Sasquatch is a fulsome liminal symbol, containing fundamental paradoxes of being and non-being, mind and matter, life and death. It straddles and incorporates boundaries that we consider absolute, that are fundamentally required by our system of rationality. To the extent that it is as it appears to be—a being of the mind which leaves footprints in the earth—Sasquatch remains absolutely inexplicable, a genuine mystery.
—Marjorie M. Halpin, Manlike Monsters on Trial
Tales of haunted valleys. Hairy mini-men with a bad attitude. Shaggy colossi shaking log cabins to their foundations. James Bond–style speedboat adventures. Bear politics. Environmental wars. At most I had been expecting just a handful of Sasquatch reports. Instead the floodgates had opened, sweeping me along in the deluge. There is simply too much to digest at once.
I book myself a spot on the Queen of Chilliwack, a three-hundred-foot passenger ferry that carries me, slowly, methodically, and soberly, to the next precinct of this adventure. I forgo the action-hero dramatics of floatplane and speedboat, opting for something calmer, less kinetic. I need an interval of perspective.
My next stop is the all but abandoned pulp and paper mill community of Ocean Falls, located in Heiltsuk territory at the head of Cousins Inlet. The ferry journey, beginning in Bella Bella, is a circuitous, full-day affair, first heading north along the Inside Passage route to the village of Klemtu, in Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory, before doubling back and then turning east through the upper channels of the inlet system toward Ocean Falls.
Earlier, in Bella Bella, snide remarks had followed any mention I made of taking the ferry. The government-run ferry monopoly is widely considered overpriced and inefficient, the product of an inept bureaucracy. Though many locals depend on its services, it’s reviled with the intensity of an oppressed people’s hatred for their dictator. But I have a fondness for ferries. Having spent my early travel years plying every possible ferry route in the Mediterranean, often sleeping on the deck, I learned to appreciate their austerity and patient plodding. The slow-rolling vistas and the sense of impending arrival set to the smell of oily grime on metal, sea breeze, and engine exhaust can, strangely, have an almost soothing effect.
The Queen of Chilliwack feels, in that sense, familiar as it plows leisurely through the forest-lined arteries of ocean. On the front deck, a few dozen tourists lean over the railings, gazing toward the rugged slopes of Swindle and Dowager Islands. I find myself thinking about Leonard Ellis, the former bear hunter turned bear-viewing guide from Bella Coola. Though he offers no obvious connection with the Sasquatch, I’m eager to visit this controversial mountain man again. The more I hear of him, the more I envision an antihero, a kind of Clint Eastwood cowboy.
While waiting to catch the Chilliwack in Bella Bella, I brought up Ellis with Ian McAllister at Pacific Wild. Ian, who has butted heads with Ellis many times over the latter’s bear and wolf hunts, described him as a hard—but also charismatic—man. That second quality chimed more with my memory of him.
“He’s a skilled predator who’s bagged a lot of animals,” Ian said. He took a moment to mull his next words, before deciding to say nothing else.
The Queen of Chilliwack docks in Klemtu’s bay shortly after noon to a litany of metallic screeches and clanging noises. The hamlet of 450 people, a cluster of homes set in a few rows, hugs the curving bay beneath a pair of scruffy conical hills. I go ashore for the afternoon and find many of Klemtu’s residents, whole families, crowded outside the boat. For a moment, I think they’re a welcoming committee for someone important getting off the boat. The Kitasoo/Xai’xais have a reputation for being the friendliest First Nation community on the coast. But then residents impatiently board the ship. I learn that the townsfolk gather weekly to have lunch in the ferry’s cafeteria.
This is my second visit to Klemtu. I had come here by floatplane as part of my magazine assignment the year before. At the time, Klemtu, like other nearby communities, was experiencing a surge in reported Sasquatch activity. Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory has a long history of reports, with documented cases going back to the 1930s—long before the words Bigfoot and Sasquatch became commonplace. Residents here claim some of the creatures live on the shores of Kitasoo Lake, nestled in a bowl in the mountains just above the community, which serves as the town’s water reservoir. Sasquatch sightings over the decades have always come in periodic waves. During my previous visit, the creatures were showing themselves again after years of inactivity.
In the few hours I have in Klemtu I visit the Spirit Bear Lodge—a world-class ecotourist bear-viewing resort, owned and run by the Kitasoo, that has completely revitalized the community. While there, I run into Charlie Mason—a jovial storyteller and hereditary chief. I ask him about Bigfoot activity in the village. He tells me the earlier spike in incidents has already dropped off.
“How do you account for that?” I ask him.
Mason shrugs his shoulders. “That’s just how it is with them Sasquatch,” he says, in his characteristically baritone voice. “You won’t see ‘em for years, and then suddenly they’re back like they never left. Then one day, you realize they’re gone again—poof—like they were never there to begin with.”
There one moment, gone the next.
Is this the cunning of some unknown being? Or the shenanigans of the most complex piece of machinery in the known universe—the human mind?
I’ve lost track of time. The long blast of the Queen of Chilliwack‘s horn, signaling its imminent departure, yanks me away from Klemtu’s relative normalcy—a state that will prove to be short-lived.
The Chilliwack pushes on into the advancing dusk. I am standing on deck, alone, as we backtrack through Heiltsuk territory, crawling through the channels and passes dividing jigsaw slabs of land. As we go from Return Channel to Fisher Channel, the mountains, with their heads above the clouds, transform into shadowy presences. At midnight a distant light appears through the sea of blackness at the head of Cousins Inlet. The Chilliwack’s intercom announces our impending arrival in Ocean Falls. I gather my things and queue up with an older couple from Oregon at the ship’s exit. As the ferry pulls up to the illuminated pier another message comes over the intercom warning passengers disembarking with their cars not to drive while talking on their cell phones, or they may incur a hefty fine.
Two ferry employees walk by as the message is broadcast. One of them laughs at the announcement.
“What’s so funny?” his colleague asks.
“That message. There’s no cell-phone reception in town. No cars are getting off the boat here. And you wouldn’t be able to find a policeman in this place if your life depended on it.”
Blessed with a charming name, Ocean Falls is an outlier, a place neither here nor there. The carcass of a once thriving pulp and paper mill metropolis, today’s village of two dozen people is beyond description. How does one define a locale that is at once a ghost town, a squatters’ camp, a settlers’ outpost, and a safe haven for misfits and runaways, situated somewhere between lost and forgotten?
It all started with a waterfall.
In the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century, the future site of Ocean Falls—the location of an old Heiltsuk village—was earmarked for its potential to generate hydroelectricity. The crystalline waters of a stunning glacial lake (later named Link Lake) that emptied into Cousins Inlet, below it, made the location the perfect spot to situate energy-dependent industry.
Construction on a pulp and paper mill began in 1909, followed later by a dam to power it. Meanwhile, Heiltsuk residents were encouraged to relocate. Soon a hospital, a school, a hotel, and numerous homes and apartment buildings had been built to house and service the people who would run this factory deep in the heart of the northern rain forest. Within a few decades, Ocean Falls, a company-run labor-camp paradise, would swell to five thousand people, becoming the largest pulp mill town in British Columbia.
