With modernity, Bhutan slowly loses the legend of the Yeti

Once accepted as fact, the yeti is becoming a mere folk tale.

SIGNYAR, Bhutan (AP) — He remembers the darkness of the pine forest, and the footprints, and his terror when the creature began to howl. He remembers the stories of his childhood, of a beast that stalked the upper reaches of the mountains, and how fear spread through the village every time it was spotted.

In a remote Himalayan kingdom that held out against the modern world for as long as it could, the old man remembers a time when the yeti was a normal part of life.

“The creature has always been out there, and it’s out there still,” says Sonam Dorji, 77, sitting on the pockmarked wooden floor of his small farmhouse. It’s a cold Himalayan morning, and he warms himself beside a wood stove. The smell of burning pine fills the room. “If you travel the ancient trails, even today, there’s a good chance you’ll meet him.”

His son-in-law, listening to the old man’s stories, laughs dismissively from across the room.

Tshering Sithar is 39, a bulldozer operator helping pave the road to this village, which until recently could only be reached on foot.

“What is there to say?” he asks. “There’s nothing out there in the forest. Any educated person today knows this.”

Many traditional beliefs remain deeply ingrained in Bhutan, from astrology to the worship of Buddhist priests. But the monster is now increasingly forgotten, and the link to an ancient past is more often seen as a sign of ignorance.

“We can’t live today like we did in the 17th or 18th century. Our culture has to be dynamic,” says Khandu Wangchuck, Bhutan’s finance minister. “Within the last 40 years, we’ve jumped 300-400 years.”

And the yeti? Wangchuck pauses. “I think most people today know this is just a story.”

What does it mean, though, when accepted fact decays into mere folk tale? When a belief that helped tie a land together is relegated to myth, what happens to the culture that believed in it? And how can a country that entered the 20th century just a few years ago make its way in the globalized world of the 21st?

In the West, yetilike creatures long ago were reduced to myth. The Abominable Snowman is something from a “Scooby Doo” episode, or part of the latest installment in Hollywood’s “Mummy” franchise. To mainstream science, the notion of Bigfoot is little more than a joke.

But across the Himalayas the beast was seen as real, known for generations in a half-dozen countries from Tibet to Pakistan. It was a region flush with wildlife, where tigers, bears and wild dogs roamed thick mountain forests and remote river valleys. Here, if nowhere else, the yeti was simply one more creature.

For Bhutan, a country barely noticed by much of the world, it became something even more.

In a nation stumbling nervously into modernity, the hulking mountain beast was publicly celebrated, becoming a 20th-century talisman against unbridled change and a link to ancient traditions. Stories of its travels were told by the king and top government officials. The Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a large national park, was created in part as a place to protect it. Once Bhutan bothered to set up a postal system, in the early 1960s, it issued stamps honoring an animal that science insists does not exist.

“Everyone knew it was there,” Dorji says. “It was like the bears or the leopards. Why would we question it?”

But changes barely imaginable just a few years ago are accelerating.

Until the early 1960s, Bhutan had sealed itself off for centuries, with life revolving around crop cycles, Buddhism, tiny feudal city-states and revered royalty. It had no roads, no electricity network, no currency, telephones or airports. Trade depended on barter. Tourists were barred.

Only after China invaded neighboring Tibet in 1959 did the king decree his country would no longer be fully closed off. The first paved roads came in 1963, the first tourists in the early 1970s, international phone service in the 1980s, television and the Internet in 1999.

While tourism remains highly restricted — visitors must pay $220 for each day’s stay, in advance, just to get a visa — 20,000 tourists came last year, nearly 10 times as many as in 1991. In a nation where kings held absolute power, democratic elections in March brought forth a generation of ambitious politicians.

Bhutan is a place where almost everyone was born in a village but where few people see a future in farming — and where a minuscule modern economy means there are precious few other jobs.

Thimphu, Bhutan’s increasingly crowded capital, has everything from majestic royal palaces to micro-traffic jams of a few dozen cars. On weekend nights, bored, unemployed young people brawl outside dance bars.

Suddenly, Bhutan has reached an uncomfortable crossroads. This is a time when the dynamism of modernity regularly clashes with modernity’s pitfalls. Child mortality rates are plummeting, crime is on the rise and a college education is no longer just a dream.

It is a time when the yeti is increasingly unwelcome.