CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Robert Pyle!

But instead of just teasing and stuff like that, I want to jump right into this because I know that an hour or even two hours is going to be too short of a time to speak to the gentleman Bobo and everybody else listening right now, please welcome doctor Robert Piles, or Bob as we call him, Bob Pile, who wrote Where Bigfoot Walks Beyond the Dark Divide and has a new movie out where Actually David Cross, you know that dude from OSAs Show, arrested development and a

million other things. The comedian actually plays this gentleman right here, Bob Pile Bob, welcome to Bigfoot and Beyond.

So they all run together. But my first attention to natural history as a boy in growing up in Colorado was seashells. Now that sounds counterintuitive, You're right. It was a stupid place to be a young concologist in Colorado, and diminishing returns quickly set in after I spent all my allowance buying seashells at the Denver Museum of Natural History, I belonged to the Shell of the Month Club and so on and so forth. But there weren't many seashells around.

I've soon discovered there were more butterflies around. I mean, there weren't any more seashells around than there were Bigfoot and there were Colorado in nineteen fifties and sixties, But there were a lot of butterflies. So very early on, at the age of eleven on, I became a lepidopterist, a person who is serious in his or her or their pursuit of butterflies. And butterflies were reading my big

window on the world. And the other part of the window on the world old ditch outside Colorado, and that ditch was my my wilderness. Got out of my subdivision out on this old, tangly wet ditch, and that's where the life was. That's where the butterflies were, and of course that's where the imagination went. And I always imagined that I might see something that nobody else had seen. Occasionally I'd find a rare butterfly, and that was pretty satisfying.

But later on, when I went to college up in the Pacific Northwest, I started hearing about something that really might be out there that most people had not seen, and that was Sasquatch, Bigfoot, oh mah se Latis. I had the most wonderful introduction to the subject. Now, mind you. Prior to that, I'd read some of the some of the early crypto books that a lot of boys read, that Ivan Sanderson and so on and so forth, and

the Yeti, the early Yeti things and so on. So I had an interest, but it wasn't greater than an interest in many other things until I took three wonderful classes at the University of Washington from Bill Holme. Bill was a Cherokee Norwegian dude who became a quak Utile Indian.

Through the Hamits dances and his great study, he became the greatest authority on Northwest Native American art and culture anywhere, all the way from the Athabascans to the Hoopa, through the Ballabellas and Bellaiculas and Macaws and Nukahs and everybody else.

He knew their art, he knew their culture, and he knew the people, and tot three classes in it, one on totems and carving some masks, one on their flat art, and one on their dance and tradition and lucky boy, I got to take all those classes, and one of the strongest elements in my memory from them was the presence of the Bigfoot cognates and all those cultures do Naquah Book was merging in bak Baquali, Nuxi Way, and all the others, and how powerful the Bigfoot traditions were

and remain in those Native American cultures, those first people's cultures. And here was the thing that really got me, Cliff, was when Bill told us that not only did every single Northwest Indian culture have these stories and traditions, but they were considered to be part of their natural history, not necessarily restricted to their spirit world. Along with set seed,

the sea serpent in Thunderbird. Of course the two run together for a lot of Native Americans, but they also have us a recognition of the animals that they encountered regularly in the woods, skunk and weasel and raven and barn orca in the water, and Bigfoot was among those.