Archival pictures taken at the town’s apogee in the 1950s show row upon row of terraced, barracks-style white homes sitting beneath cumulus-like plumes of vapor spewing from smokestacks ringing the gargantuan mill. At the time, any job in Ocean Falls was considered a plum position. The mill and town, owned first by Pacific Mills, until 1954, and then by Crown Zellerbach, until 1972, provided for every need of the employee. In addition to a decent income, workers received lodging, meals at the mill cafeteria, and a list of social and sporting clubs to choose from. Forest cottages lined the shores of Cousins Inlet and Link Lake for those who wanted to escape the monotonous work grind but didn’t have it in them to make the long and tiring pilgrimage to vacation spots in the outside world, and back in again.
As all societies do, Ocean Falls would boast its own milestones and achievements. Its man-made wonder, its Parthenon, was twelve miles of boardwalk that crisscrossed the town. A huge swimming pool produced a pedigree of world-class swimmers. One third of Canada’s national team at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki were swimmers from Ocean Falls. For a period, the town was considered so important that it had its own daily news pages in the Vancouver Sun.
Sometime in the 1950s (no one remembers exactly when), the residents of this exurban outpost in the rain forest started referring to themselves as the “Rain People.” By some unknowable configuration of air currents, mountain relief, and sea, Ocean Falls was said to get more rain than any other place on the British Columbia coast.* Close to two hundred inches fell annually on average. It is now an accepted though apocryphal theory that the noxious gas cloud emanating from the pulp mill and hanging almost permanently over the town created its own weather system, amplifying the rainfall. Whatever the truth, those old downpours remain the stuff of legend. The Rain People emblemized this mythology by adopting as their official mascot and corporate logo a Disneyesque Daffy Duck knockoff holding an umbrella happily over its head. The weather may have been uncooperative, but life for Ocean Fallers couldn’t have been better.
And then everything changed.
As in other places on the coast, boom went to bust with little or no warning. By the early 1970s, Ocean Falls’ viability became increasingly tenuous. Geographical isolation, obsolete machinery, growing competition, rising overhead, and shrinking markets made Ocean Falls less and less profitable for its owners. In 1973, Crown Zellerbach pulled the plug on the mill’s operations. The provincial government stepped in at the last minute and bought Ocean Falls to keep it alive. But persistent fiscal issues dogged the town. By 1980, the community was shuttered for good, consigned to the long list of canneries and sawmills whose lifeless, rotting husks pepper British Columbia’s coast.
Today, a dystopian mood has replaced the mill steam hanging over the town. Many of the old derelict buildings left standing—including the four-hundred-room Martin Hotel (once the largest lodging in the province), a few low-rise apartments, the school, and a cluster of homes—have succumbed to the tenacious reclamation program of the rain forest. The aesthetic of abandonment is reminiscent of Chernobyl. Rotted homes covered in lichens and moss. Foliage punching through the buckling pavement of old tennis courts. Forests of berry bushes growing into porches and doorways. A mostly unseen legacy of pollution also adheres to the place. For decades, the pulp mill spewed a cocktail of toxins into the air and water, including dioxins, PCPs, nitrogen oxides, and heavy metals. Crabs and prawns caught in the ocean closest to town are reportedly often deformed. The few fishing enthusiasts in town head far out into the inlet.
To be fair, a spark of life remains within the festering ruins. Since the town was shuttered, a handful of people have come to live here, and they love the place; their numbers triple or quadruple in summer when boaters moor in town for days at a time. A few historic buildings have survived with their dignity intact. And the old hydroelectric dam still generates power—not only for Ocean Falls but for Bella Bella and Denny Island, too.
For all its drawbacks Ocean Falls manages to cling on, sustained by an enduring nostalgia, the beauty of the surrounding mountains, and the promise of an unhurried existence devoid of officialdom’s nettlesome interference.
It’s appropriate, even poetic, that my first experience of rain in the Great Bear Rainforest on this trip comes on my first full day in Ocean Falls. It lasts only twenty minutes—in marked contrast to the weeklong downpours that took place during the town’s golden age. But it’s enough to tear me away from my breakfast in the dining room of Darke Waters, the lodge where I’m staying. Through the window, I watch raindrops the size of gum balls lash the asphalt. The mountains and their wraiths of cloud, visible earlier that morning, are blotted out in the bland, impenetrable gray of precipitation.
There are a few others staying at Darke Waters. The Oregon couple from the ferry sit at the back of the dining room. At another table are four rugged-looking middle-aged men in construction gear, laborers from out of town who are in Ocean Falls to make repairs to broken sections of the dam.
Turning pancakes and strips of bacon, maestro-like, in the fully exposed kitchen is Rob Darke—a co-owner of the lodge. A forty-nine-year-old former ski-hill manager from Grande Prairie, Alberta, he has an eighties rocker look and a tendency to cackle at his own jokes.
“We’re finally back to some decent weather around here,” Rob says, leaving the kitchen with a breakfast plate in his hand to sit at my table. “Terrible with all that sunshine. Hahahaha!“
Rob’s wife and business partner, Corrina Darke, wipes down a nearby table.
“I’ll take the sun any day,” Corrina says. “The last thing we need is to get depressed around here.”
Corrina, formerly, was a graphic designer with the Grande Prairie Herald Tribune newspaper. When she was laid off after thirty years of service, Rob, a fishing fanatic, convinced her to support him in his dream of owning a fishing lodge. Both had grown tired of life in Grande Prairie, a predominantly white, working-class community ridden with crime and recently dubbed “the most dangerous city in Canada.” A simple Google search was all it took to find the property, which, to their surprise, had sat idle on the market for several months. The twenty-three-room, two-story European-style chalet had been built in the mid-1940s as a women’s dormitory. Following a few other incarnations, the building became a lodge once the mill closed down. It remained one of the most intact structures in town. The Darkes purchased it for just over $100,000.
It’s the couple’s second season of operation. The lodge is still a work in progress—and running it has come with a steep learning curve. Renovations continue, and there still aren’t many guests. But the place is in working order and is slowly accruing charms. Framed nautical charts, old black-and-white photos, and drawings of locomotives hang in the hallways and rooms. Vintage knickknacks looted from the ghost town and placed in the rooms lend the lodge a retro feel.
Suddenly, a bespectacled woman in her sixties saunters into the dining room. She says hello to us, pours herself a coffee, and sits at our table. Corrina introduces her to me as Glenna, before adding proudly: “She’s one of the original residents of Ocean Falls.”
The woman smirks. “I’m the longest resident here.”
“How long is longest?” I ask.
“Oh, about forty-one years and counting.”
Rob gets up. “Her family’s been here even longer. She’s a kind of encyclopedia about this place.”
“John’s collecting stories about the Sasquatch,” Corrina says to Glenna, excitedly.
“Sas-quatch?” Glenna says, unimpressed. “You mean like … Bigfoot? No, if there was anything like that here, I’d have heard about it.”
