by John Zada
And not just one. There were several large humanoid footprints pressed deep into the mud on the side of the trail. Unable to do anything at the moment, Bindernagel and his wife returned to the area later to cast the tracks in plaster of Paris.
It was an eerily fortuitous moment that rekindled Bindernagel’s interest with a fury. Many researchers had spent their entire lives without themselves ever seeing a Sasquatch or coming across tracks. But here the beast had all but danced across his path, as if it were taunting him. Not only were the prints in very good condition, but Joan, who had at best been lukewarm toward her husband’s obsession, was also there to see them for herself. It was the vindication that Bindernagel so desperately sought.
He decided on the spot to revive his research; only this time, there would be no half measures. He would come fully out of the closet with his interest, becoming a sort of “Bigfoot biologist.”
Ten years later, Bindernagel published his first book on the subject: North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch. In it, he argued that Bigfoots were an unclassified species of ape that shared physical features and nearly identical behaviors with other primates in the animal kingdom, such as mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Reports of Sasquatches vocalizing, throwing objects, emitting rancid odors, bluff charging, building nests, and scavenging and foraging are all part of the primate repertoire. For Bindernagel they were, in aggregate, too much to be coincidence.
“I am now satisfied with the available evidence for the existence of the Sasquatch in North America,” he writes in the book’s opening. “My view is that not only do we have sufficient evidence to treat the Sasquatch as a bona fide member of North America’s spectrum of large mammals, but that we already know a great deal about its biology and ecology.”2
Bindernagel broke ranks with his colleagues not only by declaring the animal extant but also by circumventing the normal avenues of peer review. It was an act of dissent that effectively made him a heretic. But because he wasn’t a big-name scientist, few people paid him any attention. The book, which was issued by a small British Columbian press, and which faced the usual uphill battles to garner publicity, didn’t reach a wide enough audience. It fell on mostly deaf ears.* Without a carcass or physical specimen, few of his colleagues would take the animal seriously enough to stake their reputations on it, even with Bindernagel’s erudite arguments.
Not even a second book, published in 2010 and lambasting the scientific establishment for its closed-mindedness, would stir debate in a community that Bindernagel described as being “asleep at the wheel.” In The Discovery of the Sasquatch, a philosophical manifesto seven years in the making, Bindernagel threw everything he had at the scientific establishment. He argued that in spite of the lack of formal recognition by science, the Sasquatch had, nonetheless, already been “discovered.” It was a de facto discovery, he insisted, made first by indigenous people and later by colonists and everyone else who followed. It just wasn’t officially sanctioned. He went on to list all the mental impediments and misconceptions that prevented science from seeing what he and others had so easily recognized.
“The proposition put forward here,” Bindernagel writes, “is that the acquisition of a sasquatch specimen will merely be additional corroboration of a discovery which can already be claimed on the basis of published testimonial evidence, evidence which has been corroborated by the archived physical evidence of tracks.”3
But like his first book, The Discovery of the Sasquatch landed with a thud.
Now in the grip of disillusionment, and of his growing sense of mortality, Bindernagel is spending most of his time trying to make available every shred of his findings for when he is no longer alive, by way of the Internet. He says the upsurge in popular interest in the subject, with self-published books, reality-TV shows, and websites, largely by nonscientists, threatens to eclipse his lifework. His fear of being forgotten, postmortem, weighs on him.
“I was recently with a younger researcher from Alberta who didn’t even know who John Green was!” he says. “Imagine that—John Green! This is the guy who literally started Sasquatch studies. I mean, gee whiz, if a guy like Green’s already being forgotten, what’s gonna happen to the rest of us?”
Tomorrow I leave for the Great Bear Rainforest, and in the time left with my host, I want to poke and prod at his arguments a bit more. I suggest to Bindernagel that we abandon his leafy Courtenay subdivision in favor of a place more connected to his work—a place with a bit of an edge and some Sasquatch history. We hop into his car and head to a local haunt known as Medicine Bowls, a stretch of rapids and waterfalls on the Browns River, located ten miles from town.
Medicine Bowls, Bindernagel tells me, is on the edge of a subalpine region called the Forbidden Plateau. The name for the area was coined after an incident in the late 1800s in which three dozen women and children of the K’ómoks First Nation mysteriously vanished from a makeshift camp while the men were on a war raid. No trace of them was ever found. Some in the tribe claimed that they were abducted by a race of alpine giants believed to inhabit the region.
We leave the open fields and thin patches of wood at the edge of town and drive into an ever-thicker coniferous forest. Bindernagel’s demeanor changes. He is suddenly excited, gesturing with flitting, birdlike movements at areas where sightings of the creatures occurred in the past.
“A bunch of reports came in from here,” he says, with a big grin, “and now I’m getting cameras set up in the area. It’s a promising spot, but nothing like where you’re going tomorrow on the central coast.”
We turn onto a bumpy dirt road beneath a canopy of large cedars and continue to a clearing at its far end. We park the car and bushwhack down a hill until we reach the moss-covered banks of the Browns River, which is a mostly dry gash of rock careening through majestic timber. There has been no rain on the British Columbia coast for weeks, but snowmelt from the high peaks of the Vancouver Island Ranges keeps the river at a trickle.