The other thing he told me was that he did not know a single Indian in the woods or in the waters that is still living in the villages, living in the countryside from Alert Bay all the way to the Hoopa, who did not have a personal belief not only that the animal lives among them, but that we, the whites, are foolish to even ask the question of them does it exist as a real animal. So those things made a powerful impact on me, followed by encountering

Peter Burn a few years later. Peter had an enormous impact on me, and then it went from there. My own studies grew out of that, and we'll get to

that later. I'm sure that was my beginning, really was the early crypto books, followed by being up here in the Northwest and then going to build Holmes classes, and then on Halloween night camping on the snows of Mount Saint Helen's ten years before the eruption in nineteen seventy and hearing the cries all through the night that I believe we're likely the cries of telatics.

naturalists in cryptozoology. There aren't many who have had the opportunity, the great privilege that I've had to have a pretty rich academic background in biology, and in my case, it's centered on ecology and ultimately on the ecology of rare and endangered species of butterflies as my thesis project. But I've always been a general naturalist, and my training was in general natural history and biology, and then ultimately in butterflies and into writing.

look at me, I have a degree in music. What good is that? You know? Like, well, I incorporate that into my big foot stuff when I get I.

So butterflies were just as good a portal for an interest in Bigfoot as I think any other subject might have been. These are animals that live by the same constraints and ecological opportunities as any other living things, and so you study those constraints and opportunities with whatever group of animals you work on, and they're applicable to others

if you apply the broader principles. You know, for years I went up every March until this year of the Germ and gave a couple of evenings lectures or talks, conversations really with sixth graders at an outdoor school at the Cispas Center in Washington, which is pretty cool because that's where I began my trek for crossing the Dark Divide. But those kids were hungry for this information, of course, but I wanted them to have their vegetables as well

as their desserts. So I'd give them one night of butterflies and one night of Bigfoot, and then I would put them together and I'd say, now, you tell me, when I've taught you all these things about butterflies and they're seemingly miraculous metamorphosis, you tell me that butterflies are not just as weird as Bigfoot. In other words, that Bigfoot isn't just as natural as butterflies.

were naturalists studying the natural world. And eventually these naturalists became specialized, and that's how science was kind of born in some ways, these various arms. But really you're a student of the world, the natural world, and you happen to specialize, you know, in mods and butterflies, But really you're a student of the natural world with a curiosity

that will never be satisfied. And I think that is just so cool, And that's part of the reason we all, Bobo and I and everybody else listening are interested in the sasquatch thing because of the mystery of it all, just to know that the world is not as not a solved puzzle. It is full of wonder and grace and beauty waiting to be discovered. And I think you and your writings really embody a lot of that.

you're quite right. I'm Humboldt and Asa Gray and Legacy and Audubon and all the others right up to Darwin, the chief naturalist of all they were naturalists, and yet that word fell out of favor, particularly between the Wars. It was really's spot Neck that did it. In used to be the American nature study movement was active all over the country, and learning something about our local flora and fauna was a regular part of elementary education in

this country. And then as things began to become more specialized, more technological, that began to fade a little bit in favor of hard science. And then between the Wars, when there was such an emphasis on armaments and instruments of warfare and hard science. Driven by that, it became even

more so. And then when sput Mac went into orbit in fifty six, I think it was the first Russian satellite, Well, that really was the nail in the coffin of natural history in the schools because we really had to catch up with the Russians on science and the space race, and so natural history went by the bye in the schools until environmental education came along later. And by that time they had lost a lot of the basics of the flora and fauna because the teachers didn't know it anymore.

And by the way, Cliff and Bobo, during that time when I was at the University of Washington as a lucky student, there were a lot of good naturalists left on the faculty, but they were all being farmed out, retired off to the pasture, and not being rehired in favor of all hard science. The hard science was good, but it was done at the expense of the naturalists.

I called the time of the purge of the naturalists, and I was one of the last students to come in to really get the advantage of all those old naturalists on campus. Which let me put those great stories of Bill Holme and the Indians into the context of a lot of different kinds of plants and animals. So yes, I have been always a general student of natural history, and I deeply, deeply admire and am grateful for the legacy that we have all the way back to Darwin and everybody before.

how it works. Whereas if you study natural history, you see how that clock fits into this environment and what

role it plays in a larger scale. And I think perhaps studying things as a natural historian might serve what am I trying to say, I might serve the subject better, especially when we're dealing with subjects like sasquatches or people or something that is sentient and it certainly has emotions and fits in and it has relationships, as opposed to let's let's, you know, dissect the arm to see what how thick the tendon is what.