I turn to Corrina. “And you and Rob haven’t heard anything.”
“Sorry, we’ve got nothing,” she says, shaking her head before turning to look at Rob, who’s pouring himself a coffee at the waiters’ station. “Well, except for …”
“For what?” I ask. “Ghosts.”
Glenna smirks again.
“We haven’t actually seen them,” Corrina adds, looking a bit embarrassed. “But strange things have been happening here.”
Rob sits back down with his coffee. “When we closed after the first season, we left all the room doors in the lodge open,” he says. “We came back and found them all closed. And many of them were locked. That’s one story.”
Corrina runs a hand up and down her bare arm. “Look, I’m getting goose bumps,” she says.
“I’m not,” Glenna says. “If I can’t touch something, I don’t believe in it.”
Corrina leans over the table toward me. “Did you know that this lodge used to be a hospital?”
Glenna cuts in. “They made this building the new hospital in the 1970s after the old one closed. That driveway leading into the back was for the ambulance.”
Corrina’s voice tapers to a near whisper. “And behind me where the baking pantry is—that was the morgue.“
Rob sees me cringe, slaps his leg, and keels over, cackling. Corrina leans back into her chair and nods at me, eyes wide open.
“Well,” Glenna says, “maybe you ought to change the topic of your book.”
“No, no,” Corrina tells her. “All he needs to do is speak to a few more people. Who would you recommend?”
Glenna’s face goes stone cold. “No one.”
“Come again,” I say.
“Nobody here knows anything about this place,” she says. “People here invent stories. They make things up as they go along.”
“Are you calling the people who live here bullshitters?”
“With the straightest faces you ever saw. It’s the gospel truth coming out of their mouths.”
“But you don’t mean the original residents of Ocean Falls?” I ask her.
“Mister, I’m the only person originally from here. The rest are people who came after Ocean Falls was shut down, burned, destroyed. They’re the new people. This is their town now. And so their stories are whatever the hell they want.”
If I can’t touch something, I don’t believe in it. Glenna’s words echo in my mind. Could it be that what many people are seeing by way of a Sasquatch is not a rare, flesh-and-blood animal but instead some nonphysical, incorporeal entity? An apparition? After all, we know that there is a wider reality than what we can perceive through our specifically tuned senses. And that what’s “out there” is so different from what we feel and experience every day that we simply would not believe it if it were presented to us.
Discoveries in the area of quantum physics demonstrate that things are truly not what they seem, and that the universe, at the subatomic level anyway, operates far differently from how it is known to most people.
For instance, the world appears to be composed of separate objects with clearly definable boundaries, which we slot into categories of space and time. We evolved to see the world in terms of separate objects partly in order to distinguish the things that could either help or hinder us. But this view is more apparent than real. On a fundamental, subatomic level, nothing is fixed or separate. Objects that appear to us as solid, static, and separable—whether atoms, apples, or asteroids—are in fact made up of transient particles that are continually appearing and disappearing. They occur in no fixed time and space but only show tendencies to exist and occur. There are no objects, only processes—fluid bundles of energy, patterns of relationships, that ebb and flow in an ever-shifting web of interconnectivity. Fundamentally—and in total contradiction to what we know at our scale of day-to-day experience—all things meld into all other things. We just can’t see this. It’s an almost impossible thing to wrap our minds around.
Experiments conducted by the late Arthur J. Deikman, an American pioneer in the psychology of advanced states of consciousness, reinforced the above ideas. The ability of humans to perceive the full richness of life around them, he said, is constrained by an almost default state of mind he called “action mode” or “survival mode”—one characterized by a focus on objects. Mental postures involving greed, acquisition, consumption, excess logic, analysis, preoccupation with time, and the use of categories and language fall into the survival mode. That mind-set’s capacity to appreciate wider reality, he said, was like a hand trying to grasp water by making a fist around it. The closing hand can’t retain the liquid.
Deikman also observed experimental subjects in another, complementary mental state he called the “receptive mode”—one characterized by intuition, openness, and an attitude of relaxed allowance. Subjects in that state reported holistic sensory experiences with more vivid details and colors and a blurring of boundaries between physical objects. They also claimed to experience a sense of connectedness to their environment. Deikman wrote that while a person was in the receptive mode, “aspects of reality that were formerly unavailable” and “new dimensions of the total stimulus array” were able to enter his or her awareness. He compared the receptive mode’s capacity for appreciating reality to a cupped hand scooping up water. The hand is able to retain the liquid.19
The science concurs with what mystics in traditional cultures have always known: that the reality underlying appearances is not accessible to our conventional senses. In Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures, to use one example, groups of mystics known as Sufis have often referred to a hidden reality, of which our world of appearances is but a partial manifestation. According to them, our survival-oriented brain and culturally conditioned mind narrow our vision, thereby preventing us from seeing a much wider reality that functions more holistically. But unlike most contemporary scientists, Sufis have always known that when those constricting mental postures are loosened or relaxed in a certain way, it is possible to get a glimpse, or more, of that bigger picture. This same psychological knowledge was systematized by the Sufis, as well as by mystics in other cultures, adjusted for the local context, and taught as science. The important point is that according to traditional psychologies, even though we are usually cut off from the bigger picture, it is still possible for us to tap into it—even if for most of us it’s often just a random flash in the pan.
Might there be a link, in some cases, between the emanations of the unseen universe, its fits and starts, and the things we occasionally feel, see, or experience that are out of the ordinary? Could it be that what some people register as a Sasquatch is a mental signature, a blip, representing an impulse from that reality beyond? A frequency to which the mind is open in certain states and which it interprets, symbolizes, and personifies as a hairy wild person—especially when we’re in or near nature?
If a mind that is somehow rendered “receptive” enough comes across a flicker of stimulus for which no innate pattern exists as a match, the brain would naturally search for another pattern that comes close enough under the circumstances: in this case a Sasquatch. This might explain why Bigfoots are most often seen by accident but are never deliberately found or captured. The late scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer René Dubos once wrote: “Man converts all the things that happen to him into symbols, then commonly responds to the symbols as if they were actual external stimuli.”20 Perhaps Bigfoot hunters and investigators are chasing the symbol, the mental representation that is generated in the minds of Bigfoot eyewitnesses—the Sasquatch itself—after the fact. When people who see a Bigfoot in a transcendental way then choose to search for the creature afterward, they are really looking to relive, or recapture, a moment of expanded awareness that has long since vanished.
If rare and elusive physical Sasquatches exist, Deikman’s ideas still hold. Deliberate sleuthing, investigating, and chasing after the Sasquatch would be “survival mode” activities that narrow our perception—we see less overall as a result. By contrast, people who see or experience Bigfoots by accident (the vast majority) seem to be, more often than not, in a more receptive mode—something that exposure to nature can definitely engender. Even hunting, which is otherwise a survival mode activity, can involve many hours of sitting in tree stands and perhaps getting into a meditative, or receptive, frame of mind. Many hunters report seeing Sasquatches under those very circumstances.
