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Hoax

Linda Caradine

    In October of 1869, a 10-foot-tall purportedly petrified man was unearthed by some workers digging a well near Cardiff, New York. The discovery started a huge brouhaha among scientists, who declared the figure a fake, and a group of theologians, who claimed the large man was authentic. The latter went on to purport the figure served to prove the passage in Genesis about a race of giants who once walked the earth. The so-called Cardiff Giant became a cause celebre and was displayed around the world for years. Ultimately, one of the perpetrators fessed up to the press that the statue was made from a block of gypsum mined in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a town where, coincidentally, I would come to live a little more than a century later.
     Somehow this was a story that my friend Tara and I latched onto along with the Cottingley Fairies, the Fiji Mermaid, and so many unlikely others. They existed to make fools of self-serving stuffed shirts and went to show that people would believe virtually anything if they wanted to badly enough. More recently we’ve been treated to a spate of crop circles, Hitler diaries, and psychic surgeries. Tara and I came to embrace the burgeoning field of cryptozoology as the branch of hoaxery closest to our hearts. Everything from Megalodon to the Mothman, the Loch Ness monster to El Chupacabra, they might be out there and there’s something in human nature that makes us want to suspend our disbelief.
    Living in the Pacific Northwest, Bigfoot was the creature de rigueur. There were bigfoot chochkes for sale in the souvenir shops, diners named after the beast, books written about him and tours dedicated to tracking him. Sightings were almost a daily occurrence in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. So, in the spirit of innocence and wonder, Tara and I decided it would be in everyone’s best interests to produce some actual photographs of the hairy biped. We really weren’t out to commit a scam or to benefit from the endeavor. We simply thought it was a good idea to add to the lore.
    One crisp Autumn day, as Tara and I planned for our annual “halfway” meeting in the town of Dorris, just South of the Oregon-California border, we simply added a few steps to our yearly plan. Our actual destination, as it was most years, was the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon. We had pretty much picked Dorris out of a hat as representing the point almost exactly halfway between our two home cities of Portland and San Francisco and thus a fair driving distance for each of us. There wasn’t really anything in Dorris. It was just a wide place along Highway 97 with about 900 unsuspecting souls who were about to be a party to something really big.
    One of my assigned tasks was to procure the costume. I stopped in at Dorothy’s Costumes in a Portland suburb and asked for a “realistic-looking” gorilla suit. The woman behind the counter, presumably Dorothy, seemed unfazed. At this time of year, people would naturally be renting Halloween costumes so we knew our request wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.
    “Is this for you?” Dorothy asked. What she meant was, were you looking for a really big costume? This was before my weight-loss surgery and, believe me, I was going to make one formidable bigfoot.
    “Yes. Do you have something that will fit me?” Life was one humiliation after another back in those days. But this was worth it.
    “I’m sure we do. Look on that back rack over on the left.” The place was a disaster area. Pieces of pirates and ballerinas and astronauts were strewn all over the shop. She went back to her magazine. “Let me know if you need any help, hon.”
    I found a couple of likely-looking ape suits and took them behind the curtained-off dressing room to try them on. The weak spot in our reproduction was going to be the face. We didn’t want it to look like a gorilla per se but we knew we weren’t going to find something that was exactly right. Luckily, the very first costume turned out to be a keeper. It was suitably large and shaggy with no visible zippers.
    “I’d like to rent this for one week.” I piled the furry suit, black plastic gloves, tufted booties and full head mask onto the counter. I paid in cash so as not to leave a paper trail.
    Tara had obtained a “burner” phone from one of her nefarious contacts in the big city so we could take lots of pictures. She also made the reservations at our favorite Super 8 Motel and reserved two tickets to Titus Andronicus for the evening following the expedition.
    We checked in and immediately set out to do some recon, hoping to find the perfect thickly wooded location for the photo shoot. We found a good spot about a mile’s walk from where we parked the car, carrying our daypacks and bottled water into the brush.
    “Are you sure it’s not deer season?” I wanted to know, feeling suddenly vulnerable.
    “No. That’s at the beginning of the month. I checked.” Tara was a great planner. “We can’t have you getting shot out here. Not before we get to see the play tonight.”
    “Very funny.”
    We trekked on, finally setting up a base camp in a grove of hemlock trees next to a stream and thickly covered in fecund underbrush. The mosquitos were out in force.
    “Do you have any bug spray?” I knew that she would.
    “Do you want it now?”
    “No. Not yet. Let’s wait until I get undressed.” It was hot and humid out, probably high 90’s, and I knew I was going to sweat up a storm once I put on the suit. “So, let’s get organized so we can be as economical with our time as possible. As soon as I put on the head, I’ll start posing and you start shooting, okay? I’ll want to get out of this thing in a hurry when we’re done.”
    “Right. Don’t forget to keep your head averted. We don’t want any straight-on shots of your face. It looks too ape-ish.”
    “Got it.” I gave Tara the thumbs-up.
    We were carrying out the crazy caper with our version of military precision. In the moment it struck me how absurd this all was. I started to get into the suit, offering my hands to Tara one after the other so she could spray them with DEET and pull the heavy gloves onto my hands. I was just about ready. I put on the head and commenced to lumbering about the woods in slow motion, taking exaggerated steps and swinging my arms high. Tara was shooting rapidly, pausing only to frame each new shot. I stretched up into the low-hanging branches of a nearby tree. I pretended to drink from the stream. I lay down in a clearing. I squatted next to a stump and cocked my huge head to one side as if listening intently.
    The whole thing was over in just a couple of minutes. I peeled off the sweaty suit and put back on my own clothes, stuffing all the pieces of the costume back into my daypack. Amazing. We’d done it. No one had come along to discover a couple of middle-aged women play-acting in the woods. We hiked back to Tara’s Mazda and took off to the motel for a shower and some dinner at the local greasy spoon café in advance of our 8 o’clock curtain call.
    The play was a good one. We sat up for half the night drinking wine and reciting lines at one another through our laughter.
    Back home, the costume was returned and the photos produced. They turned out perfectly. No zippers or tags were visible. The head was always turned just so in order to obscure the animated-looking gorilla face. I really did look like a bigfoot caught unaware. We sent out a series of prints to about half a dozen local newspapers in Southern Oregon along with an anonymous letter saying, basically, “I’m a normal person and this is what I saw. I couldn’t include my name or address for fear of becoming a laughing stock in my community. But I swear this is real. Look at it!”
    Our little adventure was pretty much anti-climactic. We never knew if the pictures appeared in any of the newspapers but our “sighting” had been duly reported. Somehow, it was enough just to have pulled it off. And, crazy as it was, we never spoke of it again. To bring it up would have been a chink in our ruse, an admission that we knew the truth about what had happened. Years later, after Tara had died and I realized I was the only living witness, I could start to rest easy. As far as the world was concerned, I might or might not have been a person in a suit on that sweltering day. The pictures, wherever they were now, might or might not portray the giant man-beast of the Pacific Northwest. They were sure to cause a stir on some level and there were certainly at least a few bigfoot believers out there who had looked on them in awe.

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