of the natural world. And by the way, I had to come back and do some more medial on all that because I so much rejected it in college and went within natural history. In order to do graduate work and to do a doctorate an e college, I had to come back and re educate myself on some of

the hard stuff that I had blown off. That necessary too, But if you put it in the context, as you say, of the broader natural world through its working parts, yes, but also through the sensations and the emotions, then you have a much more meaningful whole. And that's where we

get to the poetry. And that's why, yes, I am a poet as well, because I feel in fact, I think I don't mean better in the sense of quality, but I think I'm probably more naturally a poet than a scientist actually, because I find it impossible to distance my emotions and my reactions and my opinions. Fortunately, as a poet and an essayst and a novelist, I don't have to do that. On the other hand, when I put on the headgear of the scientists and the journalists,

which I don't do very much. I still do some science with butterflies, and I still do write some material that I try to err on the objective side. Then of course, I have to abide by the very same principles of rigor that a scientists or our journalist would have to, you know, if it really serves us well, and I know this would be Bobo's experience out in the woods. To have more than one arrow in our quiver,

we need to be broader than narrow. We need to be we need to take a broad view instead of be single minded about these things.

the Columbia River. There are forty four poems about the Columbia River the Lower Columbia. The estuary part published together with photographs that one of my favorite photographers, and it's given me a way to look at the river that the science never has. Through the lens, the personal lens of the emotions.

just refreshing to read through. But tell us how that how that book came about?

the Northwest Nature Reserves of the Conservancy. Prior to that, I'd been a researcher in Papua New Guinea on the giant bird wing butterflies, which are the bigfoot equivalent. They're the biggest species of butterflies in the world, there about as big as a bigfoot's foot. Enormous butterflies and the jungles of Papua New Guinea. And that was my first job out of graduate school, and that was a pretty

wonderful job for a young naturalist. From that, I went to work for the conservancy, and when I was really ready to leave that job, I wanted to go to the country and try writing full time, which was a crazy thing to do without any visible means of support. My wife was an artist, and we thought we'd try that. We did, and I've been in this house here in Gray's River, Washington, this old Swedish farmhouse ever since then,

over forty years. I have had to go out elsewhere from time to time to make a book, and I did back then too, But part of the time I got to write. And I wrote a book called Winter Green about these hills here and their wildness. In spite of being private timberlands that have been very heavily and very often log Do you realize a certain wildness persists,

including some Bigfoot stories from these hills. But I was in between books and I was looking for my next topic for I'd actually written another book after that, called The thunder Tree, about the ditch I told you about where I grew up and found nature in Colorado. Then I needed a new book, and I was hoping to write a book for which I could find a little bit of a support too, maybe some grant support to help pay some bills, so I could really get into it.

I had this idea and that idea, and then I'm not sure what it was. I think it was Sir Peter Scott in England, a son of Scotch of the Antarctic and the founder of one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund, with the which I was in Ball.

Peter Scott was very interested in NeSSI. In fact, just as gorover Krantz applied a scientific name to bigfoot Gigantapithecus candidadensis, Peter Scott, based on a mini submarine photograph of a seeming pleaseias or finn from Lockness depths of Lockness, applied a sign of a name to that animal too. He called it Rombopterix. That was the genus oh ron Bopterix nes citrus. The diamond finned animal of Lake Ness is

what it means. Neither of those names, of course, achieved scientific acceptance because they were not accompanied by what a scientist calls a type specimen to go along with the name. Nonetheless, Peter's interest in lacustrine plesiosaurs, one of the other great rich fields of cryptozoology, re enlivened my interest, and I remembered that night on Mount Saint Helens at Halloween in nineteen seventy and I remembered Peter Burn's book. I had

