Sasquatch Soft Serve

Welcome back! Today we discuss a tale about a member of a hot shot fire crew in the Pacific Northwest who spots some frightening fleeing fuzzies, meet the new mythical member of the family, and hear 3 stories from Sun Bunny who finds a special gift left in the forest by a grumpy bigfoot who may have had too much fast forest food. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_08: 0:00

We'll keep you evil minded.

SPEAKER_06: 0:22

It's T right here. Hit me. All right, man. We're going to get it going. All right. How are you doing today? I'm doing good. You, son? Yeah, I'm doing okay. All right. Cool. I've got a little bit of a cold lingering, but I think it's going to enhance my voice. It's going to make it sound so much better. You sound sexy. Yeah. Say that. I sound sexy. All right.

SPEAKER_04: 0:45

Can you do the intro for us?

SPEAKER_06: 0:47

Yes. All right. Coming to you live from the great piney wood east of Springfield, welcome to the Dr. Kitsune Odd Bob Uncanny Coffee Hour. Brought to you this week by Dr. Kitsune's Not Yeti Condoms. Are you a lonely Sasquatch? Comes in all sizes, small, medium, and Sasquatch size, for all of your prophylactic needs. Get some today. I didn't have a baby. Alrighty.

SPEAKER_04: 1:14

So, our

SPEAKER_06: 1:15

topic for today is going to be... Bigfoot. Bigfoot. Yeti. Sasquatch. Sasquatch. Well, you know, Yeti, that's like a white Sasquatch. Not that I'm prejudiced. I don't care if you're a white Sasquatch or a brown Sasquatch. Is it like northern? Is it based on where it lives? I think so. It's in the Himalayas, right? It is. It's camouflaged more than anything. Well, you know, maybe Yeti sheds like the Arctic fox and gets brown and the... Summertime? I don't know. I don't know either. But we're going to pretend to know. You know how people will pair a fine wine with cheese or with a great meal? Like, you're a chef. You understand this, right? There are certain things to pair. We're going to pair coffee with our subject. Whether that's a yokai or in this case, the Sasquatch. What do you think the perfect coffee pairing would be? So for today, for all my listeners, I have a very nice, dark, rich espresso blend that is mixed with a little bit of hemp milk. Hemp milk. Yes. Wow, dude. As long as you're not oxidizing the coffee, you know, you're not making it into ass juice because, you know, a lot of people go to these fancy coffee places, the commercial coffee places that are not mom-and-pop stores, and the coffee is pure ass juice. This is actually really, really good. This is from a local place. I'm going to give them a shout-out. Fast Lane Coffee. They're right down the road from me, and they make fantastic coffee. Woo-hoo! Mom-and-pop owned? Yeah. All right. Good deal, then. Well, if we're going to do a coffee pairing, then we should do a tea pairing. And this is for all of our indigenous listeners out there. Wait, it's not called the Uncanny Tea Hour. Coffee will kill me. Okay, okay, fair enough. A good tea pairing for this would be an indigenous Labrador tea, possibly with a sprinkling of red cedar in there to give it that more mellow, earthy flavor. I am 110% sure that Sasquatch drinks Labrador tea.

UNKNOWN: 3:13

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_06: 3:14

It sounds really good. It is. I'll bring some over next time.

SPEAKER_04: 3:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: 3:20

What about our listeners? What if they want some tea? We should start looking at ways to put some tea up on the website so that our listeners can experience this. Within the next couple of weeks, I want you to check out our website and maybe we'll have some Labrador tea and some red cedar up there. Make sure you're drinking red cedar. That's the only one that's not, that I know that's not poisonous. Also, uh, Don't drink too much of it. Anything in excess will cause problems. But we'll get you some Labrador tea up on the website and follow it up with maybe some other tea blends that I used to sell when I went to coffee shop.

SPEAKER_03: 3:56

Uncanny Coffee.

SPEAKER_06: 3:59

I had heard rumors about a fire crew that had seen Sasquatch while they were fighting a fire. So I did a little digging, did some research, and found one particular story. that I sort of did my own take on. So would you like to hear that? Yep, let's hear it. The person that told it was female, so I'm going to change my voice a little bit.

SPEAKER_05: 4:22

Sasquatch, Sasquatch, Sasquatch, Sasquatch.

