Roanoke Ridge

by J. J. Dupuis

  “That’s very kind of you to say. I’m actually a huge fan of your blog. And your papers have generated a ton of content for my site, especially your work on plesiosaurs.”

  “You’re the one who is very kind. Are you here to cover this circus for your site?”

  “I’m here on personal business, actually, but instead of sitting around my motel waiting for daylight, I thought this would be an interesting talk.”

  “It certainly was, in more ways than one. The use of niche modelling is novel. Speaking of, can you explain to me why Americans say nitch instead of niche, as though it’s a place where cars that swerve off the road end up?”

  “We have to pick and choose which French words we pronounce correctly. Sounding American is very important to us.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “I assume, Duncan, that you dismiss Bigfoot as nonsense?”

  “That’s a complex question for me,” he says. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. I didn’t come here to point fingers and mock.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I certainly won’t dismiss the idea outright. It doesn’t seem scientific to rule out a possibility with little or no investigation, and I do believe that the idea of Sasquatch has a prior plausibility. We’re not talking about a massive marine reptile that has been extinct for sixty-five million years surfacing in a Scottish loch that only came about after the last ice age.”

  Lindsay Chiu falls into orbit around us, shifting her weight side to side like a metronome. Her chin is tilted down at her collarbone and she looks up at Duncan. I think of a reason to include her in the conversation — I’ve been her enough times at enough conferences.

  “Excellent presentation,” Duncan says, before I get a chance to say anything.

  “Thank you,” she says. “And thank you for coming.”

  “It was a pleasure,” he says. “Have you met Laura Reagan?”

  “How do you do?” Lindsay says, rather formally.

  “Laura is the founder of Science Is Awesome,” Duncan says. “And her name also starts with the letter L, so you have that in common. We’re not quite in Superman comics, though, are we?”

  We both look at him.

  “Like Lex Luthor and Lois Lane,” Lindsay says, finally.

  “Precisely,” Duncan says. “I’d hoped I wasn’t the only comic book nerd here, as is so often the case.”

  “On the subject of superheroes: Lindsay, do you spend a lot of time trying to secretly slip climate change and conservation science into cryptozoological lectures?” I ask.

  “It’s my personal crusade,” she says. “My obsession. Sometimes that means a little live-trolling.”

  “Science communication can be an uphill battle,” I say.

  “Love is a battlefield,” Lindsay says, smiling.

  “Pat Benatar,” Saad says, proving that he’s still awake.

  “Some of us have to do it,” she says. “There’s so much terrible science journalism out there.”

  “I’d like to think I do my part,” I say.

  “We all have parts to play before the world boils over,” she says. “Or freezes over, if that’s your point of view.”

  Ouch.

  I know exactly what she’s talking about. Last year, I ran a story on my site based off of a press release from the National Astronomy Meeting. A team of scientists were predicting, based on mathematical modelling, that we may experience a decline in solar activity, known as a Maunder minimum. This phenomenon is thought to have caused the “Little Ice Age” in the seventeenth century. I ran the story with a headline claiming we were approaching another ice age. Worse still, I posted an image beneath the headline of a man with his fur collar up, a wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and a comically confused expression on his face. I knew the story was sensational, but I wanted to generate traffic to the site and interest in factors affecting climate. A story like that, of rapid climate change, gets picked up by mainstream media. And mine did. The Telegraph in the U.K. ran the story on their front page. Comment pages, the natural habitat of climate-denying trolls, were awash in discussions of the validity of mathematical modelling as it pertains to climate change, something they usually argue against.

  Was my headline hasty? Yes. Did it succeed in generating interest in the site and in the science behind climate change? Certainly. Had I become the sensationalist media who encourages the distortion of fact in favour of attention? I’m afraid so.

  Within days I was torn apart. Doubtful News and other skeptical sites highlighted the poor coverage of the story. I personally wrote three follow-ups accepting blame, one of which featured an interview with the head researcher responsible for the original press release. I ran special pieces written by several important science communication experts about the failure of the media, my own included.