actually run into Peter Burn in nineteen seventy five. I was doing butterfly research and I went to the DALs, Oregon and there was a double wide it's actually very just single white trailer on the docks at the dolls had a sign said Bigfoot Information Center. So I dropped on down there met Peter for the first time, and I was impressed by his credo, which was when in doubt,

throw it out. I had no idea that time about the extremely contentious and polarized nature of the Bigfoot world and the many opinions that the top people and had had of one another, and so out. I wasn't biased anyway, and so I actually brought him back to Yale to give a seminar. I was on the seminar committee at the Forestry School, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale,

and I got permission. I had to get permission from the vice president of Yale, not even just from the dean as usual to bring a Bigfoot speakers to campus, but they ponied up the money and we brought Peter back to Yale, believe it or not, and he gave a very arresting talk. As you know, he's full of

charm and very convincing speaker. And he had this extraordinary audience of distinguished Yale oh primatologists and zoologists and archaeologists and anthologists, and many students and graduate students wrapped around his finger. And when he concluded, a lot of them had come really to make fun and to just have a lark, and I didn't hear a single person behaving

in that manner. Now, I won't say that he convinced anybody that day in such a rarefied academic environment, but he did open some minds, and that to me was extraordinarily impressive. So people going out of their scratching their heads thinking, well, maybe there's something to be looked at here, just as we've seen in very recent years with the collection of scientists organized around Oxford.

a true believer, because I was not. I was deeply interested, hopeful, open minded, but I would not say a true believer trained after all as a biologist and a skeptic had not seen personal evidence at that point except for the one night of Calls. But also not from the standpoint of a professional skeptic, as some of the other books

were too. Most of the books either tried to advocate for or advocate against, or tell a history, or like John Napier's book, to give a founded picture of it, but without actually being in the field with it, a scholarly approach. And that was a good book, but not

the book I wanted to write. I wanted to write a book by a naturalist, an actual biologist who could be skeptical from that standpoint, but who is also a decent Woodsman, which by the way, does not come across in the movie quite the opposite, but also a person who was a literary writer, not writing journalism and not writing strictly history. I wanted to write it from the standpoint of creative writing and yet attentive to fact, which is what the essayskts to do both those things, and

that was my approach. So I needed to have some support for it, and so I applied for a oh Lindbergh grant, which I did not get, and then some other grant and some other grant, and then someone said why not try for a Gugenhem And I said, oh, yeah, sure, you know, one of the most sought after and competitive grants. I'm going to apply to write about Bigfoot. And they said, well why not try? So I did try, and damned

if I didn't get the thing. I mean, you guys, that is the weirdest thing about all of this, Bobo, wherever you're sitting, if our friend walked in the door right now and sat in your lap, and you're one of the few people I know who could actually probably support it and started feeding you bond bonds and reciting Italian poetry from the seventeenth century. Now, I think we could agree would be strange, but it would be no more weird than a person getting a Gougenhem grant to

write about Bigfoot, now, would it. It just wouldn't. I think that's the weirdest thing about the whole deal. And then once I got the Gougenheim, therefore assuring me of a year's support for study, then I went to Holton Mifflin, my publisher, and said, hey, look, fellas, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation is taking this seriously. How about you too? And they did, and they gave me a book contract.

So armed with both the book contract and the and the GG I still laugh when I think about that fact. I went to work. That's how it all began.