It’s just as William Housty said to me at Koeye: as with anything in life, if you try too hard to find something, you’ll be hard-pressed to succeed. But as soon as you stop trying, your odds suddenly change.
I meet another member of the Ocean Falls congregation outside the lodge in one of those intermezzos between downpours—intervals characterized by a testy, tepid rain that makes fat polka dots on your clothes but doesn’t come down hard enough to drench you outright.
“The name’s Darell Becker,” the man says, “but I go by the first name Darellbear.”
I offer my hand, which he takes in a rock-hard grip.
“The Bundjalung people in Australia gave me that name during a music festival when one of them saw the bear energy in me.”
“Bundjalung?”
“Aborigines. They knew I was coming. They said it was a prophecy.”
Darellbear looks to be in his mid-fifties. He has a mop of wavy, now rain-drenched, brown hair and striking blue eyes. He is solidly built and wearing a light khaki rain jacket over shorts and sandals. A white crystal hangs around his neck. He comes across as a wizened retired surfer transplanted into the mountains.
“I was in Australia for thirty years playing professional baseball and hockey,” he says. “Now I spend the warm months here.”
“What do you do?”
“Mostly hang out on my boat and go fishing. But I also sell miracle ointments for knotted muscles, cuts, and abrasions. I call it ‘The Goo.’“ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small jar, handing it to me. “That’s the hot Goo,” he says. “Great if you have aching hands or an aching neck.”
I turn over the red-labeled jar, trying to remember the last time I had aching hands.
“There’s cayenne in it. So don’t have a piss or touch your dick after using it. Or you’ll get a hot rod. Then you’ll need the cold Goo to put the fire out—and I’ll make a double sale.”
I hand the jar back to him.
“So, what brings you to this charming dystopian settlement in the middle of paradise?” he asks.
I tell him about my research.
“The big fellah, huh? Well, I haven’t seen anything around town. And no one living here has either, as far as I know.”
Darellbear’s answer adds to the collection of blank stares and shrugged shoulders I’ve accumulated in the last few days, seeming to confirm Glenna’s claim that the Sasquatches, if they exist, have neither stumbled upon nor ever intended to come to Ocean Falls.
“That’s what I’ve been hearing,” I tell him.
“The only Sasquatch stories I know are from the outskirts. A guy I know has a small cabin way behind Mount Baldy over there,” he says, pointing to a rounded, rocky peak in the distance. “It’s a bushwhack to get in. Super remote, secret spot. One day he found the place broken into. Stuff moved or taken that no bear could get to.”
“Thieving Sasquatch, more like. Human thieves rob jewelry stores and embezzle from taxpayers. They don’t point to an empty spot on the map and then go wandering there hoping to get lucky. A chopper pilot I met once who worked on a logging show in that same area saw snow tracks in the alpine. Massive. Huge stride. Absolute middle of fucking nowhere. Do you know what people told him? They told him: Maybe it was someone snowshoeing.“ He breaks into a chuckle, shaking his head.
“It could also have been that,” I say, without intending to be skeptical.
“Buddy,” he says, becoming serious, “take a look around. This is no weekend recreation area. These are big, dangerous mountains around us. Ranges upon ranges of them. Grizzly Adams territory. No one’s out wandering or going snowshoeing up there.”
The rain’s pitter-patter transforms into a steadier shower. We begin to get drenched. Darellbear starts shaking his mop of wet hair and laughing.
“Yeah baby! Now we’re talking! Wooo! Wooooooooooo!“
I crack a little grin. When I don’t join him in his hooting, Darellbear cuts his laughter short and puts a concerned expression on his face.
“People told you about the rain here, right?”
If clock time and calendar time become opaque in the Great Bear Rainforest, they effectively stop dead in Ocean Falls. They’re replaced by a suspended animation whose silent symbol is the whorls of vapor rising from the mountains.
Ocean Falls thwarts my expectations. It’s upside down in relation to the rest of my journey. For one thing there is rain here, where previously there was none. And it is no normal rain, with a beginning, middle, and end. It starts and stops in whims that are nonsensical, bereft of logic, and without a real prologue or epilogue. When the rain does stop, there is no knowing when it will return. But invariably it soon gathers itself for another discharge at the same moment you watch, marveling, the sun illuminating another rainbow.
In dealing with the rain, there is no planning or waiting things out or consulting the weather report. You just live with the downpour, surrender to it, cavort in it. And forget umbrellas—here they are mauled by the rain, outflanked by it.
As awe-inspiring as the rains have been, they’ve only slightly resembled the legendary rain-forest torrents of my mind’s eye. When I say this to Ocean Fallsers, they chuckle. But then, in a more sober, ominous tone, they inform me that, yes, I have seen nothing yet.
In Ocean Falls, one of the smallest communities in Canada—a place tucked into the back of a maritime cul-de-sac no one’s ever heard of, and condemned to crushing isolation as if in a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse—there is a bar. Or it is what one might be tempted to call a bar—but is, by name, a saloon.
Saggo’s Saloon, Rob and Corrina tell me, is like no other drinking establishment on the planet. For one, it’s open only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings—and from only four o’clock to seven o’clock at that. Unless, of course, its owner, thirty-six-year-old Bartender Bob, the youngest person in Ocean Falls, is having a bad day and decides to kick everyone out. Or unless the place runs out of beer, in which case everyone will still have to leave. The saloon’s burgundy shag rug, from the age of disco, wafts the aroma of cigarette smoke—as smoking is still unofficially permitted there.
The day after my conversation with Darellbear I find the no-frills watering hole—an old brown wooden bungalow located down the road from the lodge. Apart from a small, hard-to-read sign beside the door, there is no indication that the former Standard Oil fuel station is now Ocean Falls’ reluctant tavern.
Inside, the place looks and feels like an unmaintained legionnaire’s hall from the seventies. Several people, a mix of older men and women, sit at roadhouse-style chairs and tables, the kind you often see in bar brawls in movies.
I find Rob Darke sitting at the bar, which is manned by an uncomfortable-looking man who, I conclude, is the owner, Bartender Bob. The portly and somewhat swarthy gentleman is hunched over the bar, sipping from a straw in a tumbler glass. “Black Magic Woman” plays from an old television set behind him, tuned to one of those cable TV stations that run generic music round the clock. A few old and nearly empty bottles of liquor line the shelf behind him. A shredded dartboard, a sickly pair of mounted antlers, and a derelict billiards table complete the tableau.
“Hey, look who’s here!” Rob says.
I take a seat at the bar beside Rob and make eye contact with the bartender, who’s wearing a wide smirk on his face: a smile tinged with cynicism and something bordering on contempt. Rob introduces me to Bartender Bob and tells me it’s Bob’s birthday. I shake the barman’s hand, wishing him well.
“Thanks,” he says. “Want a beer?” He reaches below the counter and extracts a generic-looking can, placing it on the countertop with a loud thud. The label reads “Lucky Lager.” I notice that everyone else in the bar is drinking it. “Five bucks,” Bartender Bob says.
