A Cooper’s hawk shot past me at the edge of the meadow. I heard a struggle nearby, and a squirrel scolding, as the rusty accipiter made a silent, quick kill just fifty feet away. Things still work here, I thought, in spite of the fighters and the logging booms approaching from down valley.
Rounding the biggest pond, I looked for salamanders and saw instead two intersecting lines of large tracks in the bottom. Very muddy and blurry, they looked to be about ten to fifteen inches long and half as wide, though they might have been inflated by the shifting mud. Little definition remained. The best one, near the edge, had a good heel impressed three inches, but no toes or claws. The step was something under a yard. The tracks led into tall grass, where they were lost.
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Another autumn Thea and I would come to Yellowjacket Pass with two friends, Ann Musché and Alan Richards. We hiked in on No. 1A, they took Snagtooth Mountain Trail No. 4, and we met in the middle; remarkably, both parties reached the trail’s fork at the same time. We saw anglewing butterflies sipping willow sap, aphid honeydew on noble fir saplings, coyote scat. Thea found the chrysalis of a zephyr anglewing and an anise swallowtail larva. Ann basked in the meadow. Alan and I hung the food high away from bears. At night we watched constellations and listened to the great horned owls call. After camping together, we swapped car keys and took each other’s route and car back out.
When Thea and I hiked down Snagtooth, it was old growth all the way. The gray-fir woods were dressed with lichen, the ground with bark slabs, purple bracts of squirrel-felled cones, wintergreens, and pale saprophytes, coral-roots, and pinedrops. From Snagtooth Mountain we could see from Council Bluff to Hat Rock, Juniper Peak to Dark Peak—a cross section of this old dentition. We saw no sign of Bigfoot or of anything our joint experience in the woods couldn’t explain.
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This time, as much as I wanted to explore the trail down Snagtooth Creek, there was no car waiting for me on that side. I turned back toward Powdermilk’s parking spot, slightly unsettled by muddy marks and sharp whistles. Leaving Yellowjacket Pass, elevation 4,320 feet, in the late afternoon, I crossed the Dark Divide again and again, back and forth. I heard bikers like hornets in the distance: were they the yellowjackets of the pass’s name? But then I spotted the spit-up paper nest of a Vespula in the trail and decided it belonged to the eponymous wasp.
A redtail swirled around the upper headwaters of Yellowjacket. I wondered what it would be like to sail from Hat to Snagtooth, from Craggy to Kirk, and on to Shark, Badger, and Loo Wit herself with no thought of sore feet or sagging shoulders. Cool shadows settled as a Townsend’s solitaire ascended Hat Rock.
If only it were so easy! My thick calves and thighs, so heavy with beefsteak that I sink in water, yet more marbled than when they were built for wrestling and throwing heavy objects, can get me to the peaks—but not like the solitaire, not like the hawk! Not like those three deer bounding straight up the slope. By many accounts, Bigfoot, at two to three times my weight, climbs as effortlessly as deer. I found myself envious of all these weightless creatures as I plodded the steep trail back down. If gravity has a rainbow, I know only its dim reflection in the mud of the track below: gravity’s anchor.
East of Hat Rock the trail leveled out. I strode along the Dark Divide and even straddled it at one very narrow point. I stood with one foot on each side and hugged trees on both slopes. Peeing democratically, I shared my paltry contribution between two drainages without shifting position. I don’t suppose any map, text, pass, or ridgeline has ever given me a keener sense of what watershed means than this small act. I was just twenty-five miles from where Jim Fielder would see a possible Bigfoot take a leak four years later.
One last handful of big plump huckleberries got me down the final mile. I held the last berry under my tongue until I struck the trailhead at six o’clock even. I reached my car just before sunset. A sunbolt shooting past Shark and Craggy illuminated Yellowjacket Pass and the entire Divide like General Electric or some other god.
The car bounced down the crummy road, past deep green and pink moss pads at rills, under the black gaze of the Bigfoot in the cleft of Craggy, back on watch. Pikas called from slash piles in the big clear-cuts. The dusk deepened all the way down to Eagle’s Cliff. Once there, tired and dirty, I took a tiny cabin that General Electric had not yet blessed. In my little loft, lit by gaslight, I tried to read, but I was too tired. Instead, until sleep claimed the body of the rim-walker, I pondered the nature of divides.
