by John Zada
When I think of everything I’ve considered related to the Sasquatch—belief and skepticism, scientific pursuits, traditional tales, personal mythmaking, pseudo-religious awe, pattern-matching, and the attempt to explain the unexplained—I realize these are all expressions of meaning. And that our pursuit of the Sasquatch, our various interpretations of it, are a reflection of this deepest of human motivations.
Without meaning, a man’s life falls apart.
I’ve seen during this trip that we have an innate, fundamental need for meaning—for our lives to be meaningful. Everything—our beliefs, our disbeliefs, our worldview, our perception, our actions, what we do and why we do it—is driven by this default search.
This applies to John Bindernagel and his quixotic quest to convince his skeptical colleagues of the existence of the Sasquatch. You can see it in the coastal First Nations communities reviving and preserving their culture, and resisting the systemic interests that sometimes seek to exploit them. It is evident in the work of conservationists like Ian McAllister and Captain Brian Falconer, as they struggle to maintain the integrity of the world’s most intact ecosystem. It also applies to Leonard Ellis, in his connection to a hunting tradition, a life in the outdoors, and the struggle against the challenges inherent in that environment. By finding meaning we build connections between seemingly disparate things, creating a greater whole. Out of life’s chaos we form a bigger and more coherent picture, one that feels more unified and connected. Meaning is a compass and rudder for our lives. It helps to make our suffering more tolerable.
Whatever its reality, the Sasquatch is a compelling symbol replete with potential meanings. Wild-man myths abound the world over. They do so largely because many of us seek a connection to the way we once were—to the more primal stages of our development, which, though partly superseded, still remain in us. To others, Sasquatches are anything but obtuse throwbacks to our lower selves; instead, they embody a supernatural cunning and higher capacity. They exist on a higher plane, personifying the unknown—or yet to be discovered—aspects of the universe. For some indigenous people, the creatures are preternatural custodians of nature, who, as characters in traditional stories, have something to teach. By deifying Sasquatches, some of us look to comfort ourselves with the idea that we share the universe with a comparable higher intelligence, that there’s an order to things that we can sense but not properly articulate, and that we’re being watched and perhaps taken care of.
The scientists, amateur sleuths, and explorers looking for the creatures are driven by the thrill of discovering something great. They find meaning in these investigations into new and unknown realms on the fringes of knowledge itself and in manning the outposts on the dangerous and exotic frontier dividing what we know from what we don’t know. These are modern-day mythical journeys.
My own quest in search of an explanation for the Sasquatch phenomenon overlaps with this mythical quest. The fruits of these travels—the characters, the stories, the unlikely coincidences and strange connections—have created a deluge of meaning for me. I’ve developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of the environment and the need for humans to maintain its integrity in the face of the growing forces of consumption that imperil it. I’ve also walked away with a heightened admiration of and a closer connection to the First Nations communities I’ve visited, about which I knew little prior to the trip.
Though no incontrovertible proof has emerged for Bigfoot’s physical existence, I find myself awakened to a new significance of the creature. I’ve learned to see the Sasquatch as a powerful symbol of the natural world—a diminishing realm from which most of us are becoming increasingly estranged. On one level, Sasquatches personify the more refined spectra of nature that we cannot, or often do not, see. They remind us that there is much more to the natural world, writ large, than meets the eye. They also show us, almost by holding up a mirror to ourselves, that the eye with which we see is limited. The artificial lines we humans have created, the fragmentation we have wrought upon the whole, separate us from the wilds to which we are inextricably linked.
The more we humans denude our environment, the more elusive the Sasquatch becomes and thus the more we grasp for it—not quite realizing that we are chasing after an aspect of our own nature that is vanishing with the disappearance of our earth’s nature. It is no wonder that the indigenous residents of the Great Bear generally don’t pursue Sasquatches or make too big a fuss about the creatures, beyond paying them the normal respect. The compulsion doesn’t exist because, in a way, the essence of the creatures already lives within them. It exists in their surroundings, and in their intent—and actions—as responsible stewards of their lands and waters.
So, do Sasquatches physically exist?
At a certain point in my journey, I had come to understand that binary thinking on the matter—”exists” versus “doesn’t exist”—was a quagmire. In the spirit of avoiding that mental posture and in the name of real open-mindedness, perhaps, I’ve come to see that we need to consider one more possibility in this conundrum of conundrums: human logic, suitable for explaining a certain level of physical existence, simply doesn’t apply here. In other words, maybe the Sasquatch, whatever it is, exists in a reality lying beyond our ordinary perceptual capacities. Naturally, we try to explain phenomena in terms we understand. In certain cases, however, our accepted and understood definition of cause and effect may be limiting or downright wrong. The greatest experiential scientists in human history—mystics from various philosophical traditions—and our own quantum physicists of the modern era concur that the universe is not only other than what we perceive it to be, but also so convoluted and paradoxical in its behavior as to contradict our own systems of reasoning. Reality extends far beyond our familiar conceptions of space, time, and causality into a wholly different field.