SPEAKER_00: 4:28

The smoke choked the sky, a monstrous swirling beast that devoured the Oregon pines whole. The fire crackled like a thousand hungry mouths, spitting embers that danced on the wind. The sweat stung my eyes as I clung to the ridge, the heat licking at my boots. Years fighting fires had hardened me, but this blaze? This one had a different flavor, a taste of something ancient and wrong. Keep it together, Melanie. Suddenly a shape in the smoke, hulking and impossibly tall. A bear? It was no bear. This thing moved toward me with a dreadful purpose, a gait that was both human and utterly alien. Another followed, then another. A grim procession marching out of the inferno. Sasquatch. I had heard the whispers around campfires, the old-timers' tales spun with whiskey and fear. Now here they were, flesh and blood and nightmare, emerging from the heart of the blaze like demons summoned from the pit. My breath hitched, a scream dying in my throat. They were so close, their eyes burning like embers in the smoke-filled twilight, and I could smell them, a musky reek that clung to the back of my throat like a spiderweb. Then the largest one turned his head and for a fleeting moment our eyes met. I watched them as they navigated the terrain with ease, long strides carrying them over fallen logs and through dense smoking underbrush. Then with a final lingering glance... They vanished, swallowed by the smoke and shadows. Back at camp, I thought to tell the others, but the words caught in my throat. Who would believe me? Who would understand the primal terror that had gripped my soul? It's better to keep silent and bury the memory deep within the scarred landscape of my mind. A chilling reminder of the darkness that lurked just beyond the flickering edge of the flames.

SPEAKER_06: 6:46

What'd you think? Did you change Melanie's name? I did. Oh, all right. I'm just curious. I'm trying to think if I knew any firefighters named Melanie. You know, I actually reached out to a couple of firefighters that I used to work with when I was a district ranger in the Forest Service, and several of them have said that they want to come on the show and talk or even write in and And give us some stories.

SPEAKER_04: 7:11

I would love that. So I think that as we evolve this podcast, we're going to find that we're going to have some great stories

SPEAKER_06: 7:17

that come to us outside of us, just within the family. Yeah. The uncanny family. Family. Can I just try something with you here? Yeah, what's up? This segment I like to call

SPEAKER_03: 7:29

Cussing and Discussing.

SPEAKER_06: 7:33

What? Cussing and Discussing. All right. What is it? Well, the story we just talked about. So Sasquatch. Yeah. But what I want to know is, you know, the time that you spent as a ranger, did you spend a lot of time in the woods? Yeah, I did. I mean, more than most district rangers, I think. Some of the skeptic point of views are things like, well, there's never been a carcass found. Okay. Yeah. So one of the things I want to ask you is, let's use another predator, say a bear, like brown bear. How often do you come across brown bear carcasses when you're out in the woods? Well, it depends on if you're in brown bear country. Okay. Let's assume you are. Have you seen a lot? I've seen black bear carcasses. Yeah, I've seen bones from black bears. And we don't have brown bears here. But I've seen bones from black bears and bones from deer and elk and cougars. But, you know, everything I've been told about about Sasquatch by my relatives is that Sasquatch lives in that spirit world. It's not the spirit world. It's not the place where people go when they die. It's the place that's between the spirit world and our world. And we talk about that a little bit, but we believe that Sasquatch doesn't spend all of their time in this world that we're living in. And that's part of the argument. Is it a physical being like a mountain gorilla? Or is it a spiritual being or something that is supernatural? I mean, you say supernatural. I consider Sasquatch to be uber natural. I mean, Sasquatch was here before us. Sasquatch will be here long after us. There's nothing supernatural or unusual about Sasquatch. Sasquatch is nature. No, I don't think Sasquatch is supernatural. But I don't think... Spirits are supernatural either. I think they're natural. They're part of the natural world.

