Goose Lake floats between the bottom of Indian Heaven and the top of the Big Lava Bed. I could have taken a straight shot into that great petrified pudding, but I decided to approach it from several points around the edges rather than attempt a north–south transect. No landscape in the state is more forbidding for the traveler on foot, and it seemed to me that a multipronged approach would give me a wider perspective on the big flow than picking a narrow path down the middle, which might not even be possible. But first I had business in Trout Lake, a ranching, logging, and Forest Service town about fifteen miles to the east.
Trout Lake grew up at the head of the wet camas prairies draining Mount Adams’s glacial meltwater toward the Columbia. Pahto looms to the north when its snowy buffalo hump breaks out of the clouds, and the Yakama Nation unfolds to the northeast. From here it isn’t far down the White Salmon River to the “spandex ghettos” booming on the back of sailboarding in the Columbia Gorge, and it’s a short hop to several wilderness areas. As the headquarters of the Mount Adams District of the Gifford Pinchot, Trout Lake has become a desirable posting for young Forest Service workers, as well as an outdoors mecca.
The town was full of Indian-summer butterflies and the season’s last tourists. When the late sun dropped, I dowsed a meal at an old country inn on the river. The White Salmon was likely without salmon, but it was surely white in the harvest moon’s light. I found the Forest Service village and searched out the cabin of my friend Howard Bulick. He was out, so I let myself in and I spent the evening reading David Quammen’s “Natural Acts” essays from Outside. In one he wrote that “the essence of travel is relinquishing full control over the texture and path of your own life—and one aspect of that relinquishment is a chronic shortage of decent reading.”
The first part of the quote certainly seemed right at this stage of my journey. As for decent reading, I’d carried Peter Byrne and Wendell Berry in my backpack, but it was a delight after the weeks away from my own glutted shelves to dive into Howard’s books. I fell asleep over poet Robert Sund, whose “Ish River Country” reminded me that before the pioneers and the Forest Service came the people whose names grace the land—all those names with “ish” on the end, like the Salish country Sund was writing about. Here, away from the soft, wet valleys, on the edge of the hard lavalands, the names have lots of k’s—Klickitat, Yakama . . . Selahtiks.
On the last morning of September, a Sunday, Howard and I shared Thea’s granola, his bananas, and coffee. I showed him my plaster cast and asked if he knew what the Forest Service felt about the Klickitats’ wild Indians or hairy devils. He called a coworker who had an interest in the matter. Al was home and free, so Howard invited him over. Al was currently working on spotted owls for the Mount Hood and Gifford Pinchot forests, a specialty just then coming into its own.
In fact, the Trout Lake Forest Service camp was in total disarray over this modest spotty lump of a bird. With the federal listing of Strix occidentalis as an endangered species and Judge William Dwyer’s ruling that the USFS was in violation of federal law until they took the owl fully into account, chaos reigned. Most timber sales had been shut down until the owl populations were surveyed and a new plan approved for their protection. Of course this involved the entire old-growth question, not just owls, but they were the lever that could jack the system open to change.
The huge timber cuts formerly demanded by Congress had begun to look like a thing of the past. The Multiple Use Act of 1960 stated, “It is the policy of the Congress that the National Forests are established and shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.” However, as everyone knows who knows the woods, the third-named commodity has driven the show. Mel Hansen, in his book about Indian Heaven, quoted a retired forester who had spent twenty-two years in the USFS:
If one has aspirations to eventually become a U.S. Forest Supervisor, he must plan to advance through the ranks of timber management. Somewhere along the line he may work with some other branch for a short time, but no other branch offers him a chance to build himself a small empire in the district or become a staff member in the supervisor’s office. Timber is adequately funded while other branches are not. The Forest Service is pressured from Washington, D.C. This pressure is first exerted on the Regional Office and in turn to the Regional Forester and then down through the District. The ever-present message is, “The economy of the country depends on timber.”