  What struck me the most after the dust settled was that my readership was up. It wasn’t a huge leap in page views, I can’t even be sure it wasn’t a natural fluctuation given the steady increase prior to the story, but it was up. All in all, the controversy made little difference — and that’s what hurt. Despite the popularity of my site, the interviews I’d given, the puff pieces written about my success, my audience still didn’t expect perfection. They didn’t hold me in the high regard that I thought they would. Nobody was outraged by my lapse in journalistic standards, because they hadn’t expected them in the first place.

  But the true believers, the science faithfuls, those who live by the peer-review process, the Lindsay Chius of the world, they’ll never let it go. They will always remind me that I’m not one of them, that the letters B.Sc. are all that follow my name on my business card.

  “The only difference between a wise man and a fool,” I say, “is a wise man learns from his mistakes.”

  “I don’t think that’s the saying,” Lindsay says.

  “I think it’s close enough,” Duncan says, making an attempt at diplomacy. “I’m told there’s a pub down the road where some of this lot will be grabbing a pint later, would you two care to join?”

  “Ordinarily I’d jump at the chance to pick your brain and eat fries out of a paper-lined basket, but tomorrow is a big day,” I say.

  “Understood,” Duncan says. “Raincheck on the brain-picking.”

  “I’d love to,” Lindsay says.

  The crowd dissipates like dust on a country highway. Saad and I wait a little. Saad loves crowds, he navigates them well. He can see a crowd as people, rather than just an undulating wall constantly becoming tighter and tighter.

  Rick Driver catches up with us and says, “Girl, if you think I’m a fraud, that limey fella will knock your socks off.” He walks away through the dark parking lot toward a big red pickup.

  “I don’t care,” I call after him. “I’m not here for Bigfoot.”

  “You’re here to find that professor fella,” he calls back from beside his truck. “Do you know how many people go missing in national parks every year? Do you? And they never find ’em.”

  THREE

  A number of gentlemen from Lytton and points east of that place who, after considerable trouble and perilous climbing, succeeded in capturing a creature which may truly be called half man and half beast. “Jacko,” as the creature has been called by his capturers, is something of the gorilla type …

  — Daily Colonist, July 4, 1884

  I LIE AWAKE, LISTENING TO EIGHTEEN-wheelers thunder down the highway outside my window. I try not to think about Professor Sorel, alone in the woods, possibly injured, shivering as night takes hold. Forcing my eyes shut, I try to think about something else, anything else. What pops into my head is the offer to buy Science Is Awesome — it’ll take my lawyer some time to pore over the paperwork the tech giant Geocomm sent over after the video call three days ago. And then guilt, for even considering selling off something I worked so hard to build. I never planned on this life, I’m not sure it’s the right fit. And who wouldn’t want to be set for life?

  I ch
ange tracks again. Rick Driver’s playing in my head now. What did he mean, about being thick as thieves with Dad? And that nonsense about Duncan Laidlaw?

  From the other bed, mattress springs creak as Saad turns over from one side to the other. His comforter is pulled up high over his head like a cocoon.

  I lift my own blanket up and slip out of bed, curling my toes on the carpet. I sit on the floor and lean against the wall, balancing my laptop on my knees, the monitor pointed away from Saad. I try not to disturb him with the glare from the screen and am conscious of the sound of typing and mouse clicks.

  My browser is up and my email is open. The Geocomm offer is now halfway down my inbox. I open a new tab and try to push it out of my mind.

  Entering Rick Driver’s name into the search bar reveals how much of a circus the world of cryptozoology can be. The photos that come up of Driver show him wearing hats which are plugging websites, supplement lines, local hardware stores, and so on. Then of course there are the headlines: Texas Man Claims He Shot Bigfoot. Local Man Has Bigfoot Body On Ice. Dead Bigfoot On Display in Lubbock. The dates of these stories span a decade, and in each one, Driver claims to have come by the body of a Bigfoot by some new means: nailing steaks to trees and shooting the creature. Accidentally hitting one with his truck. Finding one poisoned after it raided his campsite and ate all his chewing tobacco. All in all, it is estimated that he’s made half a million dollars touring his supposed Sasquatch corpses around rural America.

