The first group to come down was the one I’d seen first, with the youngster tumbling down the steep last bit and the infant still atop the strong young Indian’s shoulders. Among them they had five gallons of huckleberries. Had they seen a bear? They had not, and the rifle had remained on safety the whole time. Since they had two trucks, I thought I had a chance for a ride. But they planned to camp there another night, so they politely turned me down. At least I figured I could bum some water if necessary.
I sat dozing on my log, but the gray jays calling from the edge of the uncut forest awakened me. Noble fir seedlings coming in among the pearly everlasting in the clear-cut pleased me, enriching the Douglas-fir monoculture of most replantings. Orchid fireweed and a late penstemon the color of Concord grape jelly hummed with bees. I picked blackcaps and blue currants, a welcome change from huckleberries to moisten my thick tongue.
An array of autumn butterflies hovered over the soft white clouds of everlasting, sucking up the last of the summer’s nectar: sulphurs, skippers, coppers, and some tiny gossamer-wings swooping a pas de deux. When one finally perched, I saw it was a russet hairstreak. I netted it with Marsha to confirm the identification for the first Skamania County record. Its rich chestnut forewing displayed a black stroke called a stigma, identifying it as a male. When I looked again, its courtship perch had been filled by another.
Just then the two Indian women came down the trail. We chatted about berry yields, and I asked for a ride to the bottom. They were nervous about me and reluctant, but Marsha and my sticky, thirsty voice convinced them I was harmless, merely in need of water. With my gear and their berries we barely fit into their car. As soon as we were under way, they passed back their water bottle, and I drank deeply for the first time in many hours. I hadn’t figured on being in a car again so soon, but I was grateful.
Dolores, a Suquamish from Olympia, was maybe fifty, solidly built, with Coast Salish features. She worked for a state agency, and her left thumb was in a splint because she had overworked a tendon while handling big data tapes. Helene was in her late thirties and spoke with a mild accent. A Tulalip, she lived in Tacoma and worked in retail in Seattle. Dolores drove a fairly new Dodge and wore a T-shirt with a slogan from a television show I didn’t know; she said she hadn’t been to a tribal meeting in years. A Bible and a Plain Truth lay beside me in the backseat, badges of belief no more or less comprehensive in their revelation of personal creed than my John Muir T-shirt, though we are quick to judge.
As they found their ease, they spoke of Indian canoe races and honky bluegrass festivals (they attended the former but had more fun at the latter); of jobs, husbands, and the time their borrowed pickup truck was buried when a load-it-yourself gravel dispenser wouldn’t turn off. They laughed and asked me to tell them about butterflies and what it was like to write for a living. They said it sounded a lot like fishing, and I didn’t disagree.
As the maple curtain of the Cispus swept by, I asked the women if they knew any Suquamish or Tulalip legends concerning Bigfoot. “I know others have stories like that,” Dolores said, “but we’re ‘city Indians.’ We don’t know those stories.”
Yet they weren’t strictly city Indians. They had spoken about favorite berry patches and the season’s fishing and how to cook the salmon and the berries in the old way. In this wild place, far from the city, they seemed more at home than I. And Helene wanted to go up to Mosquito Meadows to see the country and the berries. “I only like them right off the bush,” she said.
So they had nothing to say about Bigfoot. I’ve learned that a direct query seldom evokes Sasquatch talk among Native Americans. It’s as if the stories are not their own to just give away. And yet there is no shortage of knowledge about hairy giants among the native people of the Northwest. I would learn this again and again when I wasn’t so abrupt.
I’d expected to be dropped at the bottom of the long, steep logging road, where I could filter water and hitch somewhere—maybe to Trout Lake, where I could stay with my Forest Service friends until I got reorganized. But the car turned left at the bottom and kept going north along the Cispus all the way back to Tower Rock Campground. Long before the sun went down and the goats came out on the bridge, I was once more ensconced in the campsite Thea and I had occupied several nights previously. The cold, clear water ran abundantly from the pipe nearby, and I was whole after walking Juniper Ridge with its bike ruts and lightning. I felt this might be more than I strictly deserved and that it was not, all in all, a bad start.