Hansen might have mentioned that Congress has consistently pressured the Forest Service to produce nonsustainable levels of harvest. With Senators Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood of Oregon and Slade Gorton of Washington, among others, calling for four or five or six billion board feet of timber per year—which kept the mill towns humming and the votes coming—the rangers were always under the gun to “get the cut out.” When I had discussed the trashed trails on Juniper Ridge with Randle District Ranger Harry Cody, he lamented the impossibility of managing the forest properly under that dictum. Many service professionals realized that the national forests were being hammered, and a nucleus of them formed AFSEEE (the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics). Regional Forester John Mumma became a cause célèbre when his career was wrecked by his superiors for his resistance to overcutting in the northern Rockies.
The Mount Adams District was reeling under the court order. District Ranger Jim Bull (known locally as the Big Bull) had recently informed employees that at most the allowable cut on their slice of the Gifford Pinchot might approach half of what it had been. Everybody from timber sales personnel to biologists were scrambling to realign their jobs to meet the requirements of the judgment, while still selling some timber to help the balance sheet and the local mills and loggers.
Al was one of the Forest Service people detailed to learn more about the whereabouts and needs of the spotted owls. He had been a student of Grover Krantz’s at Washington State and spoke highly of him. Roger Patterson had worked for Al’s father at Hanford, and his dad vouched for Patterson’s integrity. Naturally, with Krantz and Patterson in his background, Al was interested in Bigfoot.
I related to Al what Ray Wallace had told me about his road-building contracts with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest; the contracts said, in effect, “If you see Bigfoot, don’t tell, or we will cancel your contract.” One official told Wallace they just didn’t want anyone to be killed. Considering the source and Ray’s many apparent flights of fancy, I questioned the existence of such a clause. But he was adamant and consistent in the telling of it.
Al said he had heard the story of the Bigfoot contract clause, but he couldn’t say if it was true. An old-timer told him he had worked under similar restrictions. Al was familiar with other bizarre on-the-job conditions, for example a Canadian deal whereby a big logging union required workers who saw an owl to shoot it or be fired. Later I heard other rumors and whispers about Bigfoot clauses in forestry contracts but never saw one. I suppose someone who cared could pursue a Freedom of Information Act procedure to unearth an actual document. But I found the mere existence of the folklore illuminating: no one would invent such a rumor if there was no concern about the consequences of Bigfoot’s discovery.
Related stories exist concerning the timber companies. Grover Krantz has written of “people whom I suspect may be paid by the timber industries in the Pacific Northwest.” He thinks that these people are fabricating elaborate and unbelievable accounts of bionic or supernatural Sasquatches that cause people to dismiss the topic out of hand. “There is no hard evidence that this is actually occurring,” says Krantz, “but the behavior of some individuals is otherwise difficult to explain.” One pipe dream he heard of concerned monsters fashioned from titanium. “The best way to make sasquatch research look ridiculous,” he maintains, “is to make outlandish and absurd claims of this kind, with as much publicity as possible, and try to associate yourself with the scientists and laymen who are doing seri
ous research. By this means the whole subject of the sasquatch becomes tainted by association, thus making the government, most scientists, and much of the public think it is all fantasy.”
Grover told me that the rumor mill consistently turned out stories of forestry workers, both government and private, being instructed by their superiors not to reveal any Bigfoot evidence or intimations they came across in their work. I have heard such accounts also. If true, they could help to account for the paucity of reliable Bigfoot reports from the industrial woods. On the other hand, some of the most titillating tales have come from foresters who think for themselves. The loggers of my acquaintance tend to be individuals who would not be likely to abide by any higher-up’s embargo on tall tales. But if a code of silence was seen as protecting jobs and timber sales, they might go along.
