BIGFOOT LIVES

RAIN FALLS FAT on the tin roof of a chicken coop, a thousand drops hitting simultaneously, the sound of marbles onto glass. All but two birds are under the coop instead of in it, having run for cover when the first in a series of thunderclaps shook surrounding mountains and rattled fruit from its branches. This is a summer storm that soaks quickly into dirt, leaving behind a veil of humidity and the vaguely metallic, sweet smell of earth.

Inside the purple-walled coop, a man bows, the ceiling only slightly taller than his 6-foot-3-inch frame.The chickens, two plump hens, are unfazed by the hulk who’s sought refuge in their shelter. Nor is the man bothered by the occasional cluck, the rustle of feathers and feet, as he tells his story — the story of how he, Peter Busnack, a kid from New Jersey, became Bigfoot.

It happened when he was in his 30s, when he had $65 in the bank and went out into the desert for a 15-day walk. When he returned to Phoenix, where he was living at the time, a newspaper editor came calling, hungry to tell Busnack’s story. First, he wanted to know how he had survived for so long in temperatures that soared above 100 degrees.

Then, he wanted to know whether Busnack had any nicknames.

“My friends have called me Bigfoot,” he said.

So the headline blared, Bigfoot Survives Desert Trek.

So Bigfoot he was.

And so he’s been for the decades since.
 

ON THE DAY that Bigfoot started walking, July 11, 1976, his friend, John Goodson, had dropped him off near present-day New River, just off Interstate 17, at 5 a.m. Although it took more than two weeks, Bigfoot walked 85 miles to the Four Peaks, carrying only a pack, handmade knives, a homemade tent and enough empty containers to carry water — if he found any.

“One of the things I’ve always wanted to be is adept enough in the wilderness where I can cross a vast expanse of land and carry practically nothing,” Bigfoot says. “I wanted to have nature provide everything I need and learn the skills necessary to do that sort of thing. I’ve always envied the deer and the bear and the mountain lions — they’re so wild and free. They don’t have to carry a lot of baggage around or pay mortgages or anything like that.”

Within the first few days of the journey, Bigfoot contracted hepatitis from a watering hole tainted by the filth of a dead, decomposing cow. He cured himself, he says, by consuming desert plants.

“I didn’t know for a whole day,” he says. “I felt so sick and weak. There’s a mirror on my compass for sighting. I looked at my face, and my eyeballs looked like a couple of oranges, which is one of the symptoms. Good thing I was tough in those days.”

Those days, most days, the desert broiled, and during the longest segment of his walk, Bigfoot traveled 14 miles without finding water. Then, one day, he knew he was finished. The feeling came over him as quickly as did his decision to start walking.

“I had walked to the base of the Four Peaks, and I had a bad feeling,” he says. “I thought, I’ve gone through hell to get here. I shouldn’t ignore intuition now.”

So he began hiking back. And lightning struck within feet of where he’d been.

“It felt like an atomic bomb went off,” he remembers. Wisely, he regrouped and journeyed home to his Sunnyslope neighborhood.

Not long after Bigfoot’s desert adventure ended, his life’s adventure began. That newspaper reporter and other members of the media lined up to tell his story. Then hordes of people interested in learning to survive the way Bigfoot did started asking him to teach them. So he did.

Then he took another long walk, this time on what he calls “a divine whim.”
 

BIGFOOT LIVED as an Indian once, somewhere deep in the Superstition Wilderness — so a psychic told him. It made sense, he says, because when his whim walked him up Old Horrell Ranch Road, he was overcome by déjà vu.

“I thought, OK. This is home,” he remembers.

Bigfoot found the 13-acre Horrell Ranch at the end of the road, and he knew he needed it to create the self-sustaining community he’d dreamed of building. The ranch was owned by a man named Jim Tidwell, and Bigfoot, with the help of his old friend Goodson, an attorney, created a partnership in an effort to purchase it. After several months and the delivery of countless speeches and slideshows about Bigfoot’s desert adventure, the partnership was still $8,000 short of a down payment.

“I had given a slideshow about my trek at a place called the ESP Book Store,” Bigfoot remembers. “After I got done, I was kind of worried about this whole deal, and a little old lady named Frances McDermott came up to me in the parking lot. She says, ‘I hear you’re having trouble getting enough money for your project. … I’d like to help you.’ ”

McDermott wrote Bigfoot a check for $10,000.

Today, Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance rests 8 miles off pavement, at the end of a primitive Tonto National Forest road. More than 30 years after Bigfoot bought it, there is singing in the kitchen — five voices in near-harmony, trying desperately not to break into laughter as a photographer captures the moment.

It’s a vignette of happy prayer, a thank-you for the bounty that’s provided the midday meal of salad, fruit and omelets. Everything on the table, with the exception of the cheese, was harvested from Reevis. Bigfoot piles his plate with greens, peppers, cucumbers and small carrots and sits in a chair hand-painted with “Live what you love.” As he, his wife, Patricia, and his guests begin to eat, they discuss the draw of the mountain, the expectation of mutual benefit, the value of dirt and sweat and hard, hand-blistering work. They praise the curative power of human touch.

