Humans,
I need to tell you about the night I met the most famous woman in the woods, and then I need to tell you she's coming to dinner.
This goes back further than most of what I've told you — sometime after Paris, though I couldn't tell you how long. I've never been great with years, if we're being honest. Back then I was sleeping outside more nights than not, working my way up through Northern California because somebody told me the mushrooms up there could change your life and I had nothing better to do than find out. I'd gotten a fire going in a stand of redwoods so old they didn't bother making noise when the wind hit them, and I heard something on the far side of the clearing that was too big to be a deer and too quiet to be a person. I looked up and there she was. Seven feet of her, maybe more, just standing at the tree line looking at me the exact same way I was looking at her — like we'd both just found the only other person at the party who also didn't want to be there.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Turns out we didn't need to. There's a language you pick up when you've spent enough years living rough in the woods, and it's got nothing to do with words. It's how you hold a fire, how you eat, how long you're willing to sit still. She sat down across from me, took a piece of whatever I was charring off a stick without asking, and that was that. I didn't see another soul for two weeks after, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a friendship.
Her name's Patty. You've seen fifty-nine seconds of her, grainy, mid-stride, looking back over her shoulder at a creek in 1967. That's the only footage that exists of her in almost sixty years, and I'm one of the very few people who's known where she's been the whole time. I'm not going to tell you that part. Some things are hers to tell, not mine.
What I can tell you is she's coming out of the woods for one night only, and she's coming here.
She's in town because a documentary called Capturing Bigfoot is getting a one-night screening at Coronado Village Theaters on October 21st, and she wants to see for herself what all the hubbub's about. And the night before the screening, she and I are doing something we've never done — putting together a menu that's the two of us finally cooking for each other after sixty years of doing it apart. I'm not giving you the courses. Some of it I foraged myself and some of it Patty brought down out of the mountains herself, and I didn't ask where from. This one's a mystery menu, built off what Patty loves and cooked the way she showed me, decades ago, around a fire that wasn't ours. Some things are better left half-seen, like everything else about her.
This happens one night only — October 20th, which isn't a coincidence. That's National Bigfoot Day. I can't think of a better way to spend one of our greatest holidays than with a bear and a Bigfoot. After that, I've got no idea when you'll see her again. Neither does she.
I've kept her whereabouts a secret for almost sixty years because that's what she asked of me. She only agreed to this one night, and I told her you'd show up for it.
Don't make a liar out of me.
Bear