SPEAKER_04: 9:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_06: 9:33

And, you know, when people start talking about supernatural entities, perhaps they're just not connecting to their past or their culture. So, yeah, I mean, to modern humans, this is going back on what I just said, not modern humans to, you know, mainstream culture. Yeah. The Utes? Yeah. Yeah, Sasquatch would be supernatural, I guess, in my opinion, yeah. Do you think we're getting more disconnected from nature, though, and that's sort of like feeding into that to where things that should just be a natural part of our worlds are now like alien to us? We? What do you got, a little person in your pocket? What part of we? The royal we. The royal we? Yeah. What do you mean, we, Kimo Sabe? This part of we is not growing away from nature. This part of we is growing back to nature. Okay, I'll speak for my culture. I think that my kids, they're very focused on their electronic devices and such. And I guess my point is that if you don't spend a lot of time around certain things or immersed within nature, there's kids that can tell me every aspect of a video game but can't. tell me what kind of tree they're looking at. I believe that's a problem. Yeah. And maybe, uh, Sasquatches will be seen more by those that are going out in the woods because the world is out of balance. You know, I think that for most people, if you, if you don't want to see, you never will see your mind. You can ignore much of the uncanny world out there. Um, If you open your mind, you're more likely to see things that other people won't see. And perhaps some people just aren't of the right mind to see it. Yeah. The other criticism I hear a lot is that we've seen and scan, taking pictures of all of the world. And what I would say to that, except for 98% of the ocean, right? Is that just for an example here to anybody who's, who's listening, who doesn't already know this or doesn't live in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and Washington alone, the USDA forest service manages about 24.7 million acres of forest. So why is it so, so crazy to, to think that there could be a species that just hasn't been found yet? So both of the districts that I worked on were approximately 500,000 acres each. The first district, which was in the Shasta Trinity National Forest, had so many steep mountains and canyons. One of my geographers told me that if we were to flatten out the entire district, it would be larger than the state of Texas. So you're talking about 500,000 flat acres. You're talking about many million square miles of actual land. So yeah, to say that we've been in those canyons, we've seen every square foot of them. Yeah, human beings have, but Those modern human beings who are reporting or recording things with cameras have not. And, you know, considering also on that district, every wet drainage had a marijuana grow in it. Right, right. I'm sure the people who were managing those grows have seen things that we haven't seen as well. I've heard stories there too, yeah. Okay, so as far as my... story earlier from Southern Oregon around 2007. A group of firefighters called the Hot Shots. A Hot Shot crew? Yeah. Can you tell us what that is? Basically, it's a crew that goes into areas that some other people wouldn't go into. They're more advanced firefighters, usually hand crew. They have to be in really fit, really good shape. And every Hot Shot crew I ever worked with, I just loved working with them. We had... Both the places where I was a district ranger, we had hotshot crews that were stationed there that just all was really good folks. Very trustworthy, loyal. Yeah. This came across as like a very credible, credible account. Yes. Yeah. Well, you know, I don't doubt that that's what she saw. Yeah. You know, and it. at Southern Oregon. There's a lot of grows down there, but I believe there probably wasn't a grow that was on fire. So there I was in Northern California, and we were fighting a fire, and the wind switched directions, and the entire leadership cadre was up on top of this hill, and the wind switched directions, and we suddenly... You guys laughed about it a lot. Yeah. You know, like credible account. I would trust one of my hot shots if they told me that. Yeah, because you see where they wouldn't, though, where they would keep it to themselves. Yeah, I probably wouldn't tell anybody. I mean, you know, I could see. It's kind of like if Sasquatch turned around and said, you got a birdie mouth. I probably wouldn't tell anybody that. I think that this comes down to, you know, there's a lot of challenges in the documentation, just like there are with UFOs and whatnot, right? There's a huge stigma around it if you're being ridiculed. You know, not to mention that there's no real concrete evidence, right? So it's just their word. I mean, if it were me, I would have said, hey, Jeff, I'm over here. And, you know, because that's what I call Sasquatches, Jeff. And Jeff is the guy you used to work with that's really tall, that looks like a Sasquatch. I used to work with Jeff, the Sasquatch. Did he have glasses? Yeah, but he didn't wear them out in the woods. He just used them to read, you know.

UNKNOWN: 15:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_06: 15:58

Plus, you know, they're focusing on their job, right? Like they need to worry about the flames. Like they can't, you know, really be distracted by supernatural creatures too much. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I say we see what the next story is and maybe we add it in right here. Sure. Who's that? Oh, hey, Bob. This is Saoirse. Saoirse Bob.

SPEAKER_01: 16:30

Hello, Bob. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_06: 16:32

Saoirse?

SPEAKER_01: 16:33

Saoirse.

SPEAKER_06: 16:34

Saoirse.

SPEAKER_01: 16:35

Saoirse.

SPEAKER_06: 16:36

What? I thought it was just us. Where did... Oh, she's our new... No offense. She's our new assistant. Oh. Oh, okay. Well,

SPEAKER_01: 16:44

how much... I hired her. I work for beer.

SPEAKER_06: 16:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 16:46

I love beer. And oh, you have some great ones here.

SPEAKER_06: 16:50

Maybe I'll stop asking questions.

SPEAKER_01: 16:52

Thank you.

SPEAKER_06: 16:53

No, she's good. Do you like the shirt she's wearing? sure uh that is a nice uncanny coffee t-shirt that you've got there

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

my shirt it says we are not all monsters right here across my tits

SPEAKER_06: 17:07

yeah i thought i'd make an uncanny coffee t-shirt well granted this one just has uh you know sharpie on it but eventually we should make some shirts and put them on our our website for other people to buy yeah you did a good job with the sharpie it's not too much out of the lines but um Yeah. I wonder what it would look like for like men's patterns. Well, all we have to do is give her a beer. Give her a beer and we can see what it looks like? Yeah. For like a men's shirt? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 17:39

One beer, one change. But that's just because I like you blokes. What?