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In the late afternoon I walked to the nearby Cispus Environmental Learning Center. I’d once lectured at the center, and I hoped they might let me use a shower. Bathing on the trail had been impossible, of course.
Along the road in old homestead fields flitted ocher ringlets and cocoa-brown wood nymphs, butterflies I call the satyrs of September for their family affinity (Satyrinae) and their late flight among sere grasses where their larvae once grazed. Satyrs—another woodland creature once thought to be real—shared with Bigfoot, along with their mythic qualities, a reputation for a strong smell. Any doubters walking downwind from me might have had their faith restored in those rank rustic deities of old.
The shower was sublime. Afterward I called Thea, who was surprised and a little nonplused at my change in plans. She’d been looking forward to the reprovisioning reunions.
Outside, refreshed in the late-afternoon warmth, I met a teenager blowing leaves off the sidewalk. Josh Haney disliked the smelly, noisy leaf-blower as much as I did, agreeing that it seemed out of place at an environmental center. Then, to my surprise, he launched into a creditable lecture on logging practices. “Come over here,” he said, and I followed him to the edge of a construction pit, where shallow Douglas-fir roots poked through the soil profile. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the thin layers of humus and topsoil. “It’s no wonder the forests don’t grow back the way they used to, when you see what logging does to the soil.”
He expanded on what he saw as poor forest management and the cupidity of the giant timber companies. Maybe sixteen, with longish dark hair and single-minded eyes as sharp as a Douglas squirrel’s, Josh was precociously articulate, and his attitudes about the woods were remarkable for a country lad. He was a better talker than a listener, but he did listen too. I had a hunch we’d meet and converse again. I planned to loop back to the campground by a different route, so I took my leave.
I walked to the Cispus River’s confluence with Yellowjacket Creek and crossed, holding my trousers and sandals overhead. Picking my way over stones, logs, and glacial sand, I reached the woods. By my map I had to be very close to the road and Yellowjacket Ponds; but as I battled what Josh called “viney maple,” thistle, dewberry, and stinging nettle, I thought I’d never get to the edge. In the middle of the thicket I stumbled onto an enormous cedar stump. A great two-chambered hollow, it would make a fine bear den.
In The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth, or Man? Peter Byrne says that the most common objection he hears to the existence of the animal is that there is simply no place left for it to hide. Yet here I was a few yards from a state highway, near a campground, a picnic site, and the old CCC camp-turned-ecocenter, in a spot where a woolly mammoth could quite handily hide out for a week. And who alive had ever seen this stump but the man who last logged around it? In his chapter “No Place to Hide,” Byrne contends that there are lots of places to hide. As Edward Cronin wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, “The irregular topography would . . . help conceal a large primate. In the best monster tradition, [it] could disappear among the numerous gullies, canyons, cliffs, rock shelters, and varied slopes. A two-dimensional map tends to disguise the enormous surface area that exists in the three-dimensional terrain . . . The slopes fold back and forth upon themselves to include a prodigious amount of land.” Cronin was writing about the Himalaya and Yeti, but he might just as well have been speaking of Bigfoot in the Dark Divid
e. People simply have no concept of the complexity of the countryside.
Josh agrees. I ran into him again a little later on a forest road leading down to the closed bridge opposite the campground. He was excited, having come from a very old fire circle he’d recently found. His father, Bruce, judged from the stratigraphy that the charcoal predated the latest ash eruption of Mount Rainier, some eight thousand years ago. I asked Josh what he thought about Bigfoot. He said he believed in it outright.
“How many spotted owls do people see?” he asked, rhetorically but relevantly. Josh has his own theory about the decline of the celebrated northern spotted owl. He believes that Douglas squirrels increase with second-growth forest and that they drive the owls from their nests. “But the owls survive in there,” he said, nodding toward a substantial chunk of old-growth forest behind us. “And so does Bigfoot.”
Josh told me that a local hermit he knows shared that opinion, based on a lifetime in the backwoods. He was not at all sure that the hermit would talk with me or that he could even be found. The man turned up now and again for a hot meal or when he had a story to tell. He believes that as the old trees go, so goes Bigfoot, though a few of each are still around.