be reviewed there, and it wasn't a bad review. It was a little bit snide, and they made it difficult to pull out a good pull line from it, but it was generally positive. The publisher was over the moon about it because it wasn't a kill job. That same day, I was doing promo all around Seattle. I had a minder, you know, a driver who took me around all my interviews and TV and radio back in newspapers, back when

all those things existed. And then I was taken to dinner at the Alexis Hotel by the book reviewer of the Seattle Post Intelligence or newspaper, and I had a wonderful hotel room. And that night I gave a reading from it at the Elliott Bay Book Company, which was the premiere stop on any author's book tour in the country,

and it was packed with a couple hundred people. And the climax of it all was at the very end, I noticed there were a group of Native Americans in the room, and they were in the back of the room, and at the end of the reading they all stood up together. They were twelve or fifteen of them, and everybody became silent as a stone. I didn't know what was going on, and their spokesman said, we came tonight from La Pushe, from the Quillia Reservation to make sure

that this subject was being treated with respect. And at that point I was just paralyzed because about a third of the book is about Native American traditions and the stories that I was given and talks I had once I finally learned the politests of speaking to the first peoples, which I did terribly at first, and I was very very concerned that they would respect what I wrote and that they would felt the feel that I respected them. And then he said, and we concluded that you have

treated it with respects. I was extremely relieved.

who he ran the book story. He had a he produced a boombox, We threw the cassette in there, and these couple hundred people were treated to an extraordinary set of recordings that in places very close resembled what I'd heard on Mount Saint Helens in nineteen seventy and also what I heard toward the end of my time in the Dark Divide at the conclusion of my Bigfoot studies. So that was quite a conclusion, quite a publication day. And then of course after that I turned into a

pumpkin again. But that was my Cinderella day with the publication of that book.

a fairly good rough estimate of its size. There you were out there alone for how long?

the Dark Divide. How cool a name is that? Where could you get a better name for a place than that? Because just think it sets up any kind of divide you might want to have, the divide between belief and non belief, between spiritual versus physical, between life and death, between the supernatural and the entirely natural of you know, between belief and those who are hardest bones against belief. You just can't get a better name than that. It

sounds good, the Dark Divide. Well, what is the Dark Divide? As you say, it's this range that occurs in between Patois or Mount Adams and lou Witt or Mount Saint Helens and Tahoma or Rainier and Mount Hood also known as Why East. Across the river to the south. They form more or less a crucifix, and the crossbar is the Dark Divide. It's a black rock, rugged, rugged, scregly range of basalt extrusions that runs perpendicular to the main

axis of the cascades. Of course, Adams and Saint Helens are offset from that main axis, opposite one another, leading to all manner of wonderful Native American stories about the love affair between them and the triangle with Batwa Mount Hood,

and so on and so forth. The Dark Divide runs between them, and along the Dark Divide runs the very old and important Indian Trail, the first great trading freeway of the people there known as now known as Boundary Trail number one, the very first trail designated in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and that runs the center of

the Dark Divide. The divide part refers to the watershed divide between the Cispus River on the north and the Lewis River on the south, and the dark part, well, I'll give it, shall I give it away?

Dark Meadow, and ultimately the Dark Divide. But that's okay, it doesn't matter. It works just as well as this great evocative, mysterious name, the Dark Divide. And so that's the place I decided to go. I mean, I spent several months in deep Bigfoot study with people. I studied with John Green, I studied a little bit with Reneeda Hinden, certainly with Grover Krantz, with Peter Byrne, with lots of people.

I went to meetings. I went to all the archives and the transcribes transcriptions of the Bigfoot symposia that have been held, like the Great win at UBC.

at the supermarket. Because there's a whole chapter in the book called Bigfoot Baby Found in Watermelon as Elvis sneer, and it's all about the tabloids and how they've done their best to make just a silly joke out of this very very powerful and consequential set of stories in our midst and I take that to task. So I did all that study, and then ultimately, and this became the heart of the book. I had to take it to the forest. I had to take it to the woods,

as you two always did in the program. You always went to the forest with your colleagues. And that's what we have to do. We have to take it out to the real land and confront our book knowledge and our experiential knowledge in scholarship and studies with the actual

facts on the ground, that's where it matters. And so I chose the area known as the Dark Divide not only for the cool name, although as I say, that turned out to be extremely consequential for me, but also because it's an area of deep and abiding Bigfoot lore from the clickitats Yakamas and so on, and put all that together, including John Dark. I mean, those prospectors had had their own Bigfoot low as we know from the Portland and Kelso posse of nineteen twenty three and earlier.

