Welcome to Giantess!
In this scenic byway of That Mystic Road, you will find Sasquatch stories, poems, book & media reviews, ai Sasquatch art that is intriguing, significant, and worthy.
Welcome to a new Substack: Content Preview
I have written many many poems and stories about the Giantess and her Sasquatch tribe that I will post here. Some of these will be free to all subscribers, but longer, in-depth stories will be for paid subscribers only. I have read many books on the topic that I will review. I like to create ai images mostly using Midjourney of the Giantess. She is a rich Meadow of Dreams for me, and I invite you into our magical world.
Origin Story: How the Giantess became my spirit guide
The Photographic Memory
I’ve told this story to myself before, gone over and over it like a photographer who washes the print over and over, changing light, changing emulsion, hanging print after print by short, plastic clothespins to the line. The face of the little girl turns and wavers on the page as the fan whirls angrily in the corner. In the faint orange glow, I examine print after print, looking now at the Edvard Munch scream-faces of my mother and aunts, now at the dark mass of shadow that is the old growth Western red cedar forest. I’m looking for a hunched-over figure seven feet tall with thick, sleepy eyes, huge, leathery lips protruding and painted a garish, haphazard red. The light picks up a tight weave of branches—is that her basket? Is that mass of black the horsehair wilderness of her head? The figure moves forward, recedes, each print different.
A Birthday in the Skagit Valley
What we see in sharpest focus is the four-year-old girl. Her mother made the white party dress for her birthday, and her birthday present from her father is the brace of pearl-handled pistols cinched around her hips. The black-and-white image shifts, some angle of light changes, and all the primary colors leap vivid off the emulsified page. She is gathering dandelions, the enormous, shaggy-headed, neon-yellow dandelions of the upper Skagit River. The pasture she crosses is a saturated kelly green, and there in the distance is her grandfather’s logging rig. Most interesting and compelling to an adventurous, curly-headed girl on her fourth birthday is the big-toothed saw mounted on a John Deere tractor frame.
The high metal seat catches sunlight; the rusty saw blade teeth slicing the air to ribbons even standing Sunday-still.
First Encounter with The Giantess
I was up on the metal seat when I saw the Giantess in that cedar light. She opened her drooping eyes and looked straight at me. She raised her hand and placed a thick, black finger over red lips as if to shush me, as if to say, “Keep our secret.” Then she turned, looked back over her shoulder and gestured to me. “Let’s go,” the gesture says, an urgent movement of arm through shadow and light. As I move toward her, I begin the fall toward the blade. I fall through childhood and time; I fall toward my mother’s horror, my aunts screaming at the bright, arterial blood on my mother’s hand-stitched party dress, the dandelion suns spattered with blood. I fall toward their perfectly Oh’d mouths. I fall toward playground jeers of “No face! No face!” I tumble slow motion toward a red horse who will save me from high school, who will catch my fall, lead me into the wilderness of a future without a face.
The red convertible with the three young men passed my car. They stared in the windows at the young lady with dark hair blowing back over a tanned shoulder. Her face came into view and they started to laugh. One made a blade out of his hand and jerked it from nose to throat. “No chin,” that meant, “No face. You ugly bitch, why don’t you stay home?" That’s what it meant. She could hear and not hear what they said.
Escape into the Wilderness
The Giantess turned toward the forest, “Follow me,” that meant. The red horse jerked his head against the reins, “Let’s run,” that meant, and bareback, half flying off those high withers, one hand wrapped in thick, black horsehair, we ran.
The Voice Within
Sometimes when I read out loud some old story, I felt her in the shadows. I was living at Glen Ivy at that time, in that big inn up against the Santa Ana Mountains. That was not Sasquatch country, but during the stormy winter of 1978, the Giantess was there, living in an ancient bear cave high up the ravine formed by Coldwater Creek. I’d catch sight of her basket disappearing around an Engelmann oak, and I’d see where she’d been foraging for acorns, using the centuries-old Luiseño mortar holes in the granite.
Then those nights when we were all gathered around the river stone fireplace with the pear-shaped keystone, I’d see her nodding in the corner, big eyes closed, that huge head sunk down on her chest. She looked like she was sleeping, but when I opened my mouth, I felt her voice in me. Sometimes it grew large, like the night I read a new story about her. I’d put on my red dress and yellow shawl, my long hair swinging like a horse’s mane in front of my no face, and she was in me from the beginning: a cry, a call, a command, an invitation, a rising and falling in the night wind, a voice of sagebrush and salt, of cedar and longing, of hooves drumming and the distant call of a small bird. After many years, I have never stopped seeing her. Her voice is in my story, my painting of the world, the one with the door that opens on the sky.
Learning to Track Sasquatch
In eighth grade at Orchard Junior High School in Wenatchee, Washington, I had a teacher who put thirty kids onto a school bus and took us all up Bluett Pass to go Sasquatching. We learned how to recognize Bigfoot prints in the sand of the creek bar and how to pour plaster casts. We learned how to track by observing broken branches and nesting sites. We learned the differences between different animal tracks, so we would never mistake a bear paw for Sasquatch print. He taught us to take field notes and how to gather and label evidence such as hair samples and scat, and how to maintain a chain of custody.
This teacher was a natural born storyteller, and around that late afternoon campfire and s’mores before we bussed back into real life, we wheedled out one more story about Sasquatch glimpsed on the far side of a river, up on a bluff, in the shadows under the trees. In this way, I continued through time well-prepared to meet and greet any kin of the Giantess I might encounter in the great Pacific Northwest wilderness I called my home.
The Giantess—More than Sasquatch
She has never left me. She is more than Sasquatch—she is the Giantess, Spirit Guide Extraordinaire. This Scenic Byway of That Mystic Road Substack is for Her. You will find here poetry and story fragments and book reports and news and AI Sasquatch art and whatever else strikes both Her and me as intriguing, significant, and worthy.
The Giantess and I, we walk between worlds, the real and the imaginal alongside our favorite Oregon State zoocryptid: Sasquatch. Please join us!
