both the incident as well as the Puget root were never given a second thought by Frederick Lamont. He had never consumed, nor sought after the peculiar vegetable after that. The strange hair growth he experienced had both ceased and receded as did the inexplicable surge of testosterone. While he and his wife stood an average five-foot-eight in height, Abigail grew to be six-foot-one. Her size and physical abilities worked to her advantage as she sought a career as a military officer, rising to the rank of Colonel in the United States Army. Though Frederick Lamont had stumbled upon a strange, undocumented species of plant, and took it upon himself to name it, he can not be credited for its discovery. That happened 8,056 years before Lamont had ever held a spatula.
In their constant hunt for reliable food sources, the early humans of the Siberian region had crossed the Beringian Land Bridge into the Americas as they followed the migrating herds of wooly mammoths. Over the next 15,000 years, the people of Siberia would populate the western coast of the Americas; some settling near the shores while others would move farther inland. Groups would migrate north into Alaska and some would travel south as far as Chile. Some would thrive and populate the land for generations to come while others succumbed to hunger, sickness and cold, and simply die out. Whether a group decided to settle or travel depended entirely on reliable, consistent sources of food.
Seven thousand years after the first Siberians set foot in the Americas, a small group of roughly 1,200 people had moved east into the interior, settling in what is now the Northern Cascades in the foothills of Mt. Fury. There, they found a bountiful source of game which sustained them for centuries. For hundreds of years, they were the only people who inhabited that particular region. No others who had migrated had ever traveled that far inland from the western coast. Even though the people of the Northern Cascades had no reason to travel out of necessity, they were curious to see if they were relatively close to any other migrating groups. Eventually there were talks and plans of a small faction forming to move southwest in search of others. A party of roughly 300 had set off one spring after the thaw, moving south back toward the coast. But before finding any signs of people, they found something else.
One of the men had followed an elk deep into the forest, and before moving in for the kill, he was distracted by an aroma which he had never encountered before. It overwhelmed his olfactory senses, and stimulated his appetite. He was drawn to a plant which he dug out of the ground, tasted, and immediately brought back to the rest of the group as the prize of the day. Unbeknownst to him, he had just stumbled upon a discovery which would define his people for thousands of years to come - but, not necessarily in a good way. Though the discovery was revolutionary, and the momentary benefits were pleasing to the senses as well as an improvement to their way of life, the long-term consequences, unfortunately, were tragic.
Today, thanks to modern science, we have come to learn the health consequences of consuming things such as synthetic drugs, alcohol and tobacco. We know how such substances affect us physically, as well as how they alter our DNA, causing birth defects in our children whom we pass it on to. But 8,000 years ago, a Surgeon General did not exist. If you consumed something, it either nourished you or it killed you, and anything in between was a mystery.
The people of the Cascades used the root excessively. It was nutritious, it was pleasing to the senses, and it was bountiful. Unlike the refined palate of Frederick Lamont, the people of the Cascades weren’t so fussy. They cooked the root, ate it raw, and boiled it for medicinal purposes which may or may not have existed. As time passed, they grew healthier, stronger; able to withstand the harsh winters better than any other nomads who had settled the region. And they were finding that their longevity was improving as well. There was only one fatal adversity they were plagued with - the increasing mortality rate of the women in childbirth.
In time, the size of their newborn babies grew rapidly. The women, whose average height and weight rarely exceeded 5’5 and 125lbs, were carrying children in the womb weighing 12 - 15lbs. The women would suffer severe organ damage and anemia from which they would not recover. And of course, at the time, no one had the tools or the intellect to pinpoint the cause of this. As the frustration grew, so did the anxiety of not knowing the answers. And where their limited intellectual abilities of logical reasoning failed, their imaginations took over. They blamed the moon, the sun, the wind, and any other natural forces they looked at as supernatural phenomena at the time. The one thing that remained blameless, though: the tasty, nourishing root.
One would think that due to the mortality rate of pregnant women, the future of those people would be doomed, but that was far from the case. The abnormally large newborns grew large into adulthood. Only two generations later, the average height and weight of an adult grew to 6’4” and 280lbs, for both males and females. The physical evolution of the women allowed them to bear children the size of which would have killed them thirty years prior. Thus, the mortality rate during childbirth dropped drastically, eventually becoming nonexistent.
The physical appearance of the people changed over time as well, but was so gradual there was no cause for alarm. Scalp and facial hair grew thicker, as did the hair covering their bodies. Three centuries later, their musculature grew, producing broader shoulders and wider chests. Their skin became tough and leathery. Fingernails grew thick and their teeth widened. With the next millennium their hands and feet grew to three times their size, and the shape of their craniums became more oblong. As extreme as this change may sound in one paragraph, given the people of the Cascades very closely resembled our physical appearance today, there were no photographs back then. Therefore, there was no tool for comparison. So the people who now resembled the early primate species Australopithecus Afarensis, would’ve had no idea of what their ancestors had looked like over one thousand years prior. And even if they did, they still would not have attributed the drastic physical changes to something they ate, enjoyed, and thrived on.
As time went on, documented encounters between these people and other groups that had ventured into their regions have been few and far between. They are highly evasive people, most likely due to their uncertainty of other humans who look much differently than they do. Their survival doesn’t require interaction with those outside of their communities. They have no desire to explore further than the confines of the heavily-wooded forests in which they feel safe. Evidence suggests their diet consists mostly of fish, small game, and of course, the staple of their existence - the Puget root, as it was named thousands of years later.
Modern-day sightings of these people, while still sparse, have been documented over a wide area of North America, especially across the northern tier. Though this particular group of people are not widely nomadic, those that have traveled further into the interior of the continent would only have done so with a specific purpose. Perhaps they had exhausted their crop of Puget root, and sought it out elsewhere. How they live, exactly, is still unknown. Some theorists believe they live in a subterranean network of caves, while others believe they live above ground, in the thickest parts of the forests so deep in, where no one else would ever have reason to venture.
There are many questions about the root itself. What are its properties exactly? Does it contain an enzyme or a protein which causes alterations in the human DNA, affecting such things as testosterone levels and pituitary development? And after the incident at the Lamont estate in 1969, are there individuals who depend on the root for survival? Frederick Lamont had only been exposed to the Puget root for a year and the effects of its consumption subsided once he stopped eating it. He neither craved it nor paid it any more mind afterward. But what of someone whose bloodline has been nourished by the root for thousands and thousands of years? What if the root is a part of them that they can’t live without - be it an addiction or a necessary nutrient for their physical survival?
It is the year 2026 and science is still discovering new species in every corner of the globe, from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest mountain tops. And the deeper we are able to dive and the higher we are able to fly, the more we will yet discover. Where would we as humans be today if Frederick Lamont had continued to pursue the Puget root? What if he had perfected its preparation in 1969 and served it in restaurants all over the world? What would we look like?
END