Given all the different interpretations and perspectives, perhaps the best, most reliable description of a Sasquatch that we can muster in words—right now—is one that borders on the philosophical, or even metaphysical: it is a meeting place, a point of distillation, or a moment, in which the spirit of nature, including some long-lost part of ourselves, and an observer come together in an experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Contrary to what we like to believe, some questions have no answers. And in the case of the Sasquatch we may simply never know. To be married to one idea, one meaning, and remain locked into it without direct knowledge, just to create certainty and mental stability, is much closer to delusion than most of us realize. It’s also as far away as we’ll drift from the noblest of Noble Beyonds: the fundamental reality veiled from us by our subjective senses.
EPILOGUE
THE NOISE
I have suffered from some acute bouts of reverse culture shock over the years following trips to meccas of cacophony—places in India, Egypt, and parts of Latin America. In those cases I returned to Toronto tuned to the manic frequencies of my host country, which rendered me completely out of phase with my quieter home environment. My first days back were often buffeted by a silence so pronounced it would throb in my ears. People on the street wandered around in slow motion, like objects drifting weightlessly through interstellar space.
By contrast, my reentry into big-city life following my trip to the Great Bear Rainforest—a torturous ordeal of reacclimatization surpassing any before it—is the complete reverse experience. I’ve taken a swan dive from a moss-covered, crystalline pinnacle of stillness and clarity into a roiling, incongruous uproar.
The Noise.
That was the name Alex Chartrand Jr., in Wuikinuxv, had given to the irreverential hullabaloo, the godless clamor, the grinding machine gears of the city—the hallmark of a place where no Sasquatch would possibly reside. For people like Alex, accustomed to the subtler, gentler setting of the natural world, which is conducive to a more humane pace—the Noise of the outside world was a grating fact of life. I took his mention of it as a light rebuke, a poking o
f fun—not unlike the scores of other jokes about Toronto I’d endured from British Columbians during my journey. But in some way, it was also a warning about my impending return. Traveling to a different reality, and then returning to one’s own, highlights the things we were numb to before.
The day I leave the Great Bear, I realize something is seriously amiss when, arriving at the connecting airport at Port Hardy, I see women’s high-heeled shoes and for a few seconds have no idea what they are. In the landscapes through which I had trod, high heels were necessarily absent. As a result, they’d disappeared from my mind as a notion—and temporarily as a memory.
When I arrive for the night in Vancouver, an ordinarily subdued city, devoid of the edginess and chutzpah common to other large urban centers, I’m met with a circus of stimuli on the order of places like Tokyo or Bombay. When I left the plane my first impression, apart from the jolting sight of concrete and an indescribable smell of impurity, was of a faint background buzz, a constant humming.
The Noise ramps up when I catch a cab with a loud, opinionated driver who has lived in Vancouver for twenty years but has never heard of Bella Bella or any other coastal community north of Campbell River. It continues as his car radio babbles maniacally, entreating me to hire a lawsuit attorney and to eat at KFC. It intrudes in the forms of cranium-shattering roars of motorcycles and wailing sirens. One of the stranger experiences is walking along Georgia Street, a wide downtown thoroughfare, and seeing vehicles barreling past me, just feet away (the cement trucks are particularly bad). Up the coast, the slightest rustling in the bushes had been enough to startle me. My sensitization to the Great Bear’s delicate frequencies amplifies the sounds of distant road construction and the garbled, angry hollering of drunkards in the alleyways beneath my hotel at night. The Noise slips through every crack, like granules in a sandstorm.
My assumption that Vancouver has prepared me for Toronto is proved wrong at the airport when I arrive to collect my luggage at the baggage carousel. Above it, a large flat-screen TV broadcasts a barely coherent jumble of sensationalized news and stock-market tickers, as travelers gaze hypnotically between it and their smartphone screens. If anything, the Noise is at a more jarring pitch here, the collective neurosis more pronounced.
What equilibrium I gained during my travels is shattered, gradually, by the city’s disequilibrium. It’s underscored by the unenviable state of its people—the often rushed, routine-bludgeoned masses avoiding eye contact and wearing frowns of dissatisfaction. Weeks in, sadly, I feel the coastal magic begin to evaporate. It’s hard not to be affected by the collective. I am reminded of an old Middle Eastern proverb: All that enters a salt mine becomes salt.
It is then that I truly come to appreciate the Sasquatch’s reflexive desire to give the train wreck we call civilization a wide berth. I find myself wanting to return to the forest, to burrow ever deeper in search of places unaffected by this chorus of human short-circuiting: the Noise. Certain conversations with people, I find, especially trigger that feeling.
“I heard you were in BC over the summer,” a friend of a friend says, yelling in my ear over the music blaring in a packed bar on Ossington Street one night, weeks into my re-assimilation. I am out with friends. The sea of coked-up and marijuana-anesthetized humanity laps at our edges. “What were you doing there?” he asks.
“I was traveling the coast collecting stories of Sasquatch encounters.”
“What encounters?” he asks, half-hearing and turning his ear to me again.
“Sas-quatch!“ I say.
