by John Zada
Meanwhile, in the Bella Coola valley, people traveling along the two-lane highway reported large humanlike forms crossing the road in their headlights at night. The gargantuan, lumbering figures were said to be of such enormous stature that they stepped across the highway in just three strides before melting into the blackness. Large, humanlike tracks, some measuring up to eighteen inches in length and pressed deep into the earth, appeared along the bushy byways between unfenced homes in two indigenous neighborhoods. These were only a few of the stories.
By the time I met Clark, I was awash in these tales. I had done little of the outdoor adventuring planned for my travel story and was instead obsessively following a trail of yarns, strangely synchronized as if they’d been deliberately laid out for me.
As a child I had been obsessed by stories about Bigfoot. I grew up in the 1970s and early ‘80s, a time when Sasquatch had become a pop-culture icon after a string of movies and television shows exploited the public’s apparent fascination with the creature. I became literate by reading some of the first books published on the subject. For years the creatures, which I had come to believe in wholeheartedly, even appeared to me in my dreams at night. They were otherworldly, existing far beyond the pale, yet fit perfectly into the fabric of my mental universe.
I mostly grew out of this obsession, but part of it remained with me. Now, through no will or decision of my own, my old interest had resurfaced—like an amnesiac’s memory returning. But now, the faded old yarns printed in dusty library books were turning into real-life experiences shared trustingly with me—a writer and journalist—by the people who lived and breathed them. I felt compelled to investigate and make sense of this mystery, which, to me, had languished in inexplicability for far too long. Maybe I could discover something that others had not found. When Clark told me his story and offered to take me to the very spot he’d been fearfully avoiding for three decades, I couldn’t say no.
While I stand on the banks of the Bella Coola, the rain lets up before beating down again, this time with the feel and ferocity of sleet. Clark wades waist-deep into the river to fetch our aluminum rowboat, which has been picked up by the rising tide and dragged downstream. When he returns, we climb in and push off, hitching a ride on the swift current. Clark rows as I bail out rainwater from the bottom using an empty laundry detergent container with its top sawed off. A young bald eagle cuts a path directly over us, its wing flaps reverberating in the air. The bird lands atop a rotting tree stump sticking out of the inundated estuary. I turn my gaze to take in the valley and the mountains that line it. I have not left yet, but the desire to return to the Great Bear begins to take hold of me.
The river current slows as fresh water and salt water collide. Clark leans over the side of the boat, reaches down into the water, and pulls out a large eagle feather. He holds it close, admiring it, before handing it to me with a satisfied grin.
As we drift into the head of the inlet with sights set on the distant shore, a firm resolve takes hold of me.
I start making plans for my return.
2
THE STRANGEST THING
It’s like you walking down a back alley and bumping into a Frankenstein monster. Everybody knows there’s no such thing, but you’ve just seen him.
—Bigfoot eyewitness in John Green’s
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us
Several months after my adventure with Clark, I’m back in the bosom of the West, speeding in a rental car along the tree-lined shores of Vancouver Island. I’m heading for the town of Port Hardy—an air and sea hub linking to the remote wilderness communities and logging camps strung along British Columbia’s rugged coast. Tucked into my passport, on the seat beside me, is a plane ticket to Bella Bella, where I will kick off a maritime journey taking me through towns and villages with roots going as far back as the celebrated civilizations of antiquity.
The Great Bear Rainforest occupies the upper two-thirds of British Columbia’s long, sprawling coast. It is a region tangled with inlets, passes, and islands that add up to some thirty thousand miles of shoreline—a length greater than the circumference of the earth. Nodes of human habitation are few and far between. I’m taking the summer and early fall to visit as much of the area as I can without the benefit of my own boat. The general plan is to begin my trip in island-bound Bella Bella on the “outside coast” and hopscotch my way between communities to Bella Coola on the mainland, where I ended my previous trip. Floatplanes, ferryboats, and whatever other flotation devices I can hire or commandeer will serve as transport in a place whose fundamental characteristic is its mind-boggling profusion of trees and water.
As I drive along the edges of forest on Vancouver Island, I get a taste of the coastal wilderness I’ll fully experience in the Great Bear. But pull back these tree-lined facades, and you’ll be faced with the shocking reality of the island today: a preponderance of clear-cuts. Vancouver Island’s productive old-growth wilderness has been logged to the brink of extinction. Ugly bare patches cover huge swaths of the island. The Great Bear Rainforest, though having suffered some deforestation, has remained comparatively inviolate. The uniformity of its intact areas, seen from the air, is as astonishing a sight as the rapacious clear-cutting on Vancouver Island.
In the early 1990s, plans by lumber companies in British Columbia to ramp up their operations on the central and north coast triggered a response from environmentalists tantamount to a small crusade. A group of battle-hardened activists, emboldened by fresh victories against logging companies on Vancouver Island, drew up new battle lines. To galvanize global support for their fight, they coined an emotive epithet for the little-known stretch of coastline they were trying to protect: the Great Bear Rainforest. For years this mostly blank area on maps had been known as the “Mid and North Coast Timber Supply Area”—phrasing that reflected the view by outsiders that the area was just an economic commodity. The new name, inspired by the region’s high population of grizzlies, evoked a kind of mythos. And it gave activists an edge.