So yes, I went to the Dark Divide, which at that time was considered by Need to be the richest area within the epicenter of the Mount Saint Helens center of the universe for Bigfoot. And I spent a month there, And that gets back to your original question. I was out there for a month.

living in a timber dependent community. Of course, we were quite sure we were right about things, and we were right about a lot of our conservation principles, but we were also deeply, deeply naive about the nature of forestry and the nature of logging communities and the culture that

takes place in them. And so it wasn't until later when I actually went to forestry school, and ultimately when I came out here to live in grays River, that I got a much more relevant education about the logging community. So by the time I went up to the Dark Divide, I had already written my book Winter Green, which is

subtitled Rambles in a Ravaged Land. The Willebaugh Hills where I live are very heavily logged and multiple times because they're all private lands, no national forests, very little state land, and so that of course has come back to haunt the people of the woods as well as the woods themselves. A lot of erosion, a lot of the salmon streams

are badly silted up. And not only that, but when the big trees were gone, and when the big when the older second Girl was liquidated in the nineties, Warehouser and Crown moved on and they broke the unions and no longer were their good family jobs in the woods here. And it's been kind of a depressed timber economy ever since. But not because of spotted owls, but because of bad management on a long period of time. So in my book Winter Green, it's not an anti logging book at all.

You know, I know what my book's published on. It's published on the rendered flesh of trees through the pulpe nolls, for God's sakes, And also came out of two different forestry schools. I'm no longer naive about that. And I also live in a timber town where a lot of

people's livelihoods really do depend in the woods. So I had a kind of an inside view by that time of the timber Wars, and yet I understood the biology of the spotted owl and all the other old growth organisms too, And of course the spotted owl, as comes out in the movie, became a scapegoat for everything else and became target of people's very very justified frustration when the jobs ran out. And of course, the as you said, Bobo, the antipathy toward people who look like me, you know,

kind of along haired backpackers out of the woods. They were bound to make the assumption that I was opposed to the way they made their their lives and their livings, though I wasn't. And so yeah, there were some kind of tense encounters now and again, ultimately I think we have some good conversations and one of those is extremely well enacted in the movie with the actor Gary Farmer, who plays a logging boss. But you're right now, and

those were tense times. That was really coming out of the worst of the Timber Wars.

making documentaries and he made some extraordinary ones. Probably the best known is called Burne. It's about the Detroit Fire Department, an amazing movie. Don't know how he filmed it. He sent me a bunch of his movies and I love them, and he said, I want to make a movie based on We're Bigfoot Walks. And I said really, He said, yeah, documentary. He said, when I read the book, a friend of mine said, you're going to love the book, but don't

even think about making a movie. It'd be impossible. But then he said, I had been thinking about it anyway, I want to go ahead and try, so I said, okay. Fine. So my agent wasn't really interested because he was independent. They didn't have a big budget and it was a documentary. The film department of my agency in New York said they don't have enough money. Don't worry about it. So I said, well, heck il I'll do it myself then, because nobody else is going to make a movie out

of my book. So I negotiated a contract myself. Tom optioned the rights to it, and every year re knew the option This went on for six or eight years, and then finally he started getting some support, but not until he changed his mind from making a documentary to making it into a narrative feature film semi fictionally. And at that point he started getting support especially. The most important one was from a fellow named Jory Whitz, who was the main producer of the movie A Napoleon Dynamite,