As we scramble down the high banks, Bindernagel warns me that the gully drops precipitously in parts up ahead, creating treacherous whirlpools when the river is higher.
“I got a report some years back of a Sasquatch standing up there beside those trees, looking down at a group of people,” he says, pointing at a tree-lined cliff.
“It wouldn’t be that hard,” I reply, “for a man in a fur suit to get up there and scare people down below.”
Whatever the reality of Bigfoot, hoaxing is an undeniable part of the Sasquatch phenomenon. Shortly before my trip, a forty-four-year-old man, wearing a military-style ghillie camouflage suit, was run over by two cars and killed while crossing a highway in Montana. The man, it turned out, was impersonating a Sasquatch in a botched practical joke meant to frighten people.
“Hoaxing is taken as an explanation for all reports because it’s considered more plausible than a hidden animal,” Bindernagel fires back.
“But it does seem much more plausible an explanation.”
“Not when you know the facts,” he says. “These hoaxes would have to have been happening for centuries among the indigenous people before the Europeans arrived. And today they’d have to occur in the most unlikely places and times. During downpours, in the middle of the night, in places where there are hardly any people. Places you can only get to by floatplanes. Explanations of hoaxing are sometimes more far-fetched than explanations of a Sasquatch!”
By questioning Bindernagel, I feel myself becoming the personification of the skeptical establishment and doubtful general public. And that emboldens him. He is no longer addressing me but speaking to the rest of the world.
“When people see a Sasquatch walking,” he says, imitating a Bigfoot stride, “they realize they are not looking at a human in a fur suit. They see huge size and displays of extraordinary strength. They see great speed across the landscape. They’re also seeing fluidity and muscles rippling. People say, ‘This couldn’t just be a human in a fur suit.’“
> “Yes, but how can any animal be so elusive as to completely avoid physical capture?” I say, shifting to what I take to be firmer ground. “Surely that must mystify you.”
Bindernagel shakes his head.
“No?” I say.
“The animal’s just hard to see. If you read about Jane Goodall in the early days with chimpanzees, or Birute Galdikas with orangutans, you’d understand that these primatologists didn’t just start observing chimps and orangs in the wild. They heard noises. And when the researchers approached them, the animals ran off. They didn’t get good views of these animals until after months of following them and getting them partly habituated. It’s the same with the Sasquatch.”
“But some researchers have been trying to habituate Sasquatches for years. And there’s still no firm proof.”
Bindernagel shrugs. “I can’t speak for everyone’s methods. These are very smart animals.”
The biologist’s conviction is unshakable. He has answers for everything and speaks as if reading from a memorized script. I decide to launch a bunker buster to pierce through his scholarly facade.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ve wasted your life?”
Bindernagel’s face drops. It’s a punch below the belt, and I regret asking the question. His calm and composure begin to break down.
“Deep down my work is about helping people who are mentally distressed by what they’ve seen. It’s about being able to say to them, ‘I understand your distress.’ In the meantime, yes, it’s difficult. And my wife, Joan, has suffered even more than I have.”
I refrain from responding, wanting neither to set him off nor to concede. But when his last answer fails to elicit any acknowledgment from me, the floodgates open.
“Gee whiz, John! Thousands of people are seeing this animal—and nobody wants to talk about it! All I’m saying is, there’s a conservative way to explain it: this simply is an upright great ape. Great apes exist on the planet!”
Later, as we drive along the gravel road that leads out of the forest, a red pickup truck emerges in the distance. Bindernagel, who has been quiet, pulls his vehicle to the right to make room for the other to pass. The truck creaks to a stop beside us. The driver, who is rolling down his window, is a young man in his late twenties. Sitting beside him is a blond woman of about the same age.
Bindernagel, coincidentally, knows him—a family friend named Carl. And for several minutes a conversation ensues.
“I’m still doing my Sasquatch research,” Bindernagel says at one point, changing the subject with a smile. “I’ve got trail cameras set up all around here. I’m getting some great wildlife shots.”
Carl and his girlfriend stiffen at the mention of the creature and glance at each other. “It’s funny you mention that,” Carl says. “Just the other day, a guy I know told me he saw a Sasquatch on Sonora Island last winter.”
Bindernagel’s jaw drops. His eyes nearly jump out of their sockets. “Oh, my goodness!” he growls, turning to me in amazement, his face contorted with gladness. “Well, go ahead, Carl! Do tell, do tell.”
“My friend was doing construction work alone outside at the wilderness resort there. At one point he glanced to his side and saw a huge hairy thing on two legs walking between him and a cement truck. My friend said it was as tall as the roof of the truck. The creature then looked at him and gave him a dirty look before making a beeline into the bush.”
I watch Bindernagel with fascination as he reacts to this serendipitous, though secondhand, report. He’s nearly beside himself with euphoria and breaks into a flurry of questions that are met by an equal number of shrugged shoulders and shaking heads.
“Dunno,” Carl says, over and over again. “All he said was that he never believed in Bigfoot before, but now he was convinced.”
Before driving off, Carl bids adieu to Bindernagel with a friendly smile, saying, “Well, I hope you find it.”