Years of battles ensued, culminating in a deal in 2006. Environmentalists, industry, government, and First Nations signed an agreement that, in actuality, protected one-fifth of the ecologically fragile Great Bear forest. A subsequent agreement a decade later that made headlines around the world shored up that accord. The 2016 Great Bear Rainforest agreement provided various levels of protection across 85 percent of the region. That deal, which still allows for tourism, old-growth logging, and other industrial activities, was celebrated in the media as a grand compromise: a framework for sustainable development and a model for the resolution of other land-use conflicts.* However, the two agreements did nothing to address an issue whose stakes, residents assert, dwarf those tied to logging.
Since around the time of the first Great Bear agreement, plans have been set in motion by Canadian fossil-fuel companies to build a number of pipelines and seaport terminals on the north coast. There, liquefied natural gas (LNG), extracted by fracking, and diluted bitumen—a thick, watered-down crude mined in the infamous tar sands of Alberta—would be loaded onto supertankers for the long journey across the Pacific to energy-hungry markets in East Asia. For coastal residents, pipelines and tankers are a peril, the ultimate threat. The fear is that any of those ships, transiting the rough, narrow channels of the Great Bear region and the notoriously tumultuous waters beyond it, could get into an accident, resulting in a spill from which a widely affected area might never fully recover.
It is into this wild and immaculate landscape, marred by the gathering storm clouds of human discord, that my journey in search of the Sasquatch is taking me. As I drive along the edge of the forest, past patch after patch of enormous clear-cut, it becomes obvious just how destructive unmitigated capitalism can be. For many, the Great Bear area represents a frontier territory, entirely up for grabs, whose sole, underlying, purpose is to provide salable resources and incomprehensible wealth for a select few.
Running up against the avarice of B
ig Oil is the iron will of residents. Their determination is reflected in a Heiltsuk First Nation art installation on display at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver: a cedar mask depicting the supernatural sea creature Yagis. The round and slightly hook-nosed face, draped in a mane of horsehair, stares in wide-eyed, inconsolable rage. In its jaws, about to be crushed, is a plastic model of a supertanker. The ship sits tilted and moribund, like a salmon trapped in the fangs of a bear. The installation comes across as a harbinger and prophecy, as it rests amid the wealth of indigenous artifacts looted in the same impulse of greed about which it forewarns.
I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Though leafy and spacious, my neighborhood was a largely dull and uninspiring place. Like many big city suburbs, mine was a monument to mediocrity, a lazy arranging of things whose hallmarks are almost always an affront to creativity: from the fanatical separation of commercial and residential life to car-centric dictates on movement to the sprawling rows of insular cookie-cutter castles.
There was one redeeming quality, however, that mitigated the ennui felt across our residential tundra: a wooded ravine through which a creek ran. It has become a vogue for suburban developers building on former woodlands to leave small patches of token forest as decoration to help lure potential home buyers. Our wood was considerably more vast, one that the plastic surgeons of sprawl, either in their wisdom or out of neglect, had not entirely neutered. The ravine was part of a series of interconnected greenbelts that extended from the city and meandered north through the nascent suburbs and into the outlying fringes where forests mingled with farmland. Its mystery was enhanced by rumors, related by other kids, that it linked to some larger, deeper wilderness.
This thicket, comprising maples, spruces, ashes, and elms, turned out to be a salvation. It offered us adventures and experiences—unmitigated by parental control—that broadened our minds: a feeling of danger and risk, and the sense of achievement that comes with the successful transgression of limits. Some of those dangers were far-fetched, like the murderous recluses who were rumored to live there, hidden among the trees. Others were considerably more real, the dangers implicit in nature, evidenced in a large eastern white pine that stood in a clearing. It had been struck by lightning, its hollowed-out trunk roasted char black. The tree, which somehow clung to life, stood as a warning to interlopers. Its message: humans don’t rule here. Our parents understood this better than we did. But what they didn’t know was that their own exaggerated account of rabid creatures, homicidal hermits, and malign shadows upped the ante of excitement for us. It made the place doubly seductive.
So we ventured there, going on micro-adventures, alone or in small groups. We roved, sifted, and explored. Built fires. Climbed trees. Built forts. Observed wildlife. Lounged in the tall weeds. Got into fistfights. Dabbled in the forbidden.
We stretched ourselves, relishing a rare sense of privacy and control.
Each incursion into that surviving woodland was a journey to a kind of underworld from which we emerged reborn, brimming with new knowledge. What these forest experiences taught me early on was that learning and adventure were inextricable, and that a dose of discomfort and risk was an essential part of that formula. It was an approach to learning that stands in contrast to the practices of our safety-obsessed, overstructured education system, with its regimented activities and endless sitting at desks.