“Just put it on my bill,” Rob says, and Bartender Bob gives me another questionable look and marks the sale in his notebook.
Saggo’s owner remains uneasy and slightly combative with everyone, until a few other locals come into the saloon bearing mood-altering birthday gifts: potato salad, sausage rolls, cashews, and those small liquor bottles you get on airplanes. As the loot accumulates, Bob’s temper changes for the better.
An older man with a black eye patch stumbles in. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt, ripped around his stomach, with “Christos Glass” written on it.
“How long till last call today, Bob?” the man asks.
“It’s my birthday, Tim, so I’ll probably keep her open for an extra half hour today.”
“Bullshit! Gimme three of whatever you got,” he says to Bob, before noticing me and approaching, coming to within inches of my face.
“I know I got an eye patch on right now and it looks like I’m blind,” he says, pointing at his patch. “But I’m just getting my eye fixed.” With that, he grabs his three cans of Lucky in a fat choke hold and carries them over to a table, where a barnacled old man greets him with a yellow-toothed smile. The old man snatches one of the beers and cracks it open to a hail of protest from Tim.
Rob whispers that the man who stole Tim’s beer is “Nearly Normal” Norman Brown, the infamous pot-smoking, opium-eating curator of the Ocean Falls junk museum. “Norm used to date Janice Joplin,” Rob adds. “He once cooked and ate a wolf someone had shot.”
Bartender Bob leans in. “So I hear you’re a journalist and that you worked in the Middle East.”
Before I can reply, Tim, who has overheard Bob, swivels in his chair to face us. “He’s a terrorist, don’t you know.”
Tim’s words are spoken in such a way that they run perfectly down the middle between seriousness and humor.
“Actually, he’s a writer,” Rob jabs back.
Tim grins. “And he knows everything about an AK-47 you’d ever want to know!” The whole saloon explodes in laughter.
Bartender Bob taps me on the shoulder and points toward one of the people sitting at Tim’s table, a heavyset man with an enormous beer belly. “That guy over there in the baseball hat is Barrie. He spent some time in the Middle East. Hey, Barrie!” Bob shouts to the man, “maybe you and John here have crossed paths.”
I ask Barrie where he’s been in the Mideast and what took him there.
“Oil work,” he says. “I been all over. You name it: Baw-rain. Koo-wait. Eee-rak. Doo-bye. Saw-dee. And Aboo Dabee.”
Rob lights up a smoke. “John here’s looking for the Sasquatch.”
“If you wanna see a Sasquatch around here, have a few more of those beers and take a walk thataway,” Tim says, pointing to the door.
More laughter greets the rabble-rouser’s comments.
Bartender Bob takes a sip of his cocktail. “You’re not going to get much information in here,” he tells me.
“I haven’t heard any reports so far.”
“Well, remember there’s only a few dozen residents here. The average age is like sixty. Nobody goes into the bush. And everyone’s in bed by nine p.m. If there are Sasquatches, people here aren’t likely to see them.”
“Makes sense. But there’s no older reports, either, as far as I can tell.”
Bob shrugs his shoulders. “I wish I could help you.” He then goes quiet, deliberating for a moment. “Come to think of it, I did see something odd not that long ago. It happened about a year ago. There’s a couple of small lakes near town. We call them Twin Lakes. I was out for a long walk one day and reached the farther of the two. When I got there, I found footprints on the beach. Two sets of them—humanlike.”
“How big?”
“Well, that’s the thing. They were small. Smaller than mine. Kid-size. But they were strange. Funny looking. Splayed toes. Human—but not, somehow.”
I quickly try to remember whether I’ve told Rob, or anyone else, of the small tracks I came across in Bella Bella. I realize I haven’t.
“What’s the matter?” Bob says, noticing my reaction.
“Nothing,” I say, trying to disguise my surprise. “Could it have been kids playing at the lake?”
“Doubt it. This place is deep in the bush. No one goes out there. There’s few, if any, kids in town. Almost all the boaters who stop here are retired. And the tracks came right out of the bush at one end of the beach and walked along the sand into more tree cover. There weren’t any other footprints alongside them. Totally random.”
“How does one get to Twin Lakes?”
“Just follow the logging road out of town. You’ll need a four-by-four. Or you could walk, but it’s a distance. The road keeps going all the way to a place called Shack Bay, in Roscoe Inlet.”
Roscoe. I’m thrown off by how close the inlet is to Ocean Falls. But then I remember that shortcuts abound in the Great Bear—like secret doors in a labyrinth. If you could trudge through valleys and over the mountains in any direction you’d find yourself in another inlet, watershed, or region considered distant if you were to travel by boat.
“They built the road just before Ocean Falls closed,” Bob goes on. “When everyone realized how polluted the area had become. They were going to relocate the town to Roscoe.”
Shack Bay is near where Mary Brown and her group of young campers say they encountered a Sasquatch—the one that had crawled under their cabin. The connections continue to pile up.
Bob sees the wheels turning in my head. He reaches down and brings up another Lucky Lager, placing it beside me with a wry smile.
“You’re lucky today is my birthday,” he says. “I’m almost never this talkative.”
Ocean Falls was the quintessential company town in its heyday. The community was built, owned, and run entirely by “the corporation.” So when its last owners ended operations here, they chose to demolish their property rather than leave it behind for others. Though much of the town had been wiped off the map, some of the largest buildings, perhaps too costly to destroy, were left behind to rot.*
I spend a few days exploring the dilapidated buildings, a kind of macabre tourism that in reality differs little from visiting any other archaeological site. I survey all five floors of the Martin Hotel, a gutted megalith of peeling paint and wallpaper and shredding asbestos, littered with books, papers, broken furniture, and antique machines left behind by earlier waves of looters. The ruins are a kind of sneak preview of the end of the world. All of it leaves me feeling slightly downcast.
I visit the old school, which has imploded and sprouted a grassy field inside the old gymnasium. When I step back outside, Glenna pulls up in her white van. The self-appointed custodian of Ocean Falls’ memory offers to give me a personal tour of the town, which starts, at my request, with a perusal of her legendary scrapbook of newspaper clippings. I spend hours at her place poring over the yellowing Ocean Falls pages of the Vancouver Sun—bound together in one epic volume thicker and heavier than the largest reference atlas. It reads like a parochial community newspaper, filled with minutiae, recording every happening, and teeming with names. Except for a few references to the school football team—called the Ocean Falls Bush Apes—I find nothing referring to sightings of hairy humanoids.
“I told you,” Glenna says, with a self-satisfied smirk.
Before I can say anything more, she hands me a blue paperback book, magically produced out of thin air, entitled Rain People: The Story of Ocean Falls, by a writer named Bruce Ramsey.
“If any sightings happened here, it would be in this book,” she says, tapping the cover, “which of course it’s not.”