I completed my loop walk across the old, goat-pellet–paved bridge. At the other end I passed the goats. I got back to camp ten minutes before Thea arrived from the lowlands with small, lean steaks, home-grown kale, and a good zinfandel, all welcome after trail food. I related my experiences and my new plan. Before bed we walked to the bridge to watch the river by moonlight. Leaning against the cables, we listened for night noises.
Suddenly, out of the river mist loomed the Horned One—the greatest of all the Cispus River billies. With a beard as long as his wicked horns, weird yellow eyes luminous in the moonglow, and a randy reek, he might as well have been the arch-satyr himself. There, on Pan’s Bridge, I crossed for a shimmering second that sheerest of membranes between the insubstantial and the solid.
Now, across the span of months and miles, I hear his bleat, and it sounds as if he’s saying, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .”
And who am I to argue?
6
Of Ouzels and Old Growth
Trees are guardians of the Earth, and we are the guardians of trees. We rely on what we know of them, how well we see their dominion over the planet. They spin our breath into being, giving it in little slips. They scatter shale and literally hold the mountains together with their roots.
—Kim R. Stafford, Entering the Grove
The same satyrs of September that flitted below Tower Rock when I’d come down from Juniper Ridge were on the wing in Dryad. Unexpectedly reunited, Thea and I spent a day at Brenda Boardman’s cabin on the Chehalis River. Brenda, Thea, and their friend Lucy Suzuki relaxed and shared the harvest sun while I worked out the next stage of the journey. Dryad: the evocative name, the whim of a railroad official in 1890, might have been drawn from the image of the three women in the rising morning mist as they walked the long-grass meadow among the waking wood nymphs and ringlets. This was pleasant, but I had to get back up into the hills before comfort set in and the edge wore off the alpine scent. After a brief regroup and recoup at our own farmstead across the Willapa Hills, I went back to the Cascades.
When I returned to the Dark Divide I took my car, but I did not leave my boots behind. I had a new plan. Instead of making a single hike across the forest on footpaths and game trails, I would work laterally, both driving and walking. Since the region had already been sliced and diced by the Forest Service and logging companies, I might as well take advantage of the ways laid open by the process. Some would call me hypocritical for falling in with a pattern I had criticized. But as I see it, my use of the roads is simply a partial payback for the invasion of the wilderness.
In forestry school many years ago I took part in a wilderness policy seminar. The instructor, a noted researcher in public attitudes toward wildlands, administered a sort of test of the students’ preferences in outdoor recreation. One of the questions asked whether we enjoyed driving small dirt roads in the hills. Prowling back roads has always been a pleasure of mine, so of course I wrote yes. That one answer resulted in my being rated as a “weak wildernist”—a designation I, as a committed advocate for wilderness and parkland, hotly resented. I wish the roads hadn’t been built. Without them I would have covered less ground, but I’d have seen it more thoroughly. Since the roads were there, I saw no reason to ignore them.
I would still walk fragments of the former forest but also drive the small and larger roads by day and by night. In this manner I would experience a broader slice of the land. I would try to make up for the loss of solitude and self-reliance on my longer hikes. As it turned out, some of the roads stretched my resources as fully as any of the trails.
Since Thea and I were to have met where Quartz Creek comes out of the Dark Divide to join the Lewis River, I decided to make that my point of reentry. On a clear, warm day I took off at noon with Bill Monroe and Hank Williams on the radio. At Cougar I bought coffee from a seasoned waitress whose look told me what she thought of bird watchers or whatever I was. The café was full of mountain lion art and landscapes painted on crosscut saws. Polaroid portraits papered the door—on one side, drivers and their tractor-trailer rigs stacked with old growth; on the other, hunters hoisting trophies of bucks and bull elk. I did not bring up Bigfoot.
