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Juniper Ridge stretched ahead forever, a bony jawline hung with a gingham bib of mountain ash, huckleberry, and bleached bunchgrass. Mount Rainier, otherwise known as Tahoma, loomed up behind me, and Mount Adams, or Pahto, lay ahead to the left: a pair of white incisors. The far, pearly canine of Mount Hood (Wyeast) stood framed by two black molars in the Dark Divide on the south, while from the massive abscess on the right side of St. Helens (Loo Wit) gasped wisps of steam.
Termites glittered amber in the dropping sun, and it was time to look for camp. I stopped at the base of a hillock trending easterly on the ridge beyond Juniper Peak. From there I could see three of the volcanoes clearly—almost four, but Hood’s fang had ducked behind one of the black molars. There were juncos up here, and big lumbering deer flies, to whom I gave about a pound of flesh. Fortunately, I said, already talking to myself, they’re slow, loud, and dumb. But so am I. Brothers of the peak. I didn’t bite them back, but I damn well bapped them if they hung about too long. The sandy path was knitted with coyote tracks of varying sizes, and elk bones lay alongside the trail, paler than the volcanic sand.
There was scarcely room for the tent on the knife-edged arête. Eventually I was able to pitch it in a spot marginally wider than the rest. With the wind beginning to rise out of the west and my close call fresh in mind, I stapled the tent to the ridge with a dead tree to keep me from rolling or blowing into the abyss in the night.
I boiled some water over my blue Gaz stove and cooked some ramen noodles. I’d drunk about as much as I should have on the long hike up, and already the water I’d brought was much reduced in weight—and availability. I was careful with what I used, but not stinting. Coyotes barked and yipped somewhere down the ridge. And then the ghost moths came out.
3
Ghost Moths at Moonrise
The point of having a Sasquatch on our minds is that it makes us pry into the thickets and walk over the horizon, hoping always to see something take wing in the ghostly silver light.
—Peter Steinhart
The sun fell behind Loo Wit, dragging pink streamers all the way from Mount Rainier. A gray-green plume crept from the gaping crater of St. Helens, and the full moon rose right out of Mount Adams. My tent was a hammock suspended between the sun and the moon, guarded by three volcanoes. I watched the sunset’s afterglow through a sheaf of tall bunchgrass that sprang from a carpet of red huckleberry and blue juniper. All the tones deepened.
The first ghost moths appeared a half hour after moonrise; half an hour later they were gone. It was easy to imagine that they hadn’t been there at all. But they had, and their shimmering spiral flights turned the mountain heath phantasmagorical for the few minutes they deigned to fly.
Ghost moths belong to the primitive but successful family Hepialidae, part of an ancient suborder of the Lepidoptera whose females’ sexual equipment is uniquely arranged. Of some five hundred species of hepialids, about twenty fly in North America, most of them limited to the Pacific Northwest. While tropical ghost moths can be big and brilliant, ours tend to be small and subtle. An inch or so in wingspan, they range from beige to russet in color, often displaying metallic markings on their forewings. Their very short antennae and peculiar habits give them away.
Unlike the many moths that fly throughout the night, ghost moths appear only briefly, each species at a predictable time of day, dusk, or night. The larvae of most butterflies and moths eat the leaves of specific plants. Hepialid caterpillars, in contrast, bore into the roots of a wide variety of grasses, herbs, and shrubs, mining their underground or even underwater parts. And instead of laying her eggs directly on the host plant, the female hepialid broadcasts them by the thousands as she flies—but not until she has mated. Prior to coitus, females of some kinds are flightless . . . as if the “kiss” of the male releases them to the air. The females of other species fly up from the herbage in search of mates, reversing the usual roles of moth partners. In either case, with their antennae like a baby’s eyelashes and their tiny, jeweled eyes, the ghost moths find their way through the mountain maze to the bower of their waiting mates.