He looks at me, and I am met with a blank stare that melts into a smile and then laughter. “Sasquatch? I bet everyone who lives out there is kind of a Sasquatch, eh? Hahahahaha!“
I continue to look him in the eye, straight-faced, with an unshakable seriousness. His laughter tapers into a chuckle, which then slowly morphs into a shocked and sobering look of incredulity. He sees that I’m not joking and composes himself.
“No, really,” he stammers. “What were you doing there?”
POSTSCRIPT
Early in the morning on October 13, 2016, the US-based tugboat Nathan E. Stewart, heading south from Alaska through Heiltsuk territorial waters, missed its turn into Seaforth Channel and drove straight into the rocks off Athlone Island. The three-hundred-foot fuel barge it pushed was empty, but the tug carried more than two hundred thousand liters (fifty-three thousand gallons) of diesel and other industrial oils, which started to leak into the Pacific. Within hours, the tug was below water with an ever-growing fuel slick surrounding it.
The wreck sat beside one of the most ecologically abundant areas in the territory, Gale Passage, a place known to the Heiltsuk as Q’vúqvai. It is a narrow waterway between islands containing ancient village sites where, for millennia, people harvested seafood such as clams, crabs, and seaweed for the traditional herring-egg harvest. Though the size and scope of the leak were only a small fraction of what was envisaged for a supertanker accident, with all its attendant coastal devastation, the imperiling of Q’vúqvai was by all accounts a nightmare come true.
With barely any training, funds, or equipment—and without warning—residents of Bella Bella and Denny Island became the first responders, doing anything and everything in their power to contain the spill. It was a heroic, round-the-clock operation that lasted many weeks—one made more difficult by the delayed and largely confused response of the government and other outside agencies.
The Heiltsuk weren’t able to stop the diesel leak and its spread. Containment and absorbent booms proved ineffective, often breaking in rough weather and storms. A cluster of islands on the outer coast has been contaminated for an unknown period of time—a heavy blow to the community’s food sources, culture, and economy.
In spite of this tragedy—and perhaps in a small way because of it—the pendulum is swinging again toward more responsible decision-making for the coast. Successive governments at both the federal and the provincial levels have charted a slightly different course from their neoconservative predecessors. Between my travels and the time this book went to print, the Great Bear Rainforest agreement was ratified, in 2016, bringing additional protection to the region. Two of the more controversial pipeline-tanker initiatives slated for the coast—including Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project—have been canceled. In May 2018, a federal law known as the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, designed to restrict the largest ships carrying crude and other oils from plying the north coast of British Columbia, was passed in Canada’s House of Commons.
And in a dramatic turn of events, in December 2017, the provincial government aligned with many indigenous communities on the coast, and much of the general public, to ban the trophy hunting of grizzly bears across all of British Columbia. The lion’s share of responsibility for this shift in policy rests in the work of a core group of people, some of whom appear within these pages.
Not all individuals and communities on the coast, or across the province, support these changes. The cyclical nature of governments combined with deeply polarized politics nowadays means there are no firm guarantees that some of these decisions won’t be overturned. But optimism remains high among those who seek to maintain these changes.
Meanwhile, the world of Sasquatch research lost one of its pillars.
On January 18, 2018, wildlife biologist and Bigfoot-studies doyen John Bindernagel died after a two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer.
In the years between his diagnosis and his death, Bindernagel tripled his efforts to get his research into the public domain, posting his video lectures on YouTube and appearing as a guest on TV and in podcasts. Up until his final days, he was meticulously filing and documenting eyewitness reports. In the end, he never realized his dream of encountering a Sasquatch at close range or seeing his theories vindicated by mainstream science.
ADDENDA
Addendum 1
Incident at the Deer Pass Cabin, as Related by Mary Brown
There was another situation about
three years ago at the Deer Pass cabin in Troop Passage. I run the Restorative Justice Program, and one of the programs that we have is isolation for people who are in trouble with the law, or who are going down the wrong path. Their families come together and say, “We need to help this person get back on track.”
This case involved a young man. He was nineteen years old. He was put into isolation at the Deer Pass cabin in August.
We occasionally go to check on people put in isolation. On the first visit, I brought one of the councillors with me. When we saw him, he seemed fine. He said, “You know, I’m a little scared, but I’m managing. I hear things at night, but I think it’s just wolves in the bush.”
The second week we went up there to check on him again. We could tell that this time the young man was spooked. He told us, “I can hear things. I’m starting to smell things. It’s really stink. I think there’s something out there. I don’t know if it’s a bear—or what it is.”
We returned again during the third week. As soon as I walked up the trail to the cabin, I saw that there was a huge bonfire burning outside it. It scared me because we only do small campfires there because there’s a lot of trees around.
I ran up and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” When I got there I found the young man just sitting by the fire. As soon as he saw me, he literally fell to his knees and embraced my legs and screamed, “You gotta take me in! You gotta take me in! There’s something out here!” He was crying and was absolutely terrified.
I said, “Get ahold of yourself. Try to calm down and we’ll talk about this.”