Oh yeah, wonderful movie and a successful independent film. And Jory loved Tom's script he was beginning to develop. So once he got him behind it, he started getting some other support and was able to start attracting money and a cast. And so he informed me it was going to be a narrative instead, and I said, okay, that means there's going to be changes, and he said, well,

of course. So he started sending me the script, and I realized I was going to have to make my peace with some fairly significant changes from how it actually happened. For purposes of the narrative. You know, you've got to have in ninety minutes. You've got to have sufficient drama, you've got to have conflict, you've got to have room

for the character to grow and so on. So the first thing that was hard was he wanted to change the timeline of my late wife TIA's illness with ovarian cancer and her death and move that up so that my trip into the wilderness was partly a grief trip, partly in response to my grief over Tea. Well, that wasn't the timing of how it actually happened, but it made a much more interesting and compelling story, and it was completely consistent with how my life went a little

bit later. And what did I do. I went to the wilderness for you know, my sucker and my support. So it was in character, it was consistent, and I proved it. The second big change was that he wanted and this part may have I don't know how this part struck you two, but I'm sure a number of our of our bigfoot friends found it disappointing in a way. But I hope they'll see the point of it, and that is they changed the emphasis from being bigfoot toward

toward butterflies. Now, as you said earlier, Cliff, my book's a little bit different from a lot of the other books because it's not entirely about Bigfoot. I mean, it is about bigfoot, but it's not trying to find Bigfoot, and when I went into the dark divide, It's important to specify that I wasn't trying to find the animal. Obviously, I had my eyes and ears open, and it did end up with a very consequential auditory and track experience for me, even near the very end. That made all

the difference. However, what I was really looking for in the dark Bide should have said this earlier is was my sense of Bigfoot after my year of study, after learning so much about it from so many people and books and so on, and now finally from the wilderness itself, from the habitat, which is how a naturalist must always ultimately do it. What do I think? Not really about existence, That's not the main question here. I mean, Bigfoot obviously walks.

Bigfoot exists, whether or not it walks in flesh and blood, we know it exists powerfully in the culture. But that wasn't my question. My question was what does it mean? What are the consequences? Does it have consequence for us the way it did for the Native Americans and still does, And ultimately what does it mean for the wilderness? My point of the book ultimately, and you'll find it on page eleven is Bigfoot and the wilderness are, in many

senses equivalent to one another. And if we manage to preserve an appreciable portion of Bigfoot habitat, then along with it, we will protect everything that goes with it, including the possibility of its actual physical existence. But if we allow the land to become so tamed outright that we can't even imagine the presence of giant, hairy monsters out there beyond the campfire, then we will have lost everything. We

will have lost something truly profound. That was the point of the book, and ultimately I wanted to be the point of the movie, and Tom convinced me that it was, and so by shifting the balance toward butterflies, he was able to highlight Bigfoot in a much subtler way. Think of it. If it had been really about Bigfoot in the same sense that the book was, chances are, gentlemen, that it would have been sidelined as excuse me, yet another silly Bigfoot movie. And we all know there have

been some real, slocky, stupid Bigfoot movies. There've also been some that have been perfectly entertaining and really not bad, like Harry and Anderson's. But they don't get any critical attention, they don't get any real reviews, They certainly don't get the degree of screening that we've been getting. We've been on hundreds of screens already during the plague of all

things that wouldn't have happened. And yet by changing it so that I get the googanem for the Butterfly for Butterfly Studies, and then I go out and Bigfoot comes into the story almost tangentially, It comes in subtly and yet ultimately profoundly and totally changes him, as does the whole experience. Well, I think it's much more powerful that way, so I could go along with that change too. And finally, this is the one that was a little bit hard to take it, and it still is. I admit it,

And Bobo, you put your finger on it. It's not the Bob Pyle that I see myself a haz or that my nearest and dearest and people who know me see me as. David's a little bit different from that. He's dweeby. He's he's a dufus in the woods, naive, annoying, he's annoying, and he's kind of self righteous. With the loggers, and he's he doesn't know very much. But and I

said to Tom, I said, Tom, it's not how I am. Yeah, I know, but he said, You're not going to have a story unless the main character has room to grow. I mean, in every single vision quest you're ever going to find, from the Bale Wolf, through the Odyssey, through a walk in the woods, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, the main character has to have a

room to grow and change. And I think David comes out at the end a bigger person, a better person, a more open minded person, certainly more adept in the woods than when he went in, and I hope more likable.