  When his first fraud was exposed, Driver claimed that a mysterious alphabet agency came in black vehicles and took his Bigfoot corpse. Since he already spread the word of his possession of the body, he felt compelled to deliver on his word. He was so compelled he took an ape costume and stuffed it with roadkill. The second time, he claimed that he was the victim of a hoax. The third time, his defence was simply can’t you people take a joke?

  If cop dramas have taught me anything, it’s that serial offenders always start small, before escalating to things like killing. Perhaps Rick Driver had to take a few dry runs before becoming a half-a-million-dollar hoaxer.

  I start digging a little deeper. Several online profiles depict him as a professional Bigfoot hunter, but there’s very little about him before his first hoax. There is one thread in a chat room about Driver serving in the military, but there are no citations and no further corroborating data points.

  I decide to take him out of the equation and instead search only for Bigfoot hoaxes in the Texas area, dating back two decades. There is surprisingly little to find, even if you switch to regional nomenclature such as skunk ape, stink ape, or swamp ape. Rick Driver is pretty much the father of Bigfoot hoaxing in that part of the country, and the only hoaxes on record are his masterpieces — no practice sketches.

  Thing about Rick Driver is, yes, he comes off as the prototypical Texan — but what if that’s part of the con? Even the most well-educated U.S. president uses terms like folks, and injects some down-home twang when stumping among the rural working class. What if Driver’s good old boy accent and manner were just schtick? It occurs to me that he might have travelled northwestward — to study with the masters, so to speak. When trying a con, it’s probably best to start out on those conditioned to believe. You don’t try a Christian faith-healing racket on a bunch of atheists at a skeptic’s convention.

  I start digging through all the banner cases, the blockbusters of the Bigfoot world: the PG film, the Jerry Crew casts, even my father’s own footage. One incident sticks out, for its originality. In the late eighties, a trio of men staged a Sasquatch sighting along Highway 20 near Winthrop in northern Washington. A Bigfoot appeared at the side of the highway, just as a coach bus crossed the bridge over Early Winters Creek. Twenty people saw the ape-man disappear into the woods. Word spread like wildfire.

  The genius of that hoax was the lack of video to be analyzed. In fact, this story could have played a major part in the Bigfoot canon — but for the fact that it was too perfect. Whenever a hoax is that perfect, somebody will want credit, and eventually two out of three of the men came forward. One of the men was on the bus during the sighting — in fact, he was the first passenger to spot the beast as it emerged from a rocky outcropping and wove between yellow cedars. The second man had made the suit, complete with large rubber feet designed to leave oversized tracks in the soil. A third man, who chose to remain anonymous, wore the suit. It doesn’t appear that they made any money out of the hoax; it was more of a test just to see if they could do it.

  In the photo accompanying the article are the two men, made of halftone dots on a base of blue. They share atavistic traits with hipsters, the lumberjack look with overstylized facial hair. They look like one half of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The one on the left is the suit maker, Donald Oreskes. The thinner, shaggier one on his right looks familiar. The caption beneath identifies him as Oregon native John Driver Junior.

  Sometime between 1990 and 2004, Donald Oreskes left the picture, and John became Rick.

  The fascinating takeaway from the Winthrop hoax is what the eyewitness accounts described. The bus passengers — those not in cahoots with the hoaxers — had described the creature they saw as over seven feet tall. But when Oreskes and Driver produced the suit, which was a modified gorilla costume, it was designed to fit a man no taller than six foot one. Given the region and its history, it seems the witnesses saw what they expected to see; with no sense of scale, the creature they saw was stretched by their imaginations.