It came to me that this trip was about many more divides than the physical one I’d just crossed. There was the great gulf between differing visions for the future of the forest and the fine line separating the land of the living from that of the dead and gone. There was the murky border where history and myth meet and mingle. And always the boundary of belief. Everywhere I went, when the subject of Bigfoot came up, people would ask me, “Which side are you on? Do you really believe?” More and more I saw that this was no sharp scarp, no razorback ridge between rivers.
Back in the meadows and ponds on Yellowjacket Pass: those were probably black bear prints. And the whistles I heard were likely some taunting dialect of the gray jay. Yet they had the tone and tenor of the whistles commonly described by Indians claiming to be familiar with Sasquatch. And the tracks and stride had the right dimensions, if not much detail. They were as “good” as many that have been claimed as Bigfoot’s.
The workings of the solitary mind are a wondrous thing. There was nothing on Yellowjacket Pass that I, as a biologist, would ask anyone else to consider seriously as evidence for the presence of another primate. Yet just there and then I was perfectly prepared to believe: not to believe in Bigfoot necessarily, but to believe that the world is wider than we normally wish to accept. To believe that yes, that could be the whistle of an ape; those might be the tracks of the whistler. That I might not be alone up there after all.
Thus muddled, I lost my footing on that other divide, with wakefulness on its bright side and slumber in the shadows, and rolled deep into sleep. Into dreams, where all the edges run together like mud in a mountain pond, disturbed by someone’s footprints.
10
Grendel Redux: Snagtooth
And so I come through the trees and towns to the lights of the meadhouse, dark shadow out of the woods below. I knock politely on the high oak door, bursting its hinges and sending the shock of my greeting inward like a cold blast out of a cave.
“Grendel!” they squeak, and I smile like exploding spring.
—John Gardner, Grendel
Up on the divide, the chilly mists of the low valleys dissipated in autumn sunshine. I returned to the forest creases feeding the Lewis River, hoping to get deeper into the old growth. On foot I followed Straight Creek over shaly steps and into the blue pools of hollows, heading for the confluence of Quartz and Snagtooth creeks. This took me down a steep, gravelly trail alongside a clear-cut, through young Douglas firs. Chickadees and nuthatches led the way. Yellow-rumped warblers foraged in the second growth. It was spider season, and I used my net as a web wand. Even so, like the deer and elk with gossamer-strung antlers, I trailed yards of silky strands that tickled my forehead and forearms and crisscrossed my glasses.
I walked a line between radically different worlds. Bird’s nest and turkeytail fungi were busy reworking the soil in the thinned stands as the plantation took on life. Environmental rhetoric represents the “reprod” as having too little life; foresters make it out to be too lively. The actual state of second growth lies somewhere between barren and fecund. Windthrow from the edges of the standing old growth increased the size of the clearing while adding some structure to its depleted community. At a corner where the land dropped a precipitous hundred feet into Straight Creek, the trail turned to follow the edge.
Sapsucker sign, punched out like a pegboard. Lush big red huckleberries, tart and crisp, took the place of blues, w
hich I wouldn’t see again until Indian Heaven. Quartz Creek Trail No. 5 appeared on a wooded lip of land above the canyon. Rounding the bottom of the clear-cut, passing enormous scorched stumps, I finally entered the best of the remnant Quartz Creek old growth. The greenwood muffled the sound of a helicopter logging across the Lewis River far below.
Pausing for water and dried papaya, I wrung out my sweatband in cool green shade. Vanilla-leaf parasols nodded beside me in a sunbeam; prince’s pine and Oregon grape laid a deep green sheen on the forest floor. No more stumps! I appreciate stumps in their own right, but in this context the EarthFirst! bumper-sticker logic, “Stumps suck!” seemed appropriate.