The meat of the allegations is that Bigfoot, or even the suggestion of Bigfoot, would be bad for logging. The middling owl hardly brought a mighty industry to its knees or “crippled a regional economy,” as they like to say—timber corporation profits have never been higher (for example, Weyerhaeuser’s 1994 profits were up 86 percent over 1993), and both Oregon and Washington are booming. But it did tie a massive public lands bureaucracy in knots, and it tied up a lot of timber. So think what a big new ape might do. Sasquatch would make the spotted owl look like a gnat.
The northern spotted owl has not begun to do the things it is blamed for. Overcutting, mechanization and automation, union-busting, foreign exports of raw logs, and the belated and reluctant recognition of the need to conserve the diversity represented by older forests—all have contributed to the timber downturn. The fiber-mining boom could not have lasted much longer, even if all the old growth was allowed to be cut. The owl, as the listed representative of the ancient forest fauna, simply became the key, the tool, the wedge: the stalking horse and the scapegoat.
Even so, the owl has been powerful. The slowdown required by Judge Dwyer while owls and old growth are properly surveyed has given advocates of ancient forests time to regroup and marshal their resources for the final battle. Suppose an unrecognized species of anthropoid ape was discovered on a national forest . . . or a hominoid, which would raise questions of our evolutionary singularity and perhaps even call up issues of human (or near subhuman) rights. Even if the beast were an ape along the lines of chimps and gorillas, its animal rights position would be volatile; but the pressure to protect a much more manlike creature would be irresistible.
The Endangered Species Act would have to either be immediately enforced or be altered to omit the new creature in favor of continued timber harvest. The Republican reluctance to reauthorize the act is driven in part by the fear of finding new endangered species on public and private lands. The unquestioned discovery of Bigfoot would justify that fear in spades. Forest management in the Pacific Northwest will never be the same after the spotted owl. After Bigfoot, Gifford Pinchot’s agency and its mission would have to be entirely reinvented.
For example, the McCoy Timber Sales Draft Environmental Impact Statement (which would allow logging of more old-growth hemlock and noble fir in the heart of the Dark Divide) will have to be completely recast in light of Judge Dwyer, President Clinton’s Timber Plan, and the owls, which turn out to be more populous in the inner Divide than elsewhere in the forest. Logging is taking place there now and will surely go on in the future. But it won’t be the same show as before. If the Forest Plan had a new overlay for its maps, showing the suspected range of Bigfoot, it would not be a whole new ball game; it would be completely out of the park.
Given such a prospect, grim from the standpoint of those whose present and future depends on the flow of logs from the public lands, is it so surprising that Bigfoot is considered bad news? I can imagine—for imagining might be all it is—the timber lobby closing ranks behind closed lips, uttering nothing of what they know perfectly well to be up there, whether flesh or fancy. This attitude was typified in an article entitled “See No Sasquatch” by Bill Palmroth in the winter 1992 issue of Oregon Fish and Wildlife Journal. After relating an experience that “was enough to convince me of Sasquatch’s probable existence,” Palmroth wrote, “If you were to report it, there’s always the chance that the federal government could suddenly become interested in Bigfoot. If so, your logging operation probably would be suspended indefinitely while the Feds took time to study the creature’s habitat requirements.” He went on, “That would leave you in a real fix. What’s more, any habitat study by the government would very likely lead to a Bigfoot recovery program necessitating additional forest set-asides.”
Palmroth’s final paragraph, framed on the magazine page by ads for contract logging companies, encapsulated the flavor of the rumor I’d heard: “Your smartest option,” he wrote, “is to keep any future Bigfoot sightings under your hat, especially if you’re on public land. As my grandfather used to say, ‘Say nothing and saw wood!’”
I was surprised, then, to learn that timber giant Weyerhaeuser Company had actually solicited sightings. A notice headed “Anyone Seen a Sasquatch?” appeared in the November 1969 issue of Weyerhaeuser News, the in-house organ, asking any employees who had seen or heard of Sasquatch to report their stories. This was accompanied by a cartoon of a huge, grinning Bigfoot wearing a Weyco hardhat and standing behind two men, one of whom asks, “Where did you say that new guy is from?”