He's a cool guy. I got to go out in the field with him for one day to teach him how to catch butterflies, teach him how to use a butterfly net in the Columbia Gorge with the director Tom Putnam. But we had a ball. I mean, he's extraordinarily funny. I mean just in person. It's not like he's trying to put on a stand up act all the time. He's not. He's just plain funny. And he's got quite a different take on things from most people. Not really

a woodsman, he said in an interview. I saw afterwards that he loves the out of doors, he loves wildlife, he loves nature. But he doesn't see himself as becoming a backpacker or ever doing anything like this again. And yet it was an extremely demanding role. It wasn't easy at all, you know, all that blood and gore, and cuts and scratches he's got on him at the end, And most of that was not makeup. Most of that

was absolutely real. They were down in those cold, sharp lava caves for hours at a time, falling on the rocks. He did his own stunts in every case except one rolling down the rock side in the cave. Somebody else did that. But where he falls into the stream and he's underwater and they filmed that. He did that twice, two takes, and he he damn near was hypothermic. Quen it was over.

and BOBOI man seventy three years old. I'm an old fart, and you're supposed to start winding down, I think at this age, and physically physically, I'm winding down a little bit. I don't have the energy. I couldn't do some of the things in the field. I couldn't do that Dark Divide Trek now the way I did it in nineteen ninety.

That's not surprising, but I still get out there. But to have this kind of thing happening to me as an artist, also still getting some biology done with butterflies, and got a few butterfly projects I'm still working on. I feel incredibly privileged and gifted, and to have friends like you, and to have people of your stature paying attention to some of what I'm doing is a greater honor than I can possibly express. I'm I feel like

a very lucky boy. So I just try to navigate this plague these times with an attitude of gratitude, and I feel like I'm having a much better plague than a lot of people are having. Happy plague to you, Happy plague to you.

please please get it there. Or you can go online to Powells dot com, pow E L l s dot com, Powells dot com, great independent bookstore in Portland that has this book in stock all the time and can easily supply it supply you with It is cheap. I think it's about sixteen bucks. But the movie itself was east in September. It's called The Dark Divide. It's produced by OREI, the Great Outdoor Equipment store has a new studio. This

is their first movie called OREI Studios. That's one of the major partners and with the company that Tom Putnam, the filmmaker, put together. It is an independent film, but it has had about as much exposure since it came out as just about any independent film has during these COVID times. It's remarkable they managed to get it onto more than one hundred screens actual cinema screens, as well

as a bunch of drive ins around the country. It's still playing on a few screens here and there, but it has gone to a video and demand and it is now available on many of the streaming services and standard ones. It's on Prime, it's on Voodoo, It's on Google Watch or whatever it's called. It's on half A,

but it's not on Netflix. It's very hard to get on Netflix, but it's on many of the others, So check your service, whatever you've got, and you can also find out where it's playing by going to the website for the movie. Also at the website you can see the trailer, which should get an award itself. It's a wonderful trailer, and a bunch of other extras. You can have access to various interviews and zooms and things about it, little concerts by some of the members of the soundtrack.

Also on the Facebook page for the Dark Divide, you can do that if you just search go to Facebook and search Dark Divide. You'll get to theirs that gives you a lot of entries to stuff about the movie. But the Dark Divide website is this darkdividefilm dot com. That's a lowercase and it's all one word, Darkdivide Film dot com.

habitat that supports it. So thank you for that. And once again I thank you at the bottom of my heart for honoring me with your attentions and your time.

an individual, and I think the community in general. And I want to thank you for all the work you've done, and also thank you for coming on with Bobo and I. I cannot wait to buy you a beer and sit down and talk about stuff when we're not recording.