Walking softly on the ancient duff, I bowed for windfall and to great trees and snags as a varied thrush silently wheeled through the boughs above. A mossy creek, a huge hemlock fallen down its middle, swaddled itself in lady fern. When I hugged Douglas firs and hemlocks, I could reach just a quarter or halfway around. Yes, it’s true . . . some of us do hug trees, including some reverent loggers I know. I think for me it’s less a sentimental gesture than a measure, a recognition, an exposure of the full-frontal sensory skin sheath to the power and substance of these great green lives. Anyone who sneers and never embraces a tree is missing out on one of the finer sensual compensations for life in a mortal body.
Another pleasure is the rush that comes from recognizing the individuality of other life forms—the hit that naturalists, situated in the midst of the grand biological parade, get every time they meet something new. Few of us will ever know newness the way Linnaeus did in Lapland, when he first came upon the boreal twinflower, now known by the lovely name Linnaea (and here it was, at my feet). But we know the sweetness of first encounter. The pleasure is deeply visceral; you feel it in your belly as well as your head. Sad, how few ever experience this joy, for close observers are almost as rare as tree-huggers. If lingual illiteracy is advancing, natural illiteracy is already winning.
Professor C. Leo Hitchcock’s university course, Botany 113, Local Flora, opened the world to me as few other ways of knowing ever have. Nature study was once commonplace in schools, and before there were schools, a basic knowledge of flora and fauna was a prerequisite for survival. Now, with massive societal ignorance of our fellow animals and plants, we once again face the question of survival. Botany 113 should be a required course for life!
The black and spartan fertile fronds of deer fern poked up from the floor of an open grove of a dozen giant firs, recalling a scene from the redwood groves. Breeze and sun flickered across maple leaves. On an old mossy rockfall, pikas called from a swale of wood fern. The vine maples hinted at their coming red shift, not shouting it ahead of time as in the clear-cuts. The polished trunks of white snags rippled in sun and shadow. Artist’s fungi climbed a tall snag, making balconies for squirrels. The messages of kinglets and red-breasted nuthatches carried like an aural semaphore.
Anyone with field guides has access to the common life forms. Yet the decisions about such forests are made by people who have no idea what the kinglets are doing in the crowns of the trees, who know nothing of the life beneath the forest floor. A field guide to old-growth life forms and lifeways should be required reading for all who go here.
I found myself wishing for a field guide to the colors of plastic ribbons. Everywhere I went in the Dark Divide the trees were flagged with a panoply of plastic ribbon—yellow, orange, red, pink, blue, polka-dot, stripe, and half a dozen others. Without knowing what the patterns mean it is impossible to know the intent of the invading flaggers. I’m sure many helpful marks are lost to vigilantes who routinely remove the flags of surveyors, developers, timber cruisers (who estimate lumber volume in a forest stand), and the like. Here orange-capped stakes and scarlet ribbons were scattered around. I suspect they were for a trail crew, but a well-intentioned vandal could mistake them for timber sale markers.
An aluminum plate stapled to a small hemlock bore messages official and otherwise: “RP/STA 170 + 77/DIS 20.0/AZ 210/8-22- 88 SUS,” neatly inscribed; and scratched crudely across it: fuck you rapists! The letters and numbers might denote a cartographer’s baseline, a trail crew survey, or even a spotted-owl listening transect—but someone obviously thought it was a timber cruiser’s tag, which it probably was. An additional message, likely scrawled with a Swiss Army knife, read long live the ancient forests.
I clambered under, over, and around the deadfall across the trail. It was just as well that I had not come directly from the Saddle, across Jumbo and Dark, and down Quartz from its headwaters south of Dark Meadow. Traversing many miles of these giants’ pick-up sticks with a large, heavy backpack would have been torturous, taxing even the forest’s powers of refreshment.
Such nurse logs these! Planter-dividers for the living rooms of the gods. Over time, under the hungry influence of the springing ferns, mosses, lichens, and seedlings, the logs break down, giving the soil its foodstuffs. In the standing snags, pileated woodpeckers carve honeycombs of rectangles. Dead wood, often thought wasted in its rich rotting, feeds all the small rotters and, through them, finally the earth itself.
