I have suffered from some acute bouts of reverse culture shock over the years following trips to meccas of cacophony—places in India, Egypt, and parts of Latin America. In those cases I returned to Toronto tuned to the manic frequencies of my host country, which rendered me completely out of phase with my quieter home environment. My first days back were often buffeted by a silence so pronounced it would throb in my ears. People on the street wandered around in slow motion, like objects drifting weightlessly through interstellar space.
By contrast, my reentry into big-city life following my trip to the Great Bear Rainforest—a torturous ordeal of reacclimatization surpassing any before it—is the complete reverse experience. I’ve taken a swan dive from a moss-covered, crystalline pinnacle of stillness and clarity into a roiling, incongruous uproar.
The Noise.
That was the name Alex Chartrand Jr., in Wuikinuxv, had given to the irreverential hullabaloo, the godless clamor, the grinding machine gears of the city—the hallmark of a place where no Sasquatch would possibly reside. For people like Alex, accustomed to the subtler, gentler setting of the natural world, which is conducive to a more humane pace—the Noise of the outside world was a grating fact of life. I took his mention of it as a light rebuke, a poking of fun—not unlike the scores of other jokes about Toronto I’d endured from British Columbians during my journey. But in some way, it was also a warning about my impending return. Traveling to a different reality, and then returning to one’s own, highlights the things we were numb to before.
The day I leave the Great Bear, I realize something is seriously amiss when, arriving at the connecting airport at Port Hardy, I see women’s high-heeled shoes and for a few seconds have no idea what they are. In the landscapes through which I had trod, high heels were necessarily absent. As a result, they’d disappeared from my mind as a notion—and temporarily as a memory.
When I arrive for the night in Vancouver, an ordinarily subdued city, devoid of the edginess and chutzpah common to other large urban centers, I’m met with a circus of stimuli on the order of places like Tokyo or Bombay. When I left the plane my first impression, apart from the jolting sight of concrete and an indescribable smell of impurity, was of a faint background buzz, a constant humming.
The Noise ramps up when I catch a cab with a loud, opinionated driver who has lived in Vancouver for twenty years but has never heard of Bella Bella or any other coastal community north of Campbell River. It continues as his car radio babbles maniacally, entreating me to hire a lawsuit attorney and to eat at KFC. It intrudes in the forms of cranium-shattering roars of motorcycles and wailing sirens. One of the stranger experiences is walking along Georgia Street, a wide downtown thoroughfare, and seeing vehicles barreling past me, just feet away (the cement trucks are particularly bad). Up the coast, the slightest rustling in the bushes had been enough to startle me. My sensitization to the Great Bear’s delicate frequencies amplifies the sounds of distant road construction and the garbled, angry hollering of drunkards in the alleyways beneath my hotel at night. The Noise slips through every crack, like granules in a sandstorm.
My assumption that Vancouver has prepared me for Toronto is proved wrong at the airport when I arrive to collect my luggage at the baggage carousel. Above it, a large flat-screen TV broadcasts a barely coherent jumble of sensationalized news and stock-market tickers, as travelers gaze hypnotically between it and their smartphone screens. If anything, the Noise is at a more jarring pitch here, the collective neurosis more pronounced.
What equilibrium I gained during my travels is shattered, gradually, by the city’s disequilibrium. It’s underscored by the unenviable state of its people—the often rushed, routine-bludgeoned masses avoiding eye contact and wearing frowns of dissatisfaction. Weeks in, sadly, I feel the coastal magic begin to evaporate. It’s hard not to be affected by the collective. I am reminded of an old Middle Eastern proverb: All that enters a salt mine becomes salt.
It is then that I truly come to appreciate the Sasquatch’s reflexive desire to give the train wreck we call civilization a wide berth. I find myself wanting to return to the forest, to burrow ever deeper in search of places unaffected by this chorus of human short-circuiting: the Noise. Certain conversations with people, I find, especially trigger that feeling.
“I heard you were in BC over the summer,” a friend of a friend says, yelling in my ear over the music blaring in a packed bar on Ossington Street one night, weeks into my re-assimilation. I am out with friends. The sea of coked-up and marijuana-anesthetized humanity laps at our edges. “What were you doing there?” he asks.
“I was traveling the coast collecting stories of Sasquatch encounters.”
“What encounters?” he asks, half-hearing and turning his ear to me again.
“Sas-quatch!“ I say.
He looks at me, and I am met with a blank stare that melts into a smile and then laughter. “Sasquatch? I bet everyone who lives out there is kind of a Sasquatch, eh? Hahahahaha!“
I continue to look him in the eye, straight-faced, with an unshakable seriousness. His laughter tapers into a chuckle, which then slowly morphs into a shocked and sobering look of incredulity. He sees that I’m not joking and composes himself.
“No, really,” he stammers. “What were you doing there?”