Rain People looks and reads like a high school yearbook, except that it covers the better part of a century. It’s filled with old black-and-white photos of the community during various phases of its existence. I’d learn that Rain People is as revered in Ocean Falls as the Bible is by Christians. Everyone has a copy of the town’s official biography, first published in 1971 and reissued in 1997. It’s constantly being referenced and quoted by people around here as if it were holy writ. Apart from a little snippet in the introduction, which Glenna shows me, referring to an indigenous legend concerning a lost tribe of humans who turned wild and hairy, on nearby King Island (a site of many Sasquatch reports), there’s no mention of anything related to Bigfoot. I would read the book later and confirm this myself.
I find the dearth of Sasquatch lore here fascinating and peculiar—especially when so much of it exists in nearby communities. There’s a similar and even more puzzling absence of reports from the hundred or so non-native residents who live on Denny Island, across from Bella Bella. Perhaps these outlier communities and their lack of reports support the idea that there is no Sasquatch. I wonder whether the wide discrepancy stems from Sasquatch lore being more ingrained in indigenous culture, so that people in some First Nations communities, like all of us, are interpreting their experiences through their preexisting beliefs. Or could it be that aboriginal residents are better equipped, perceptually, to see and feel the animals—if they exist—because of culturally and genetically inherited perceptual templates, and an overall sensitivity to the land?*
Later that day I go for a walk in the Martin valley—where most of the town’s residents now live. I’m on a footpath that begins where the residential road ends and leads deep into the forest. The dark, narrow enclosure is peppered with a few old-growth Sitka spruces, dark spires towering over aging, moss-encrusted alders and berry bushes. The sound of rushing water from the nearby Martin River overtakes the pitter-patter of rain on my jacket as I continue along the trail, which becomes more overgrown with each step.
Both walking and nature—separately but especially together—are conducive to thinking, and I find myself turning everything over in my mind. I feel I’m approaching another impasse in my attempt to make sense of this wild-man phenomenon. Of course, the journey remains open-ended. Anything might still happen. But wishful thinking, hoping for a new turn of events, is also dangerous, for it can seduce one into the same trap that has ensnared nearly every other hell-bent Sasqualogist: continuing with the never-ending quest, the journey that never quite bears fruit, whose cost is an ever-deeper, more consuming, obsession. Maybe the rain is bringing on this mood, but the specter of futility is now staring me in the face.
I tell myself the Sasquatch is one of two things:
It’s a physical being, an animal, which—through a combination of its intelligence, stealth, evasiveness, rarity, and environment, and our own psychological and cultural filters and blind spots—we are prevented as a society from seeing, identifying, classifying, or otherwise acknowledging. People who see it are simply lucky, in the right place at the right time.
Or Bigfoot is a psychocultural or metaphysical phenomenon. It’s a symbol arising from a range of possible experiences, some explainable, some perhaps unexplainable. People who regard Bigfoot as real and who go looking for it, as well as eyewitnesses who become obsessed by it, are chasing a symbol, a mental representation of their own or someone else’s experience. That symbol is a “downstream” mental by-product of an experience stemming from known and/or unknown stimuli. Perhaps that’s why the Sasquatch can’t be found. It doesn’t exist as we know other things to physically exist.
Though I’ve done my best to avoid choosing a contrived position based on false certainty, I still find myself caught between the either/or poles: “It exists” versus “It doesn’t exist.” Even if I bridge these explanations by saying, “It may be a bit of both,” that is still a superficial synthesis—a fusion of somewhat foregone conclusions. Using logic and deductive reasoning to choose between possible explanations doesn’t translate to a fuller, more robust knowledge.
The walking trail fades ahead of me in a commotion of tall weeds and berry bushes. The narrow, mist-drizzled valley carries me gently upward in an ever-increasing tangle of wildness that feels deeply forbidden. The way ahead seems ungraspable, unfathomable even, and I stop in my tracks, a preamble to turning back. I stare into that defile of seemingly infinite chaos, marveling at its depth, inaccessibility, and paradoxical subtlety. And then a thought hits me: maybe the Sasquatch hasn’t been found, indeed can’t be found, because it resides in the place most difficult for us to find and navigate. A wilderness of an altogether different sort. A place where people seldom look, or are loath to look: in the subtler shades, the gradations between black and white—the middle ground between “this” and “that,” between “It exists” and “It doesn’t exist,” where the components of truth most often reside.
I arrive back at the lodge and head to the dining area, where the guests are having dinner. It’s pizza night. Rob is rolling dough in the kitchen. Country music is playing from a hidden stereo. Corrina, also in the back, sees me, grabs a menu, and shuffles over. She has a big smile on her face.
“You’re a popular guy around here,” she says teasingly, handing me the menu.
Rob looks up from his dough roller. “You gotta hear this,” he says.
“One of the residents,” Corrina says, “a guy named Don, came by earlier. He was asking about you—and what we thought of you.”
“Of me?”
“Yeah, like, what kind of guy you are. We told him we really liked you and felt you’re like family.”
Rob scurries over, his hands and apron covered in flour.
Corrina continues. “So the guy keeps saying, ‘Really? Are you sure?’ And we tell him, ‘Yeah, he’s great.’ Then he lets out this huge sigh of relief and says, ‘Thank heavens! Now we can stop checking the water supply!’“
Rob breaks into a gut-wrenching cackle. Corrina chuckles with him.
“I don’t get it,” I say, smiling, infected by the inexplicable humor.
“Right?” Corrina says. “So I ask Don why they’re checking the water supply and he … hahahahaha … he tells me, ‘We thought your guest might have been an al-Qaeeeeda terrorist. We figured he was here to poison the reservoir.’”
Rob and Corrina both double over in laughter.
“A terrorist!” Rob squeals, eyes tearing.
The other guests stare at us uncomfortably. Rob is one convulsion shy of collapsing onto the floor. Corrina can’t contain her mirth but manages, after a moment, to go on with her story.
“So … so I tell Don he’s being ridiculous, and that you’d have to be a real genius terrorist to come all the way from the Middle East to Ocean Falls just to kill all two dozen of us—and then get caught while making your big escape on the Queen of Chilliwack ferry. Then Don said: ‘Well, he was in the Middle East. And he barely told us anything about himself. He only asked questions.’ And I’m like, ‘Duhhhh! He’s a writer. That’s his job!’“
“Who is this Don guy?” I ask.
Robs wipes the tears from his eyes. “Remember Tim? The guy at the saloon the other night with the eye patch who made those jokes? Don is Tim’s brother.”
Corrina leans in, lowering her voice: “And the two men haven’t spoken to each other in about ten years.“
“A decade?” I ask. “In a town of two dozen people?”
Corrina nods, with a Yup, can you believe that shit? look on her face.
“Just like Cain and Abel,” Rob says.
Corrina smiles. “Welcome to Ocean Falls.”
The sound of a downpour draws our eyes to the window. Rob takes a few steps over and stares excitedly outside. “Wow, look at it out there.”
Corrina raises her order pad and pen, and gives me an ironic look: “So, are you gonna order, something, Mr. Sasquatch Terrorist Man?”