  I search for a Donald Oreskes in Washington, and it looks like he might own a bookstore on the outskirts of Kennewick. There’s a phone number for the store and I contemplate calling it in the morning.

  Finally, before I go back to bed, I type my father’s name plus John Driver Junior into the search engine. If Rick had seen me when I was little — before I was all grown up — he was probably still going by the name John Jr.

  I’m relieved when I get zero results.

  FOUR

  Most accounts tell of giant boulders being hurled against the cabin, and say some even fell through the roof, but this was not the case. There were very few large rocks around in that area. It is true that many smaller ones were hurled at the cabin, but they did not break through the roof, but hit with a bang, and rolled off.

  — Fred Beck, I Fought the Ape-Men of Mount St. Helens, WA, September 27, 1967

  HIGHWAY 49 SNAKES THROUGH PINE TREES and mountains before becoming the main street of Roanoke Valley. The sun climbs slowly over the peaks of the trees. There’s no wasting daylight at a time like this. Aunt Barb looks alert in the rear-view mirror. She’s quiet and I doubt there’s anything I could say to assuage her worries. Aside from “good morning,” she hasn’t said a word since we picked her up. Saad slows down as a man with a stop sign, wearing a hard hat and orange vest, stands in the middle of the road. Workmen in a cherry picker are hanging a banner that stretches across the two-lane highway. Bigfoot Welcomes You! the sign reads as the workmen hoist it taught, high above the asphalt. Shops appear with silhouettes of Bigfoot in the windows. Advertisements for Bigfoot burgers, Bigfoot shakes, Bigfoot fries, Bigfoot hats, Bigfoot everything are visible from the street. The smell of fresh pancakes wafts over from the diner on the corner. The banner above their door reads Bigfoot Breakfast Special $3.99 All Weekend Long.

  A camera crew is in the centre of town, shooting establishing footage for The Million Dollar Bigfoot Hunt. The white-and-green NatureWorld van is parked by the curb, its back doors open. A cameraman pans across the sidewalk to capture the scene, the mood, the worship of all things Bigfoot.

  The road curves and dips down deeper in the valley part of Roanoke Valley. We cross a bridge that runs overtop of the Klamath River. Half a mile farther up, one of the mountain streams merges with the Klamath, adding to it the clean, clear water pouring down from ice packs high in the Cascade Mountains. The Klamath itself starts in the plains to the east and cuts a path through the mountains in defiance of every other
waterway in the region. National Geographic called the Klamath “a river upside down” due to its odd geography.

  On the bank of the river, on my side of the car, a hulking dark wood structure looms menacingly back from the road. It’s an old sawmill, the water wheel long removed and boards along the side fallen off. A smaller, newer structure sits in front, closer to the road; its sign reads Bigfoot Museum and Art Gallery.

  The road winds around a bend and then there’s nothing but trees growing straight up on radical inclines, one mountain rising above all the others. It sits dominantly, the silverback of the group, wearing a crown of clouds. It’s easy to forget that we just left town. There is only the one road, the one scar on the land as evidence of a human presence, until we reach the turnoff for the ranger station.

  A command centre, set up at the ranger station at the end of the road, points toward the mountains. A dozen cars are parked on the gravel shoulders on either side of the road, most of them with insignia on their doors. I make note of the coats of arms of the county sheriff, the Park Service, the Department of the Interior, and a white pickup that just says Roanoke County. An army of volunteers awaits their directions. Some are squatchers that I recognize from Lindsay Chiu’s talk last night, others are from a citizen science organization I’ve met before called Oregon Budwatchers. They record the exact date and time when buds open in the spring, allowing scientists to gauge the effects of climate change, among other things, on these forests.

  The ranger station is an army-green single-storey building, set back from the road by a well-manicured lawn, with a flagpole out front, a plaque at its base. It was built in the thirties, among the thousands of projects created by FDR under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. It looks like a summer camp, not a federal building, but there’s a tension, an urgency in the people coming in and out, descending the three stone steps and heading out into the parking lot.