SPEAKER_06: 17:44

Well, she's a puka. A what?

SPEAKER_01: 17:46

Puka.

SPEAKER_06: 17:47

Puka.

SPEAKER_01: 17:48

How do you say it? Puka.

SPEAKER_06: 17:51

Okay. And what is a puka?

SPEAKER_01: 17:54

Puka. Well...

SPEAKER_06: 17:56

I'll let Saoirse tell you what a puka is.

SPEAKER_01: 17:59

Well now, boys. Be careful peeking and prying into the affairs of my kind. You want to know about me, do you? You might just find yourself turned around and lost in a bog if you're not careful. I am the whisper in the wind. The rustle of leaves in the dead of night. I am the shadow that dances at the edge of your vision. The glint of mischief in a horse's eye. The sudden, unnerving silence when you're alone in the woods. I can be a sleek black stallion, with eyes like burning coals, or a mischievous hare that leads you on a merry chase. I might even be a gruff old fellow you meet on a lonely road, with a twinkle in my eye and a story on my tongue. Or perhaps, just perhaps, I'm the cat that's been watching you from the corner of the room, with a knowing look that makes your skin crawl. Because I like you boys, I may be a sweet little tart in a white t-shirt with poorly drawn sharpie marks on it. We Pooka are creatures of the in-between, the twilight, the liminal spaces. We are the spirit of the wild, the untamed, the unpredictable. We are tricksters, shapeshifters, the guardians of the old ways. We might lead you astray just for a bit of fun, or we might warn you of danger if we deem you worthy. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_06: 19:49

I like you. I like you just as you are. Yeah, however you want to be. And I love that t-shirt, by the way. Yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_06: 20:01

So wait, so you can change shapes. Yeah. No, I like her in this shape. What? Wait, is that Dwayne Shatner? Don't do that. Don't do that. Wait, you don't have to do Shatner. Okay. Here, have another beer. She is going to read the Sun Bunny Chronicles for us. Ah, okay. And Sun Bunny is a nom de plume. Gotcha. For a person from the Forest Service who retired from the Forest Service and she had quite a few stories. She shared three stories with us. So Saoirse has agreed to read those stories. Oh, great. Thanks, Saoirse.

SPEAKER_01: 20:49

Okay guys, I'll start with this. I have never actually seen a Bigfoot, but I know of others who have. In 1971, my brother took my sister and me on a road trip to the Rogue-Umpqua Divide. On the way up the road, we saw some weird things, a doe, and three huge books, acting unusually for that time of year. Around a few more corners, a bear was chasing a doe. We nearly hit the bear. It was like the bear didn't even see us. But that was all pretty explainable. On the spur road to our destination, we saw probably 300 head of elk in a big open meadow. It was beautiful. More elk than I had ever seen before. We got to the end of the road and went to hiking down the trail. On the west side of the trail, the brush was dog hair thick. I literally couldn't see anything in there. The other side was a deep rock canyon. We were probably about a quarter mile in and my brother stopped suddenly and said,

SPEAKER_02: 21:50

Hey, did you hear that?

SPEAKER_01: 21:52

He was always joking and teasing us, so we just laughed and said, Oh, stop it. He said,

SPEAKER_02: 21:57

No, let's go back now.

SPEAKER_01: 21:59

He was really shaken. We started back and my sister said, What

SPEAKER_00: 22:03

was that?

