by John Zada
Johnny spent two months in the hospital. He’d suffered serious bite and claw injuries on his head, neck, back, torso, and thighs. The doctors told him one of the claw marks had missed his spinal cord by just a millimeter.
I ask Johnny what happened to the bear.
“The game wardens got her,” he says. “But it was a year later. And after she chased a kid in the village—and also me.”
“What?”
He nods.
“She ran after me by the band office. I escaped by climbing into one of the trucks parked there. She knew who I was, too. I could see it in her eyes. She remembered me from my smell.”
Johnny tilts his neck to one side and winces, then massages it with his hand.
“I felt relieved when they got her. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder anymore. But when they shot her I felt physically sick. I felt bad. I don’t hate her for what she did. Bears are just animals. They don’t have the rational thoughts we do.”
Johnny tells me he has to leave to go fishing with a friend visiting from out of town. I quickly ask him what he knows about Sasquatches—and the so-called Hoodoo Valley.
“I don’t know much about the place,” he says, gathering his gear. “Only that loggers got spooked in there—and left. It was a long time ago. People here stay away from that place.”
“And Bigfoots?”
“One story,” he says. “I was staying a few nights at a cabin on the lake, at a place called Kwap. It’s an old village site. About five miles down, on the north side. Near Hoodoo. We were doing work at the lake. This was about twenty years ago. We were sleeping one night, and then all of a sudden we heard this deafening banging on the walls: Boom! Boom! Boom! It went all the way around the cabin. It felt like the cabin was gonna fall apart. It kept pounding on and off for about ten minutes. We had a couple of bear dogs with us, sleeping outside. They were 120 pounds each. When we finally opened the door to find out what was going on, the dogs bolted into the cabin. They didn’t bark once. It was definitely not a bear.”
“What happened next?”
“Nothing. The banging just stopped.”
“So you didn’t actually see the culprit. But you’re assuming it was a Sasquatch?”
“Bears don’t walk around cabins banging on walls. Besides, my dad and uncle had seen a Sasquatch around the same time, bathing in the creek behind that same cabin.”
“And the cabin’s still there?”
“It is. But nobody’s been there for ten years now. People are afraid of the place. Some students didn’t believe my story until they went on a camping trip there. The next morning they were back here with their tails between their legs. But they weren’t as lucky as we were. They lost one of their dogs.”
“Lost?”
“Their dog chased after whatever was bothering them. It never came back.”
There’s a long pause. Johnny throws me a serious yet commiserating look that seems to say: Have you got your fill of stories yet? He cuts the silence by saying he has to leave.
“Wait,” I say, getting up. “Is there any way I can get to these places?”
“Where?” he says, exasperated.
“Hoodoo. The cabin.”
He chuckles sarcastically. “If you can find anyone here willing to go with you to Hoodoo, or that cabin, I’ll give you everything I own.”
“What about you? Could you take me?”
Johnny makes a cringing face and shakes his head. “I’m not going out there. I’ve been through enough.”
“Can you suggest anyone?”
Johnny thinks a moment. “Do you know Alex Chartrand Jr.?”
“No.”
“He’s one of our Guardian Watchmen. He patrols our territorial waters. I heard him say he’s going out that way in a few days. You can ask him to guide you into Hoodoo.”
“What’s the chance he’ll agree?”
Johnny gives me a deadpan look. “About zero.”
Despite my continued attempts to remain neutral and objective, I still find myself being yanked back into that comfort zone of credulity—as if tied to it by bungee cord. Every time I hear a new yarn, something clicks inside me. I’m especially enraptured by the old rumor of the Hoodoo Valley. How is it that I—though I’ve neither seen Sasquatches nor come across my own hard evidence of any—am so easily swayed by arguments of their existence? And why does part of me stubbornly refuse to budge from that position?
I’m not alone. There are perhaps millions like me who have read the Sasquatch books and watched the Bigfoot TV shows—none of us have ever seen the creatures, but we are certain they exist. And no amount of contradictory information, no assemblage of reasonable doubts, can change that.
How can that be? One likely answer, I discover, boils down to one thing: our need to remain sane.
Our brains construct simplified versions of reality, helping us to see just enough of what we need to survive, but those simplifications apply not only to our sensory world. They also affect our understanding of events. The narratives and stories we use to explain the world are also caricatures. It’s what we call our “worldview.”
We spend our early lives building mental models of how the world works, using our education, experiences, predispositions, and intuition as brick and mortar. How and why do certain things happen in the world? What is possible, and what is impossible? Because we don’t have access to all information—no human can be all-knowing—our ideas are always a best guess. We fill in the many blanks with our hunches, opinions, and assumptions. Any new information that conforms with our ideas, our worldview, is easily incorporated.