Ryan has come here from Albuquerque, New Mexico, because “this way of living just feels right.” In a week or so, he’ll take off for the Pacific Northwest and another farm, and he’ll go feeling changed by this place, though he can’t really put into words why, only, “Don’t you feel changed being here?”

Melissa hasn’t been well in months. She arrived on the ranch last night with the help of her sister, Amy. She could barely walk. Her throat was swollen. She felt, she says, as though she might be dying. Within hours of her arrival, she began to feel better, the result, Bigfoot says, of Oriental touch-healing.

“Natural healing is like putting out a forest fire,” Bigfoot says. “Illness is the fire. It starts small, but it quickly grows if it’s neglected. Then the fire gets too big and spreads out of control.”

He’s begun the slow process of pulling the fire out of Melissa. In exchange, she’ll tend the garden, help cook, do the duties of an intern. So it goes at Reevis. Come, work, be healed.
 

BIGFOOT'S PHARMACY contains no aspirin. No broad-spectrum antibiotics. Nothing processed or generic or tested on lab rats. You’ll find no Prozac there.

Instead, Bigfoot’s pharmacy smells of spearmint, and the air inside tastes tinny — like water that’s been sitting too long in a kettle. Dozens of containers of plants and herbs rest on shelves Bigfoot built himself — comfrey for healing broken bones, coriander to aid digestion, Western mugwort for the quelling of the slow, venomous burn of a scorpion’s sting.

“We take care of ourselves better here than anyone in town,” Bigfoot says. “This shop may look like total confusion, but I know where everything is.”

Bigfoot gathers his medicines from the desert, from the mountains, from wherever that whim of his takes him. And often, he’ll take a group of people along for the hunt.

Reevis hosts a menu of classes each spring and fall, among them herbal pharmacology, wilderness survival, Oriental acupressure, off-grid homestead living and more. Bigfoot’s is a curriculum couched in his own experiences, as well as his intuition.

“A doctor diagnosed me with skin cancer,” he says. “But I said ‘no, thanks’ to his treatment. I said, ‘I have the best doctor in the world. Me.’ ”

He claims his own treatment worked, that he also aided an injured eye, that you won’t catch him convalescing in a hospital if he can help it.

You will, however, most often find him in his garden, tending the rows of fruits, vegetables and herbs that help sustain the ranch and the people who live there. Bigfoot and Patricia travel once a week to the farmer’s market in Globe to sell their harvest, along with the line of natural remedies Bigfoot has developed for everything from acne and sore throats to diabetes and brown-recluse bites.

Echinacea blooms attract beetles and bees, and Bigfoot plucks a shiny scarab from a leaf. He pinches it dead and puts it in his pocket. Later, he’ll feed it to his pet duck, Lucky.

Bigfoot moves between kale and chard, picking up a clump of dirt here, pulling a weed from the earth there. The acre-big garden, an orchard of 100 fruit trees and a greenhouse are the ranch’s growing places, and it’s in those spaces that Bigfoot seems most relaxed.
 

He plants according to “the dark of the moon,” burns asparagus as a celebration on New Year’s Eve and believes, more than anything, that nature provides and provides again. He hoes the garden in a shirt with cutoff sleeves and homemade shoes, the rhythm of his swing punctuated by the sound of turkeys, of a quince hitting the ground across the garden — the subtle thud of something dense against something denser.

The grinding corn is the only thing in the garden that’s taller than Bigfoot. He is what his name implies, but there’s a litheness about him, too, and a gentle, easy laugh. His nails are muddy. His knees are caked with dirt and dust — he is, in this moment in his garden, an overgrown child, a happy supplicant of the Earth.

“My body is 71,” he says. But he doesn’t need to say the rest. He doesn’t feel his age. He’s encountered mountain lions, carried rock from Roosevelt Lake to build a house on the property and swum across the Yellowstone River to fetch a buffalo horn. He’s built fences and houses. He worked as a logger, did some time in the Army and hiked countless miles across Central and South America. He once carried 100 pounds of apples across 7 miles in two hours, 52 minutes just because someone else carried 80 pounds — and took longer.

He isn’t, he says, afraid of anything Mother Nature can throw at him, not even as he moves a towel in the ranch’s shower house to reveal a swarm of baby scorpions.

“More than anything else, I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone’s feelings,” Bigfoot explains. “I don’t want to diminish anyone. I want to empower people. I want them to be one in themselves. Why would anyone want to live any other way? I can be more human here, more emotional, closer to the source.”

The sky trembles again, and the clouds unleash. The Earth sighs, the recipient of more late-summer rain. And Bigfoot begins walking back toward his garden.

For more information about Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance, visit www.reevismountain.org.