The lekking flight of the male ghost moths is their most distinctive trait, giving rise to their common name. In leks, such as those of sage grouse, birds of paradise, and swarm flies, males forgather to display communally to the females. By flying together they superstimulate the females to be receptive. Leks account for some of nature’s most spectacular displays of sexual energy and adornment. The brief twilight leks of ghost moths might seem subtler than the daylight displays of bright-colored birds, yet when the males swivel in place on the air as if hung from a skein of spider’s strands, the sight is dramatic.
Cornell entomologist Robert Dirig described the sight of an eastern species thus: “Imagine three large tan moths about ten feet above the ground hovering and swaying back and forth in this strange rhythm, against the greenish-black backdrop of the alders and distant forest beneath a purpling sky . . . lending by their brief adult existence a touch of faerie and romance to the remote wetlands.”
The twilight flights of the males spiral over the vegetation in shifting columns that seem to evoke glowing spirits hovering over the turf. The name Hepialidae, given to the family by the French entomologist Fabricius in 1775, comes from the Greek hepiales, deriving from epialos (nightmare) or epiolos (moth), or perhaps both. The moths’ ghostly reputation grew from their luminous pallor and common occurrence over foggy moors and graveyards.
Try to approach them, and they do seem to be phantasms: you see them; then you don’t. Their rapid flight gave the group its alternative English name, the swifts. They seldom come to lights, and the adults do not feed, so flowers don’t draw them, as they do sphinx moths and millers. Till that time I’d seen few ghost moths and caught fewer. But David Wagner, a University of Connecticut professor and hepialid specialist, had asked me to procure specimens for his ongoing studies of the Northwest species. So when I saw these wraiths rise from the heath on Juniper Ridge, I attempted to collect a small series for him.
I had already shed my boots to cool and rub my feet, sore from the rocky trail. Birkenstock-shod, I bumbled among the huckleberries in the full moon’s light, lunging at the luminaries. I managed to catch only one of the many flitting around, always just beyond the reach of my net. Not only were they swift and spectral, but at times they seemed not to be there at all. Then, within moments, they disappeared for real.
Moonlight mothing, chasing ghosts. It brought to mind a charming essay on these creatures by Harriet Reinhard, a pioneer Northwest lepidopterist. She wrote:
As children, we lived during vacation time at our family cottage at Ocean Park, Washington. Each year during the last week of August at sundown my sister and I set out for the spot where we had discovered the ghost moths, for only at that hour and season did they materialize.
Pulses and footsteps quickened as we drew near. Almost invisible, they danced and darted from bush to bush as twilight deepened into dusk. We netted what we could until darkness prevailed, then trod light-footed homeward with our harvest. Scientists called ghost moths choice and rare.
That was in the early twenties. Sixty-two years later, Harriet met David Wagner, then a graduate student at Berkeley, quite by chance. Learning that she had collected the well-known series of Ocean Park ghost moths, David plumbed her memory, hoping to go there and find the moths himself. “I looked into the eager young face,” Harriet wrote of the occasion, “and knew that the excitement I had felt in 1921 would blaze again, could he but see the ghost moths dancing in the dusk at end of summer.”
I wonder if that’s what my friend Jeanne Gammell saw. A present-day resident of Nahcotta, just a mile or two from where Harriet had chased the ghost moths more than seventy years ago, Jeanne told me of an experience she once had while camping in the wilderness of Washington’s North Cascades. It was early October. After a storm, she peeked out o
f her tent at two thirty in the morning and saw what she thought were stars.
But the “stars” were moving within the tiny clearing in the deepwoods. There were dozens of what Jeanne took to be small lights, nearly equidistant from each other, moving “in a gently undulating spatial dance, counterclockwise, never touching or crossing the path of another, as though directed by an unseen choreographer.” Jeanne stood and reached up as one circled near her, then climbed up on a stump and stretched toward them. But she couldn’t reach the “lights,” which seemed to give off a “warm gold-white glow, pulsating as they moved.” They were about the size of butterflies. Completely unsure of what she’d seen, Jeanne retired to her tent with her mind wide open.