In his book Brain and Culture, Yale psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler tells us that up until adulthood our brain is exquisitely skilled at building its models. But once that task is complete, the brain is far less skilled at changing them. Most adult brain activity from that point forward, he writes, is “devoted to making the environment conform to established structures.”15 In other words: we work to set our views in stone. We all have our own internal models for what’s going on in the world. These models can be seemingly reasonable or outlandish in their assumptions. We might believe that oil companies, Freemasons, or Zionists rule the planet. We may allot blame for the problems in society to white men, immigrants, or liberals. The perceived rights and wrongs in any given conflict—such as those that underscore the Wuikinuxv’s grievances against the Heiltsuk, and vice versa—also constitute a mental model. For most of us, sooner or later, these cobbled positions become rigid, fixed, inviolable.
So what happens when we eventually come across information that contradicts our simplified narratives?
“One option,” writes Indian neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran in Phantoms in the Brain, “is to revise your story and create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem,” he adds, “is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable. You would go mad.”16
Our tendency is to look away when our hard-won and cherished narratives are faced with information that undermines them and the way we live.
Investigative journalist Will Storr says our brain adores our models and “guards them like a bitter curmudgeon.” It reworks them only when absolutely necessary. “Your brain,” he writes in The Heretics, “is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.”17
Similarly, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, argues that our intuitive reflexes are the basis for much of what we believe, and that those reflexes seek rationalization. Reasoning, he says, “evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.” The good reasoner, he adds, is really good at one thing: “Finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reas
ons.”18
There is a term to describe the mental discomfort that arises when we hold two pieces of contradictory knowledge at the same time: cognitive dissonance. Instead of going back to the drawing board or recomputing in the face of new information, we resort to chicanery. We reject, ignore, rationalize, or distort the new data, becoming even more hardened in our position. We cherry-pick, find additional evidence, and reinterpret facts that support our position—a process known as confirmation bias. In more extreme cases, in which political power or wealth is at stake, we simply marginalize, penalize, cast away, or kill the messengers responsible for the dissonant information. Turkish journalists who write critically of their regime are labeled “terrorists” and thrown into jail. Environmentalists who loudly protest deforestation in certain Latin American countries are often killed by police or thugs hired by logging companies.
This devotion to what we think we know and what we think should be runs deep. Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness, says that at the root is a fundamental preference in our lives for what is known and familiar to us, whether real or imaginary. Anything that falls outside that—the unknown, the dissonant, the alien—is seen as an enemy. “Embedded within our self-definition, we build relationships, institutions, cities, systems, and cultures that, in reaffirming our values, blind us to alternatives,” she writes. “This is where our willful blindness originates: in the innate human desire for familiarity, for likeness, that is fundamental to the ways our minds work.”*
This is partly why many members of the ever-growing congregation of Bigfooters, never having seen a creature for themselves, push aside the dissonance caused by the fact that a Sasquatch body has never been presented. Even John Bindernagel and his Bigfoot-positive scientist colleagues, who are not pure “believers” because their arguments stem from professional assessment of the Sasquatch data, are still working with their own cherished models of reality. Their emotions and intuitions are fully engaged. Their minds are no less like Storr’s “bitter curmudgeon,” defending their models to the end.
All of this also applies to debunkers or conservative scientists. The desire to discredit or deliberately disbelieve, whether rightly or wrongly, is also a mental posture. Because science operates within the convenient circle of what fits with its preconceptions—which is anathema to what science is supposed to be about—it has rejected the work of Bindernagel and his colleagues outright.
Alex, the Guardian Watchman, it turns out, is hard to find. He’s never at his place. When I ask Lena about him, she tells me he has no phone and that he uses only the radio. I try calling out to him on the VHF channel, but I get no response save for some unintelligible, static-filled chatter coming from the sportfishing camps out in the inlet.
While at Lena’s I find myself restless and unable to stay put. I decide to walk to a place called “the reload”—the old logging depot at the edge of Owikeno Lake. Lena advises me not to make the hour-long walk. A huge grizzly, she says, was seen earlier on this side of town. She tells me to take her pickup instead and throws me the keys with a smile.
I drive along the heavily potholed gravel road through a stretch of forest that separates the village from the lake. The approach is dark and a touch ominous: a landscape of silhouetted, mossy trees, streaked with sunbeams, towering above huge spiderlike ferns. I drive out of the forest and into a wide clearing strewn with old logs and rusting equipment. Before me are the azure waters of Owikeno Lake, a long, flooded alpine valley stretching far into the distance. About a dozen seals are sunning themselves, lazily, on a log boom a few feet offshore.
Once I step out of the pickup I hear voices from behind a pile of timber and the sound of an engine starting. Then I see a motorboat drone away from the edge of the reload toward the distant reaches of the lake. That’s followed by laughter and a dog yelping. I walk over to the other side of the woodpile and find a man and two women, all in their forties, sitting on logs around a small fire. A tiny, rodent-like dog with puffy brown fur is running around them, barking madly. Parked behind them is a truck. All three are holding cans of Budweiser beer, and they stare at me as if I were an apparition.