A follow-up piece appeared in February 1970. The substantial, unsigned article contained a survey of the Sasquatch situation in a rather flip voice, an interview with Roger Patterson, photographs of him with casts of prints, and a frame from his film. It also included several employee responses to the prior query. Helen Upperman of Tacoma sent a wonderfully apropos quotation from Cavafy: “It is night and the barbarians have not come, and some men have arrived from the frontiers and they say that there are no barbarians any longer and now, what will become of us without barbarians? These people were a kind of solution.” Tom Adams of Fontana, California, suggested that Bigfoot, like gorillas not so long ago, might be thought mere figments because they have “not been seen by civilized men from the intellectual world.”
The other responses were joky and distinctly less inspiring. The Aberdeen foreman (mercifully unnamed) sent a letter that today would not get past the transom, or he’d be out over it: “Here is a picture of my secretary. Do you suppose she is really the Sasquatch? There is quite a resemblance to the picture . . . If you think there is a possibility this is the real thing, please let me know so I can make arrangements for a new girl.”
Finally, the December 1974 issue of Weyerhaeuser Today (as it was renamed) carried a column headed “Employees to Be on Lookout for Sasquatch.” Peter Byrne, then at the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles, had appealed to the company to put its fifty-seven thousand employees on the alert for sightings. John Hauberg of Seattle, identified as “a long-time member of our board of directors,” gave his support. “It seems to me,” he was quoted as saying, “that Weyerhaeuser might lend a hand through the many hundreds of our people who live in the Douglas-fir region in areas where sightings have been claimed.”
This hardly sounds like a company trying to suppress knowledge of Bigfoot on its lands or on public lands where it logs. On the other hand, nothing seems to have emerged in the twenty years since this request, even though loggers routinely account for a large percentage of reports. A cynic might ask, what better way to prevent information getting out than to call it in to HQ? At least that way it could be monitored for any alarming details that might prove threatening. A more generous interpretation would take Weyco’s reputation as a relatively progressive company at face value and assume that it truly intends to share any monster data that come out of its woods. We’ll not know until the day they hold the press conference.
What about Bill Palmroth’s allegation that the feds would lock up the woods once a good report came in? And what has the official response been so far? I am aware of on
ly two. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was petitioned to list Bigfoot as an endangered species on an emergency basis at a time when armed expeditions were at a peak. The Portland office failed to advance the petition through channels, reasoning that it did not contain substantial data and that the Endangered Species Act did not provide for the listing or study of cryptids (unknown species). This was probably the correct response in legal and biological terms, although one might have hoped that FWS would query serious searchers and examine the literature and available evidence. But until the species is demonstrated and named, the feds will not touch it. This should give some comfort to “wise use” types who believe that the government is doing backflips to list everything in sight in order to undermine the economy and ruin their livelihoods.
The other governmental response to Bigfoot actually emanated from the sedate Army Corps of Engineers. Long known for their massive concrete works, including a large number of pork-barrel dams, the corps began to change its mission and its image in the 1970s. One of their projects was to prepare environmental atlases of certain states, Washington being one. Under fauna the corps listed Bigfoot and said: “Reported to feed on vegetation and some meat. The Sasquatch is covered with long hair, except for the face and hands, and has a distinctly humanlike form.” It called the Sasquatch agile and strong, with good night vision and great shyness, “leaving minimal evidence of its presence.”
While the army did not come right out and say that Sasquatch occurs in Washington, it discussed the subject seriously at some length and included a map of sightings. The compilers, with the U.S. Army’s imprimatur, classified the animal’s existence as not unlikely. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar, five-year atlas project surprised many by its open-mindedness. Bigfoot researchers found it refreshing that an agency concerned with the most concrete of matters could also attend openly to hairy giants. Conspiracy or not, the U.S. Forest Service has shown no such willingness to discuss the animal in official publications.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 27