Now, in the evening of this other October, a hundred miles south down the spine of the Cascades, I watched my own parade of dancing lights. To my eyes the ghost moths didn’t seem to generate light, but in the pale moontorch and sunfade they could be said to glow. Their dance, if not quite as regular as what Jeanne saw, arced like a signalman’s swinging lantern. And they were almost impossible to touch, as I found with my net. Clearly they exploited the faint ultraviolet better than I was able to use the last visible light.
The ghost moths fell back into the heath as ineluctably as they’d risen. To spend the better part of a year enclosed—first as a senseless egg in the winter; then as a burrowing wormoid in some cold, tight root; next a dumb pupa within a silk-battened cavity—then finally to fly free in the alpine air for all of two hours! The life of a ghost moth suggests a Cinderella whose ball is not only brief but also final.
As I retreated into my own cocoon of ripstop nylon and fiberfill, I took with me the glimmer of the moths’ soft wings on the soft night air. These fleeting lives leave powerful visions behind, beguiling a small number of lepidopterists while giving shivers to dusk-watchers and night-campers who haven’t a clue what to make of these strange sights, “dancing . . . at end of summer.”
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I have little doubt that many UFOs, fairies, and specters could be handily explained in lepidopterological terms. Yet I suspect that such an explanation would hardly satisfy Jeanne Gammell. I have seen things in the night myself that have nothing to do with moths or anything else I know in the “natural” world . . . yet they were surely part of nature, which is all. Reluctantly yet inescapably, we admit to having seen certain night lights that are not readily explained as ghost moths or headlights or airplanes or weather balloons.
In the same way, after all the shadows and bears and monkey suits and plankwood footprints have been eliminated, a residue of Bigfoot remains. Tucked in my ridgetop camp, I turned my thoughts back to hairy giants. After all, my mission wasn’t one of moths. I laid my buzzing head against my air pillow and thought about how we’d arrived at the present Sasquatch tradition.
Every culture has had its monsters and giants, its myths of the Green Man and the Wild Woman, but no culture has ever been so confused as ours as to what it really believes. Are we such wonderful observers of the natural world that we should expect to know everything that looms, walks, creeps, or grows outside our doors or beyond the city wall?
The orderly pace of taxonomy has been steadily eroding the biological unknown since before Aristotle, through Buffon, beyond Linnaeus, and right up to one Professor C. P. Alexander, who described more than ten thousand species of crane flies. Lately this leisurely enterprise has taken on an air of urgency as the rate of species extinction has come neck and neck with that of description, for only by knowing what’s out there can we hope to conserve it.
With the accelerating effort to catalogue life before it disappears, our estimates of its overall proportions expand. New information from the rainforest canopy has raised the projected tally of the world’s insect species (and thus, most of life) from around a million to more than thirty million. Journals of systematics tumble over themselves to place new taxa on the docket. Still we know just the meager margins of the totality of natural diversity in any depth whatever.
David Wagner plans to name several new species of ghost moths. For the time being he has placed the dusk-flying swifts of the Cascades in the species Hepialus roseicaput—the red-headed ghost moth—for the reddish ruff of furry scales on its bulky thorax. Far from phantoms, these flesh-and-blood redheads are real enough to earn scientific names, the number of which might soon increase.
It may seem a matter of little moment just how many species of obscure moths actually occupy a remote wilderness. Yet knowing what they are and where and how they live might help us know better how to care for the high country—a landscape under pressure from acid rain, grazing stock, forestry, and recreation. Even if the naming yields no practical application, it somehow seems better to know the world in its secret detail than to take its diversity for granted.
Yet who knows the ghost moths? I had seen a total of perhaps a dozen over a decade—a few of Harriet Reinhard’s ocean-beach species in my own domain, one broad-daylight type on the pre-eruptive slopes of Loo Wit, another on her sister Komo Kulshan (Mount Baker) to the north—prior to the night of the moonrise fliers on Juniper Ridge. That’s a dozen more than most people have encountered. Yet because something hasn’t been seen, does it therefore not exist? Who, upon hearing of its bizarre life history and eerie twilit transience, would not be forgiven for wondering whether such a thing as a ghost moth was real?