The next morning, in a campsite at Lower Lewis River Falls, I awakened not to the sound of water but to logging helicopters. After breakfast I hiked to nearby Middle Falls, where the sound was the river’s. Water ouzels danced on the rim of the broad water slide. These slate-gray relatives of wrens, also known as dippers, are synonymous with pure mountain waters. As I watched, one dipper repeatedly plunged its head into the oncoming water, making great fountains over its head and back at metronomic intervals. Another, closest to me at fifty feet, picked and stabbed more gingerly in shallower water, pointing downstream as often as up. Paler, less sure, slip-sliding down, it was likely young and inexperienced. A third worked upstream at the base of a satellite cascade some fifty feet across and four feet high. It dove in, bobbed, swam, flew underwater, and shot over runnels and little flumes repeatedly. I wondered if dippers ever rode, or got washed, over the big fall. The lead-pellet birds maintained their individual behaviors for the quarter hour I watched. The only constant trait was their perpetual dipping.
Tatterdemalion maples and lacy cedars overhung the falls, dripping gold and lichen, as alder leaves peppered the water and rock. Water ran white over churns, then brown over shallow stone before plunging green into the deeps between. What a place to swim! But the day was too cool. I picked red huckleberries—watery and tart—just below the dippers’ run. A mountain biker dressed in turquoise spandex rolled by on the Lewis River Trail as I climbed back toward my camp.
This place, with its helicopters and bikes, is not very wild until you get a few feet into the forest across the river or into the night. But it is idyllic. I could be a faun, male cousin of the dryads of the Chehalis to the west. In dappled sun on the edge of old growth, I had my lunch of kipper snacks where Quartz Creek crosses Forest Road No. 90. Here a dipper worked the quiet water in yet another mode. A kingfisher rattled like my cursor running along a line, and a lazy Lorquin’s admiral floated overhead. Kinglets wittered in small firs. My original plan had called for arriving upstream on foot, but I was here just the same.
One advantage of enlarging my scope was that I’d be able to walk in a variety of woodland leftovers, which are widely scattered and cost a lot of prowling to find. To have any hope of penetrating the twinned tangles of the old-growth debate and the Bigfoot puzzle, one must spend more than an afternoon’s saunter in the woods, and in more woods than one. For the facts of these matters grow out of the very mat of moss and needle and fern that cushion the feet of those who go forth to seek them. They do not spring solely from t
rial records, newspaper accounts, or barroom hearsay; those who seek the truth in such sources alone are doomed to secondhand conclusions and irresolution of the muddiest sort.
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Quartz Creek chuckled under dappled sun, oblivious to the droning helicopters. The place reminded me of Bluff Creek in California, site of the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. Here was another place where hairy giants were said to walk among the trees and rocks and waters. Near the trailhead a rustic birdhouse fashioned of cedar slabs topped a signpost from the forties. Vanilla leaf and false Solomon’s seal wove the groundcover; lady fern sent crepe streamers in from the sides. Hemlock needles showed through the broad, backlit leaves of devil’s club. Thick, mossy cedar planks bridged each rivulet of limpid spring water, green with the reflection of vine maples. Up a little way the stream spread out over dipped strata into red whorls of iron oxides, terraced and hued like the turkeytail fungi spackling the path. Already I was among big trees in a diverse conifer forest with most of the middle-elevation species—true firs, Douglas firs, hemlocks, cedars. It was the time of shedding for the hardwoods; their leaves took tortuous passages down runnels, became beached, refloated, and traveled on.
Finding the trail washed out below a clear-cut, I realized how narrow was this envelope of old growth. Platinum Creek, farther on, had been scoured and piled with overburden and slash from another clear-cut upstream. Steeply up the other side, pipsissewa and twinflower wove the soil before the trail plunged right into the clear-cut that had caused the problems below. The young Douglas fir reclaiming the space might someday brace the soil against the storms and allow Platinum Creek to run metallic-clear again.
The trail climbed through middling timber, and far below Quartz Creek ran liquid crystal. Stretching up the opposite side of the canyon, maybe a thousand feet from creek to ridge, the big trees masked a clear-cut over the top. The wooded band narrowed on my side. Is this a big corridor? Compared to what? Like every other fragment, it looks great in the context of the shaven whole, but it’s just a patch on the pelage of the former forest. At least from here on the creek was mostly free of logging all the way to its headwaters high in the Dark Divide.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 7