I have a few days left before I move on from Ocean Falls. Though there’s been little in the way of Sasquatch reports I feel I’m coming close here to breaking down, or surmounting, a wall in my understanding. Another key kernel of information might propel me further.
The downpour continues for days, drowning out all other noise and obfuscating everything. I suit up in my waterproof gear and step out into dusky air that smells of damp earth and soaked evergreen.
I head in the direction of the Martin valley again, passing the boat-choked marina and the shuttered saloon. Across the shimmering inlet, where I know huge fjords to be, there’s nothing but an impenetrable haze. Sheets of water flow down the mountainside beside me, crossing the road at several points and emptying into the sea.
I reach the residential area and approach a small, beat-up bungalow with a Canadian flag and a big picture of Bob Marley in the window. In the driveway is an aging sports car. The driver’s door is ajar. As I get closer I see a man dressed in shorts and sandals rummaging through the back seat. Darellbear emerges from the vehicle just as I reach the house. He closes the door, sees me, and breaks into a wide smile.
“Hey, man! What are you doing out in this mess? I got some people over. You wanna join?”
He waves me toward the front door. “Come on. I just grabbed me a couple of the hot Goo for the folks inside,” he says, flashing the small jars of salve as we enter.
His place is dimly lit and toasty warm, reeking of must, candle wax, and incense. A Mexican flag and a Harley Davidson banner hang on faded walls above retro furniture, probably surviving pieces from the old Ocean Falls. Dream catchers and pieces of native art abound in the rest of the house.
A young couple, in their early twenties, sit on chairs drinking Lucky Lager. The young man is Lucas, a family friend of Rob and Corrina’s, whom I’d met at the lodge. The woman with him is from Victoria and is visiting her parents, who own a summer home in town.
Darellbear hands me a cold beer before taking a seat. He tosses Lucas and the woman the jars of Goo. “That’ll stop all the itching and clean up those bug bites right away,” he says.
“That’s sick,” Lucas says, in an exaggerated surfer’s drawl, reading the label of the jar and then opening and sniffing it.
“It’s powerful stuff,” Darellbear says proudly, cracking open a beer.
“This’ll be perfect after the hike up to the tunnel,” Lucas says to the woman.
“Tunnel?” I say.
“There’s a tunnel that connects Martin Lake at the head of this valley here with Link Lake in the next one,” Darellbear says. “It’s a six-hundred-foot-long hole through the mountain drilled back in the 1920s. It was an engineering feat. They brought in the Chinese to work on that. That’s why there’s so many opium bottles lying around here.” Darellbear nods at the woman: “She’ll tell you.”
“Yeah, my mom’s got two thousand opium bottles,” she says, flatly.
“Opium?“ Lucas says. “Are you kidding me?”
The woman’s frown flickers into a brief smile. “She has a big treasure chest full of them. Sake bottles too. She finds them on the water where the bunkhouses used to be. We went and got them appraised. Some lady wants to buy them.”
Darellbear asks about my investigations. I tell him I have no real leads apart from the small tracks Bartender Bob saw at the lake, along the old logging road to Roscoe. I add that I plan to go up there and poke around.
Darellbear shakes his head. “Those animals just don’t wanna be seen.”
“Are you hunting the Sasquatch, man?” Lucas says, looking at me wide-eyed. “If you’re going up that logging road to Roscoe, I’m coming with you!”
The woman turns to Lucas and stares daggers at him.
“You just got me thinking,” Darellbear says. “You know why it’s so hard to see a Sasquatch? Because it’s not just ‘right time’ and ‘right place’—it’s also right people. What’s the observers’ consciousness like? Will they be able to see the Sasquatch, if it’s there?”
Before Darellbear can say any more the woman groans, rolls her eyes, and stomps out of the room. Lucas, momentarily stunned, looks at the two of us and gets up to go after her. There are muffled sounds in the back. The door opens and then slams shut.
“I guess we freaked her out,” Darellbear says, wearing a puzzled expression.
We hear the door open again. A middle-aged man, short, balding, and wearing glasses, suddenly walks into the room carrying two six-packs of Lucky. “Behold,” he says, “the last dozen beers in all of Ocean Falls till the barge comes in. Do you know you’ve got a crying woman outside?”
“Ronny!” Darellbear says, smiling. “Forget that and sit your ass down here. We’re having a discussion about the Sasquatch.”
“The Sas-quatch? Oh boy!”
“Ronny here moved to Ocean Falls from the illustrious city of Winnipeg,” Darellbear says to me.
“Yep, I went from the car theft capital of Canada to a place that’s got absolutely no car theft whatsoever,” Ronny says, taking the empty chair next to me.
“I was just telling John that few people have the right consciousness to see a Sasquatch. You could be the best tracker, the best mountain man, and still not see one. Heck, I’ll bet that even our hunter friend Leonard Ellis hasn’t seen a Sasquatch either.”
“Leonard?” I say.
“That’s right.”
“You know Leonard Ellis?”
“Do I know Leonard?” Darellbear says, raising his voice, laughing. “Heck, man, we’re only sitting in the guy’s fucking house!”
“What?”
“Yeah! He used to live here. In this very house! The person I bought it from took it off Leonard when he moved to Bella Coola. What’s the matter? Your face is pale.”
I tell Darellbear about the coincidental references to Ellis and the serendipitous meetings over the course of my trip.
“Well, of course! What did you expect?”
“What do you mean?”
“Man, you amaze me. Do even you know where you are?” he asks, with his arms outstretched.
I answer with a puzzled expression.
“You’re in the Noble Beyond.”
“The Noble Beyond?” I repeat, in a tone of deliberate incomprehension.
“That’s right. The Great Bear Rainforest, this whole coast, is the Noble Beyond. This is the land of serendipity, man. The ultimate landscape of myth, magic, and metaphor. The domain that is the unseen universe. Interconnection and deeper meanings lie around every corner here. It’s where your Sasquatch, your coincidences, and a million other possibilities exist. Haven’t you ever read Joseph Campbell, or those Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda?”
Ronny nods knowingly, as if I’m being let in on a secret.
“Heck, let’s just call a spade a spade, man,” Darellbear says. “This whole business of you, or anyone, finding the Sasquatch—that’s bullshit. Exists? Doesn’t exist? You’re never going to know. Besides, that’s not even the point.”
Lucas wanders back into the room and sits down gloomily.
“What happened?” Darellbear asks him.
“It’s her last night here. She said she didn’t wanna spend it with a couple of old dudes.”
“So take your beers and go to her, man! What are you waiting for?”
As Lucas reaches for his cans, the rain outside doubles down.
“Oh yeah!” Darellbear howls, looking out the window next to him and laughing. “Listen to it!”
The rest of us get up and stare out into the drenched blackness.
“God damn,” Ronny says, entranced.
“I’ll bet it can go on like this for days,” Lucas adds, with a touch of concern.
“Ha! Are you kidding?” Darellbear says to him. “It can go on like this for the rest of the year! That’s why they call it Ocean Falls, man! You should see it when it comes down full tilt. When the rain bounces two feet in the air after it’s hit the ground. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s game over. The rain’s made you its own.”