“You’re that guy from New York who’s staying at Lena’s,” exclaims the man, who’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. The two women pull at their cigarettes and stare at me with fascination.
“Toronto,” I say.
“Same thing,” he replies. The women chuckle. “I’m Alex,” he says, breaking into a smile and extending his hand.
“Alex Chartrand?” I say, shaking it, taken aback by the coincidence.
“Yup, Junior. Alex Senior is my dad.”
I mention the referral from Johnny Johnson—and my interest in exploring the lake and the Hoodoo Valley. The women’s faces drop at the mention of Sasquatches and the valley. Alex nods, straight-faced.
“I heard that you were asking about that,” he says. “Want a beer?” He reaches into a box beside him and fishes out a warm can, handing it to me. “I’m one of the Guardian Watchmen in the village,” he adds. “Many of the communities on this coast have watchmen. We patrol our waters. Keep an eye on our resources, on the environment. Tomorrow we’re going out on the lake looking for poachers.”
“Poachers?“ My imagination instantly conjures up ragtag groups of men in pickup trucks stalking elephants and rhinos in the Serengeti with AK-47s.
“Bear hunters,” he says, clarifying. “We’ve banned them here. But they still try to slip in.” I remember the discussion with Captain Brian in Koeye.
“Could I tag along?”
“Sure, but we won’t be going into any of those places you mention,” he says, closing the door on discussion about the Hoodoo Valley.
But I press him. “Can you at least tell me something about the Hoodoo Valley? About what happened there?”
Alex tells me he neither has been there nor knows more about the place than anyone else. I can see he doesn’t want to talk about it. The two women avert their eyes when he speaks. When I ask about Sasquatch he’s more forthcoming. He says that once, while spending four days camping alone on the south end of the lake, he came across a huge humanoid footprint beside a creek.
“It was pretty unnerving. I was in the bush purifying myself for a Hamatsa dance I was going to perform at a potlatch. So I couldn’t leave. And I could barely defend myself. The only things I had with me were my sleeping bag, a tent, an ax, lighter, knife, and a water bottle,” he says.
“What did you do?”
“I stayed put,” he says. “Those were the rules. I wasn’t allowed to go upriver, or follow any noises in the bush, because it could be a Dzonoqua—whose track I probably saw—trying to lure me,” he says. “Or even the Little People.”
I do a double take. “The Little People?”
“Yup.”
Alex tells me there are smaller Sasquatch-type creatures inhabiting the valleys around the lake. He describes the same beings I was told about in Bella Bella and Koeye after I mentioned the small tracks I saw in the mud at Old Town. As I did with the others, I ask Alex if the small creatures aren’t just juvenile Sasquatches.
He shakes his head. “They’re a separate race. They even sound different. I heard their laughter behind my tent at night while on that same outing.”
The women follow the conversation, spellbound, clutching their cigarettes, the long ashes dangling precariously from the tips. One of them, itching to say more, interjects: “You gonna tell him what else happened to you out there?”
Alex shoots her a stern look as if she has relinquished a secret. Everyone goes quiet.
I down the rest of my beer and stand up.
“Hold on,” Alex says, getting up with me. He waves me over to his pickup. I look into the back when we get there and see that it’s filled with a dozen large salmon. “A buddy of mine just came over with these.”
“What kind are they?”
“Sockeye,” he says, smiling from ear to ear. Alex grabs one and hands it to me. I hoo
k my fingers into its gills. The heavy fish reaches down to my knees. It’s the first time anyone has casually given me a whole fish. I stand there for a moment, awkwardly, wondering what to do next. The women begin to chuckle.
“Go ahead,” Alex says. “Throw it in the back of Lena’s truck.”
I look at him quizzically.
“It’s a gift,” he says. “Go back and eat it.”
Alex’s mention of voices and laughing in the woods reminds me of extended periods I’d spent alone in the forest and the desert, hiking and camping, when I’d experienced similar phenomena.
In the 1950s, the head of McGill University’s school of psychology in Montreal conducted a series of experiments on paid student volunteers. The goal was to study the effects of isolation on the mind. The experiments were funded by the CIA, which wanted to know more about the role that isolation played in the brainwashing of American prisoners of war held captive by the Chinese during the Korean War. The volunteers were isolated in soundproof cubicles and cut off from all meaningful human contact for up to a week. Researchers deprived them of stimuli, reducing what they could feel, see, hear, and touch, by making them wear opaque visors and cotton gloves. Air-conditioning units were made to hum continuously in order to mask any sounds that might reach them from the hallway. A few hours into the experiment, the volunteers became deeply restless and started to crave stimulation. Most began to talk and sing to themselves to break the monotony. Soon the test subjects began to experience things that weren’t there. This began with nonspecific objects, like points of light and abstract shapes, that then turned into dreamlike scenes replete with dogs, babies, squirrels, and, in one case, eyeglasses marching down a street. Some volunteers heard music and singing, or felt that they were being poked and prodded.