SPEAKER_01: 22:04

She turned around and her face was white as a ghost, eyes wide with fear. I didn't hear it. I felt it. It's hard to explain, but it was like a vibration in your soul. The growling noise was so bass and deep, that you could feel it, like when there's an explosion or an earthquake. So powerful, I have not heard anything like it since. Here is the second story. It was around summer of 1991, we were getting a thunderstorm on the district, and all hands on deck at 0700. There were so many lightning strikes we could barely keep up with mapping them. I was on the three-person engine that day. Lookouts were calling in fires and people were scrambling. We went to get into the engine and one of the tyres was flat. Damn it! We were already behind and stress was high. We got it changed and off we went in search of smokes. Danny, a student from Hawaii, and Renee, the assistant captain, were all in the cab with me. We got our orders and shooked off to the Bessie Rock area. Danny was riding shotgun. It was raining pretty good, and the lookout called in another smoke below us in the canyon. It was my turn to chase the smoke, so I grabbed the radio and took off a sniffing. The land was open area at first, and on the other side of the meadow a gentle upslope. I figured it would be in the old growth, where the trees are taller and attract more lightning. I headed into the thick timber area, thinking I would get a whiff of the smoke. It was so dark and heavily canopied that there was no undergrowth. The only whiff I got was like something rotting. When my eyes adjusted, I felt the blood drain out of my head, and I became dizzy and disoriented. About every 10 or 12 feet, There were ice cream-shaped, conical piles of poop. It was not bear poop. They leave lumpy piles. This was completely... like a Phil's frosty ice cream cone, only 16 inches plus or minus tall. I was a bit shaken. I started squelching my radio, so whatever it was would leave me alone. I went back out into the open and hiked up the hill. I found the fire and hightailed it back to the engine. Fallers were cold and took the tree down. I never told anyone about it because I just knew they would be relentless in their teasing. A year later, my sister and I went on a hike up on the west side of the district. She wanted to show me where her husband had taken his five-point bull. We saw a doe pain and I had never seen that before. Of course she ribbed me, then she told me in that same area, before it was logged, she was hunting during elk season and came across giant piles of poop that were shaped like an ice cream cone and really tall. It was thick old growth back then. She described it and I said, I saw the same thing last year over by Bessie. Was it a coincidence? Okay, and my last one for today. It was right around fall of 2015, up by Bessie again. I was out searching for possible, bow-cutting areas for people to go. It was early September, and the squirrels were in a fury to collect their food for the winter. There were piles of eaten cones all over the roadway, and you could hear them squawking at each other over territory. A few deer ran downhill across the road in front of me. I thought it was weird that they didn't turn around and run back up the hill, but whatever. I pulled up the wide area by Bessie Rock and stopped. I sat there for a minute and decided I would go check out the view by the rock. When I got out, it was dead silent. No birds. No squirrels. Nothing. It gave me the goosies because just about 400 yards back down the road, it was really noisy. There is no real trail and the rock on the ground is pretty packed. There was a gentle rise you have to climb up to get on a flat ground again. I looked down to check my footing options and saw where the rock had been turned up. As I looked closer, my brain finally clicked in. It was toe marks, and they were eight inches wide. I could make out the bigger toe the best, but there were five toes. That explained the absolute quietness. Of course I got the hell out of there.

SPEAKER_06: 26:53

Gigantic things of poop. What kind of a podcast are we doing here? Scatological, obviously. No, I believe her. I know this woman, and she goes by the name Sun Bunny right now, but she knows her shit. Yeah. I mean, no, literally. She is one of the more serious people when it comes to this stuff, and she knows... She's been out in the I said, it's probably mine. Yeah. I mean, I do eat things with a lot of hair. I mean, I don't usually skin them sometimes when I eat them either. Oh, man. All right. That was good. Those were three good stories. Yeah. Thank you, Saoirse, for reading those. Yeah. Thanks, Saoirse. What did you think?

SPEAKER_01: 27:57

It is a fine thing no Ringo, no Kai be hanging about or they would be sorry about the pie.

SPEAKER_06: 28:04

Okay. And thanks to Sun Bunny and to Melanie for sharing those stories with us. It's really important that folks in our extended family share the stories with us. Yeah. I mean, that's what it's about, becoming part of this bigger community. I know to me, these stories mean more than just a story about Bigfoot. I remember when I was a kid and I really looked up to my big brother and he had this picture on his wall from the Patterson-Gimlin film. The classic Bigfoot that still everybody sees. It peaked that thing in me that wanted to understand the unknown. You get this love of mystery. I'm not doing a good job explaining it. It's just so... I don't know. No, I get it. With me, it's... having to keep tucking my tail in my pants. I only have one tail. I'm waiting 100 years for the next one. Well, you know, I have the same issue with my balls, so I understand. All right. What's that, Saoirse? You want to see my tail? That's inappropriate. We'll see y'all in a couple weeks when we do our next draw up. I think the next one's probably going to be stick Indians or little people. Yep. And... We will see you then. Same weight. Little indigenous peoples. Stick Indians. Little people.

SPEAKER_02: 29:32

Thanks for listening. Join us next time for more Uncanny Chats and coffee and tea. You can find out more about us, read show notes, and get your Uncanny merch at www.uncannycoffeepodcast.com. Until next time, remember...

SPEAKER_06: 29:55

Never whistle at night. Never tolerate oppression. And above all else, remember... We are not all monsters.

SPEAKER_01: 30:06

The Uncanny Coffee Hour with Dr. Kitsune and Odd Bob is produced by

SPEAKER_06: 30:12

Mitch Kiyotakitsune and Bob Mason and copyright protected under all laws foreign, domestic, and supernatural by the Unseelie Court.

SPEAKER_01: 30:24

You two are a couple of feckin' idiots.