“Made you its own?” I ask.
Darellbear shoots me a serious look. “You become one of us.”
The old logging road from Ocean Falls to Roscoe Inlet is a pockmarked, rock-strewn gravel track. A couple of miles in, past a cataclysmic rockslide of boulders the size of Great Pyramid blocks, the path begins its gradual disappearing act. From here it continues as a fading avenue of weeds that reach higher and thicker with each step.
I’m walking with Lucas and his dog, Gnarly—an energetic white retriever who’s constantly ducking into and out of the bush ahead of us. There is an on-and-off pitter-patter of rain. The goal of our micro-journey is to reach Roscoe Inlet. Our plan on the way back is to reconnoiter the two lakes along the road, where Bartender Bob saw the small tracks similar to those I came across at Old Town in Bella Bella.
We push along the path and reach a washout thick with deadfall. We spend what seems like forever crawling both under and over the debris. From that point forward the path is barely visible, continuing through thick second growth choked with blueberry and huckleberry bushes. We plod through the dark, claustrophobic corridor, having to crawl at times, coming across bear prints and what we think are cougar tracks.
“If I saw a Sasquatch and got evidence of it, I’m not sure I’d tell the world,” Lucas says, voicing a sentiment I’ve felt more than a few times. “It would probably put them in danger. That’s probably why they hide from people.”
Some Sasqualogists take for granted that proving the existence of Bigfoots would result in eventual protection for the species—and the forests they inhabit. But what if the discovery were to have the opposite effect? It’s hard to imagine the chain saws and mining machines going silent for the sake of a few remaining wild men. The announcement would be earth-shattering from a scientific point of view and would probably also result in a thousandfold more attention being heaped on the creatures and their habitat from hordes of tourists, government officials, newsmongers, scientists, and hunters.
After much effort, bruised and scuffed, we emerge into a clearing. In front of us is a creek coursing through a dark, spacious, and mossy old-growth forest. To our left, immediately downstream, lies a pulverized wooden bridge—presumably part of the old road we tried to follow and lost. Lying on top of it is an enormous Sitka spruce, one of the largest trees I’ve ever seen. The tree had somehow fallen over, splitting the bridge in half as if with a karate chop. The trunk is so wide that a small car could drive along it. The almost deliberate precision of the impact is eerie.
Just beyond the bridge, several miles from where we started, there is no sign of the road—not even the faintest whiff or vestige of a track. Lucas, heroically, wants to push on. But we have no maps or navigational equipment—nor sufficient provisions. I make the decision to turn tail rather than risk getting lost in an unfamiliar landscape whose depth, after one wrong turn, could become nothing short of infinite.
On the hike back, we arrive at Ikt Lake—the second body of water along the logging road out of Ocean Falls. We saunter along the sandy shoreline scanning the ground. This is where Bartender Bob claims he saw the unusual, small humanoid tracks. But there is nothing here save loads of goose shit, deer and wolf tracks, and a plague of baby frogs on the move. The rain ended hours ago. Except for the intermittent breaks made on the surface by cutthroats catching bugs, the lake is as still as glass. The sky is in the throes of post-rainfall tumult. Thick foggy vapors rising from the drenched rain forest churn in cottony swirls. This captivating scene, mountains and all, is reflected in the lake.
Lucas and Gnarly, lost in their own investigations, wander farther down the shore, appearing to grow punier in the surrounding gigantism. I quickly tire of searching the ground for tracks and decide there’s far greater reward in just sitting and watching the Rorschach-blot reflection of the mountain scene in the water.
And then something strikes me. When I tilt my head, turning the mountainside and its reflection in the lake sideways or vertical, the scene takes on the contours of a head and torso. I keep looking and discern facial features, which materialize in the lighter patches of alders and shrubs beside the lake, where the “head” is. There I see eyes, a fat nose, and lips. The bushiness creates the impression of matted hair. The head rests on no neck. The darker conifers on the higher mountain slope (and their mirror images in the lake) form wide shoulders that jut out from behind the head. Higher yet, the rising slope of the mountain curves to a level ridge, creating the impression of hanging arms. The image is of a humanoid being, bulky, hairy, and muscular. It’s somewhat abstract but has an unnerving presence and edge—and a stolid personality. Its power is equal to that I perceived in the ghostly faces I saw in the shoreline reflections while traveling up the Koeye, which I likened to beings on a totem pole.
I’m jolted to the core when I realize that I’m staring into the eyes of what looks to be a Sasquatch—one of my mind’s rendering—hewn from the mountain and forest and radiant with the presence of the surrounding wilderness. I’m transfixed and stare at the creature as the mist around it roils.
I’m mindful that I’m seeing what I’m seeing because I want to, that our minds are adept at generating images from our surroundings, especially images that consciously occupy us. But even though I know that this creature is just a mountain and its reflection in the lake, something about the image feels real to me. The image is expressive, its detail convincing. It’s saying something, speaking to me. It may as well be real. It doesn’t matter that it’s literally not.
And this is what changes my entire perspective. For although this symbol is an object lesson in the psychology I’ve considered, it also reframes that knowledge: rather than thinking of perception as just our senses distorting reality and thereby somehow separating us from nature (implying a kind of error or falsehood), I see now that our creation and interpretation of symbols is also part of our nature—an aspect of nature itself. There’s something normal, even essential about this process. Our minds work this way not just because they evolved to do so over time but because these functions help us fulfill a very human need.
I think of all the Bigfoot sightings. Whether they’re real, pattern mismatches, or phantasms deriving from an altered state, they must, I realize, all resonate equally in the observer—evoking sentiments that deepen life and make it and more enriching. Take the relationship indigenous peoples have to Sasquatches. The attitude of some First Nations peoples yields far more because these people see the animals as a combination of physical being, spirit, story figure, symbol, and teacher. There is a definite takeaway, with manifold social and psychological benefits for both the individual and the community. All that many of the rest of us can seem to muster is the possibility of a physical ape-man and the impoverished, binary either/or debate about its existence.
And perhaps this is what Darellbear, in his idiosyncratic way, was trying to convey the other night: that beyond the obsession with the rational question of whether the Sasquatch physically exists, there is a whole other field of inquiry that is being neglected, an ether of subtler possibilities—his Noble Beyond. What can the Sasquatch and our pursuit of it tell us about ourselves, about our motives, individually and as a culture, about what we deeply and truly yearn for?
Perhaps I’d find out in Bella Coola.
* Or perhaps it just seemed that way, given that rainfall wasn’t being measured across most of the uninhabited coast.
* In 1986 a counterterrorism unit of the Toronto Police came to Ocean Falls to test its weapons and pyrotechnics on the derelict buildings, temporarily making the town look like a smoldering action film set.
* When I hiked with eyewitness Clark Hans on my previous trip to Bella Coola, I could scarcely believe the details he picked up in the forest that were initially invisible to me. Once he pointed them out, deer rubs on the bark of trees, faint animal impressions in the moss, and banana slugs partly concealed by foliage were all revealed in an instant.