Of all this life, maybe the fungi are the most obviously evolutionarily proliferated. Although the great fall ’shroom bloom was not yet out, russulas spattered the green carpet with patches of purple, red, and white. The inverted caps of Russula brevipes, a real steam shovel of a mushroom, must push up as much soil as worms do. Polypore conks, some two feet across, made chocolate shelves, white knobs, or gray, glistening knees and elbows. One conk capped the yard-broad butt of a log. The fungi came into their own in the slight slant light of September, which accented their subtle shades. The barbed blue trailer of a dewberry vine pricked me when I stooped to touch the viscid pearl cap of an agaric.
Scale becomes confused in the old growth. Bunchberry dogwood in fruit burst from the bark of a vast hemlock, while hemlocks no taller than moss thalli furred the stumps they’d both claimed. I was dizzy with the large and small of it all when I came onto a ridge with a high view of upper Quartz Creek and, it seemed, miles of unbroken old growth. The promontory was clothed in moss: a soft, flat landscape, its sharp edges buffered. For the first time, all things seemed as they should be in the Dark Divide.
At Snagtooth Creek in the midafternoon, I munched oblong rose hips that looked like the exaggerated peaches of a fruit label. They were neither sweet like peaches nor bitter, just another abundant wild food rich in vitamin C and beta-carotene. A good little flow came down Snagtooth among signs that it ran much fuller and broader in spate. Off with the boots! The water was very cold, very fresh on my too-human feet. An enormous Douglas fir curved up and over from the far shore.
In Snagtooth’s sunny glade I sat beneath the waving cream racemes of goatsbeard and watched for rustic deities. Easily I imagined the Green Man, in one of his many incarnations, appearing here. The one I had in mind was Silenus—not the faun himself but the Silenus anglewing, a richly russet-and-black butterfly of forest glades and dappled streamsides in the ancient forest, unrecorded from Skamania County. But the satyr of this glade turned out to be a winter wren, a natural Puck, cherk-cherking among the alders. Silenus did not appear.
Why did the early lepidopterists name so many butterflies after mythic entities? Probably because of their romanticism and classical educations as much as for the insects’ sylvan habitats; the fritillaries include species named for Titania, Hippolyta, Aphrodite, Diana, and Cybele, and the anglewings include the faun, the satyr, and the zephyr, as well as Silenus.
Some have connected centaurs and satyrs, via the Wild Man, to Bigfoot. In Beowulf the giant Grendel descends on the mead hall and wreaks havoc by eating the heads of warrior Danes. John Gardner told the tale from the monster’s point of view in Grendel, mixing malice and vengeance with remorse and envy in the mind of an unhappy creature who would never be human, thanks to the curse of God upon the offspring of Cain. I daydreamed about Sasquatch popping into the tave
rn down at Cougar, like his Nordic ancestor, Grendel, just to nip off a few feed caps and hardhats. God knows he’s got a good excuse in the curse of the modern gods on the offspring of Selahtiks. Now that would be something for the tabloids. The world would never be the same.
As Blackfeet singer-songwriter Jack Gladstone told me, mythological themes are born of people’s experience of place. Joseph Campbell called myth a public dream, and dreams private myths. By these measures my Bigfoot myth was growing each day I spent in the Dark Divide, each time I dreamed. Writer Kim Stafford described to me an Andean wise man who, when asked what the smartest animal was, replied that it was the animal we have barely seen and never found. That’s Bigfoot for sure! Jack also spoke of a Blackfeet mythic teacher called Napi. Bigfoot has been my teacher here, my Napi; and that too is the name of a butterfly, Pieris napi, a white floater that frequents sunny patches in the forest such as the one I was basking in this late afternoon.
So Bigfoot and butterflies are both wrapped in myth. No butterflies bear the name of Bigfoot, but birds of the order Megapodes live in New Guinea, where they incubate their eggs in geothermally warmed soils, testing the temperature with their massive feet. Maybe there are unknown Megapodes on the backside of Loo Wit, consorting with Titania, but I doubt it. My sensibility doesn’t allow for an easy blend of faerie and fauna. To me, despite their charming nomenclatural associations, birds and butterflies are material beings, very here and now and flesh and blood, or at least chitin and hemolymph. And if Bigfoot strides these heights, it too is physical: an animal with none of the magical properties of Greek deities, just needs and instincts much like my own.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 14