When I look at Bindernagel moments later, I see his mood has soured. His face shows a mixture of expired elation, irony, and annoyance—all melded into one unsettling look that I can’t decipher.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Well, I hope you find it,“ Bindernagel says mockingly, enunciating each word as if he’d been slighted. “See what I mean? People have no idea.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The Sasquatch—it’s already been found!” he says, with a resentful, drawn-out sigh. “One day the vindication will come.”
Bindernagel fixes his gaze on the road, shakes his head, and changes the subject, pointing out another promising location for a camera trap.
* Krantz showed his dermal-ridged tracks to fingerprint experts around the world—including those in law enforcement, who were much intrigued by them. One renowned fingerprint guru, John Berry, who was also the editor of the fingerprint community’s journal, Fingerprint Whorld, told Krantz that Scotland Yard had concluded the prints were “probably real.” See Regal, Brian, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 138.
* Bindernagel mailed copies of the book to the heads of all state and provincial wildlife units in North America, only to receive just one lackluster letter of thanks.
PART II
4
BELLA BELLA
(WAGLISLA)
They believe in a race of giants, which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us. This mountain is covered with perpetual snow. They inhabit the snow peaks. They hunt and do all their work at night. They are men stealers. They come to the people’s lodges at night when the people are asleep and take them and put them under their skins and to their place of abode without even waking. Their track is a foot and a half long. They steal salmon from Indian nets and eat them raw as the bears do. If the people are awake, they always know when they are coming very near by their strong smell that is most intolerable. It is not uncommon for them to come in the night and give three whistles and then the stones will begin to hit their houses.
—Diary of Elkanah Walker, a missionary among the
Spokane people of the Pacific Northwest, 1840
The flight from Port Hardy, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, to Bella Bella is short, taking just over forty minutes. But the distance covered feels immeasurable. Within moments we soar over the blue abyss of the Pacific, crossing some invisible boundary separating humanity’s neat grids from the sprawling folds and rising humps of a free-flowing hinterland. We skip over Labouchere Channel, banking north across the thickly carpeted mainland coast and the islands that huddle around it like pottery shards. Our small twin-engine turboprop flies low, revealing the landscape in the clearest detail. Long stretches of yellow sandy beach, clusters of rocks foaming with breakers, and stands of old growth—all breathtakingly intact—roll past in succession. Occasionally, fjords—cliff-lined coastal inlets of the sea—appear, snaking eastward, before vanishing into distant scrums of mountains.
This wilderness in my sights is a powerful spectacle, amplified, I suspect, by my own predispositions and experiences. I’ve spent much time living and working in the Middle East, with its austere, bone-dry deserts, which I’ve not only become accustomed to but also accepted—as a child of Arab parents—as part of my genetic makeup. The Great Bear Rainforest is the antithesis of that barren topography. Placing images of the two regions side by side, you would be hard-pressed to find a more stark contrast. Because it is so wonderfully different from everything I’m used to, the Edenic lushness below resonates deeply with me.
We dip bumpily into fingers of low-lying cloud, emerging high above gnarled, tangled treetops in miniature. Soon a road appears, then a cluster of homes. A water reservoir and a marina finally hurtle by as the plane sinks into an outlying, tinder-dry bog jungle, meeting its shadow on a solitary strip of pavement.
When I returned to Toronto after my first trip to the area and tried to describe the Great Bear Rainforest—an environment so dynamic, so complex, and so possess
ed of intelligence that to be in it is to be subsumed into a living, breathing thing—I got mostly blank stares and perfunctory nods from my listeners. For most people, there was no comparable point of reference.
Maps, though useful for navigation, are crude approximations of reality, visual guides to only one aspect of spatial and temporal experience. To read a description of the Great Bear Rainforest as a wilderness extending 250 miles along British Columbia’s central and north coast, or to see it delineated on a map, may give some vague impression of its dimensions. But it won’t convey the area’s topography, its density of foliage, and its internal immensity. Even a flight over the region fails to reveal its hierarchal complexity. The Great Bear’s matrix of lakes, rivers, valleys, islands, mountains, and seemingly endless tracts of tangled forest is a universe unto itself. If longevity, sustenance, and the ability to swim in numbingly cold water weren’t an issue, a human could enter that wilderness and conceivably ramble through it forever. A winding trajectory would result in space turning in on itself, creating a kind of infinity for the wanderer.
The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rain forest in the world—one so rich and prolific that it supports more organic matter per square meter than any other place on the planet. Receiving as much as two hundred inches of rainfall a year, its most productive areas generate up to four times the biomass (the total quantity or weight of organisms in a given area) of the Amazon, the Congo basin, or the rain forests of Borneo or New Guinea. Wading through the fluorescent green of coniferous old growth, among trees both living and dead and thickly carpeted with mosses and lichens, must rank among the most stirring and profound of human experiences.
Some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world have grown here. Western redcedar, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, shore pine, and amabilis fir are the mainstays of a great blanket of green that, in times gone by, covered most of North America’s western coastline. Though many of their number have been lost to logging, these trees are capable of growing to a few hundred feet in height and can live well over a thousand years.