Scary Monsters and Super Creeps by Joly Dom

Author:Joly, Dom [Joly, Dom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780857207661
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Bigfoot

‘Darwinian man, though well behaved,

At best is only a monkey shaved.’

W.S. Gilbert

I settled into my seat on the flight to San Francisco. As I did so the one in front of me was tilted back violently by a very fidgety Indian gentleman. We were still on the tarmac and I knew my rights: no tilting until after take-off. I gave his seat a shove back and battle commenced.

‘I have the right to put my chair back – this is why it is designed in this manner!’ shouted Fidget.

‘Not until we take off. Seats must be upright until we take off; that is airline law,’ I countered.

‘You are British? This is why you lost the Empire: for this sort of arrogant behaviour. It is why you lose the cricket as well.’ This was a very left-field argument but it stumped me momentarily. I considered mentioning that it was a shame we had not taught our former colonial subjects the basics of travel law, but realized that I’d be hoiked off the flight by the steward.

‘As a matter of fact, England are currently the best cricket team in the world.’ It was checkmate.

‘Go fuck yourself.’ He had run out of steam and he knew it.

His chair stayed up until we’d taken off, when he immediately titled it back to the full extent. Sometimes I hate travelling.

Arriving in San Francisco I braced myself for the usual torment of entering the United States. In my experience, if you happened to have been born in an ‘enemy’ country, as I was (Lebanon), then you could expect a five-hour wait, a dumb interrogation and, if you’re lucky, an internal examination. To my utter joy, however, it turned out that the whole NSEER system has finally been abolished, having caught precisely zero terrorists and turned everyone who went through it into an anti-American since its hasty introduction by panicky Neo-Cons post-9/11. I sailed through and was soon riding the futuristic monorail to the car-rental agencies. I wondered how long it would be before monorails stopped looking futuristic.

There can be few things more liberating than driving over the Golden Gate Bridge with good music blaring, off on a road trip into the badlands of Northern California. When the purpose of said trip is to find Bigfoot, it’s off the scale.

I’d done most of this journey before. The very first travel piece that I ever wrote was for the Independent. In it, I set off to find the Giant Redwoods I’d heard so much about. Like most tourists, I stopped at Muir Woods, about twenty minutes north of the bridge, and walked around craning my neck upwards and marvelling at these natural monsters, unaware that they were mere minnows compared with what awaited me further north.

California is an extraordinary state. To me it’s a microcosm of the United States, with the deserts and lush hills of the south, the seaboard cities and then the wild of the north that even includes a ‘Lost Coast’. My destination this time was

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