Something else happened in this period that became apparent only later: the forest made me one of its own, in the same way it does to those growing up or living in real wilderness regions. Its essence was injected into my blood, its pattern imprinted on my brain. It didn’t matter that it was a pruned pseudo-forest existing in a choke hold of suburban sprawl. The ravine was a self-contained extension of all wilderness areas—a spark from the fire of grander wilds. Because of that, my early bush experience seeded a growing desire in the years ahead to find a vaster woodland, the quintessential forest—one that retained some vestige of its original bounty and power. Nature as it once was, unknown to any memory.
That inner impulse didn’t fully crystallize until later. It was to be a long and circuitous road that led to that forest, one made more mysterious and poignant by tales of savage giants.
Wild, bedraggled humanoids have been reported in hinterland regions around the world for centuries. In remote and mountainous corners of the Caucasus, central Asia, China, and Siberia, traditions abound describing unruly bipeds living on the tattered edges of civilization. The Abominable Snowman, or Yeti, of the Himalayas is the best known of these manifold Asian humanoids.*
North America too has its far-flung, otherworldly realms, and from them come stories of similar creatures, supersize and even more bestial than many of their Asian counterparts. Travelers and explorers, pushing west along the frontier in the 1800s, reported encounters with rogue beings they described as “wild men.” As settlers began populating the ever more rugged regions of the far west, incidents involving “skookums,” “evil genies,” “hairy men,” “bush Indians,” “apes,” and “forest devils” proliferated by word of mouth and in the early North American press. Indigenous residents, when confronted with these accounts, generally laughed or shrugged their shoulders. Nothing new, they informed the settlers. Not only were these wild people known to them and their ancestors, there was even a time before the arrival of the white man when they had had dealings with them.
Had the reports petered out, all might have been attributed to a mix of colorful storytelling and sensational journalism. But the reports kept coming in. By the early twentieth century, a basic profile of these creatures had taken shape among those who believed in their existence: they were apelike, often of gigantic stature, and covered in hair, and on occasion left behind large, deep footprints. Even US president Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the creatures in his 1892 book The Wilderness Hunter. He described a story he’d heard about a woodsman who, reputedly, had been killed by one of the animals. Stories like these introduced more and more people to the creatures.
One big tale appeared in the press in 1929. That year, John Burns, a teacher living on the Chehalis Indian Reserve near Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, wrote an article for Maclean’s magazine about a race of forest giants called “Sasquatch” that had been terrorizing people in the area. “Sasquatch” was a mispronunciation of the word Sasq’ets, meaning “wild man” in a local dialect of Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language. Burns had been tipped off about the creatures by a British-born teacher and anthropologist also living in the vicinity. No sooner had he started looking into the sightings than he became hooked. Burns began to document reports obsessively, becoming the world’s first known Sasquatch researcher.
“I was startled to see what I took at first to be a huge bear crouched upon a boulder twenty or thirty feet away,” said one eyewitness Burns quoted in the Maclean’s article. “I raised my rifle to shoot it, but, as I did, the creature stood up and let out a piercing yell. It was a man—a giant no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered with hair. He was in a rage and jumped from the boulder to the ground. I fled, but not before I felt his breath upon my cheek.”
For the next few decades, Burns would churn out dozens more articles about the creatures, which he wholeheartedly believed in and whose protection he later advocated for—but which he never once saw. His dispatches alerted readers far and wide to the alleged animals and gave them a name that would stick.
But not until almost thirty years later, in 1958, would the subject blow wide open. Inspired by the sensationalized reports of the Abominable Snowman in Nepal a few years earlier, the growing media machine of postwar America jumped on a series of similar stories coming out of a small town in northern California. A bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew came forward with plaster-of-Paris casts of gigantic footprints found on a logging-road construction site near the town of Bluff Creek. Someone—or something—had been leaving enormous humanlike tracks with m
onstrous strides in the dirt around the work site. The same culprit had also tossed around large machinery and equipment left overnight at the location. When the incidents caused several of his colleagues to walk away from the job, a fed-up and frightened Jerry Crew took his sixteen-inch casts to the media. The local newspaper editor used in his headline the catchy name the road builders gave the perpetrator of the tracks: Bigfoot. “An insouciant turn of phrase by construction workers had given birth to a phenomenon,” writes Brian Regal, the author of a book about Sasquatch researchers.1 The story was the gunshot that signaled the start of a race to find what would become a new holy grail of exploration.
Since then reports of the creature—and the efforts to capture and study it—have grown exponentially, culminating in what is now a de facto field of study. Successive generations of Sasquatch enthusiasts, from amateur sleuths to hunters, scientists, journalists, and explorers, have all tried their hand at solving this modern-day riddle of the Sphinx. In addition to organizing countless expeditions, this legion has cast thousands of tracks, generated a deluge of blurred images and video, recorded numerous cries in the night, collected hair and scat samples, run DNA tests, appeared in hundreds of podcasts and radio and TV programs, written numerous books, held conferences, and compiled data banks listing many thousands of reports from all across the United States and Canada.