If something we see lies beyond our ordinary experience, do we shrug and say it is nothing at all? This is the central question surrounding Sasquatch. Possessed of soft evidence, most people react with either hopeful credulity or hostile indifference. Only a few ask the hard questions, keep an open mind, then stay tuned for answers that might never come. A few others resort to the supernatural to explain the unexplained, as they always will.
For myself, I feel that nature is good enough and rich enough that a “supernatural” is not required. Therefore I try to look at the imponderables as things to ponder, certainly not to be dismissed as fantasy, phantasmagoria, or spectral deceits. If it was difficult to imagine the dusky shimmer of the ghost moths prior to my own encounter with them, then it is just as hard to accept a hepialid whose wings span eight inches of emerald green—yet just such a beast is a common pasture pest in Australia. When the world proves larger than we expected, we need to let out the seams in our mindset, and there should be no limits.
It’s a long step from even a very big moth to the smallest Sasquatch, and I hadn’t expected to find a clue to Bigfoot in the ephemeral flight of a night-fly. The objections to a second North American hominid are many, and my scientific skepticism counsels caution. But the long litany of belief and tradition courts fair consideration, as do the numerous clear tracks found in disparate wilds and the many sightings by seemingly reliable folk. To dismiss the unknown out of hand is even more foolish than to accept it unquestioned, more foolhardy than to fear it.
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The next night I camped several miles down the ridge. I cooked a curry and sat back to await the silver discus of the moon. Mindful of my poor mothing the night before, I resolved to try again. I knew the moths were there, at rest among the tussocks and clumps. Even so, when sunset came, I waited with some trepidation to see if they really would come out again . . .
They did. Just after moonrise I saw them darting above the dull blood dropcloth of the heath. Again they flew for just half an hour. Dave Wagner had written that net collecting could be rewarding, “if one is fleet-footed.” That let me out. Even so, he said, “a dozen adults may be missed for every individual netted.” I missed many more than that but finally caught six males for Dave, my only evidence that these living lanterns weren’t simply a trick of the moonmist.
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So far, Bigfoot is proving even harder to catch than ghost moths. Let us earnestly hope it stays that way. In the absence of specimens, no one can prove that Bigfoot is not out there. Meanwhile, perhaps we shou
ld not be too eager to consign a perfectly good myth to the litter bin of lies. In the end, when we come to plot the vague landscape of what’s what and what’s not, maybe a moth is as good as a monster.
4
Sunrise with Bears
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,
Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
When I awoke the second morning, the volcanoes suspended Juniper Ridge in a cat’s cradle of sunrise beams. Dawn is not my common companion. I love the morning, but I have seldom come to it gladly except from the backside. Let me stay up all night and swallow morning like a sleeping draft before bed, and I find it sweet. But the actual rising, the opening of the sandpit eyes and raising of the stoneset body, are tough for me. So when I awoke wide-eyed in my tent’s mouth, gazing out at sunrise and ready to go, I was surprised. I didn’t know if it was the altitude, the exercise, or the dawn, one of the most glorious of the few I’d beheld.
The moon was still high. Color began to mix in the east, beyond the pale lump of Mount Adams. Pink mares’ tails rode in above the Goat Rocks, and a red flush appeared where the sun soon would, almost exactly where the moon had risen the night before. Mauve smears intensified by the minute and became purple knives shooting up and through the mountain from the south. A parasitic wasp and a termite both climbed my safety rail, as if to get a good seat for the show but actually to reach the warmth. As it turned out, the night and I had been still, and I hadn’t needed a crib. Now tufty grass heads wriggled in a light breeze, silhouetted against the lightening eastern sky. The purple knives turned scarlet, their deed done.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 4