In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond

by John Zada

  I nod. We both turn away. And neither of us mentions it again.*

  * The German American cultural anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), who spent forty years traveling through northwest coast communities and documenting traditional tales, wrote of the creatures: “The Dzonoq!wa have black bodies; eyes wide open, but set so deep in the head that they cannot see well. They are twice the size of a man. They are described as giants, and as stout. Their hands are hairy. Generally, the Dzonoq!wa who appears in the story is a female. She has large hanging breasts. She is so strong that she can tear down trees. The Dzonoq!wa can travel underground. When speaking … [her] voice is so loud it makes the roof boards shake” See Boas, Franz. Bella Bella Tales. Boston: American Folklore Society, vol. 25, 1932, pp. 142–45.

  * A BBC Two television presenter hoaxed viewers in 1969 by saying he had obtained film clips of a famous 1920s comedian known as “The Great Pismo.” When he showed the fraudulent clips of Pismo to people, and/or asked them about the performer, many remembered him, sometimes vividly.

  * “In recent years Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus fossils have been found together at a site in Vietnam and another in China, evidence that the giant ape and humans coexisted,” Michael McLeod reports, in The Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 161.

  * Heffernan also writes: “People are very resistant to changing what they know how to do, what they have expertise in and certainly what they have economic investment in.” Heffernan, Margaret. Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. London: Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 51.

  * See Addendum 1 for Mary’s interesting, verbatim account of that incident.

  * Other First Nations in British Columbia, including the Nisga’a and the Tahltan, oppose bans on the grizzly hunt, largely for economic reasons.

  * There’s a remarkable epilogue to my attempts to find out about the strange events surrounding the so-called Hoodoo Valley—proof that all stories find their ending. See Addendum 2.

  7

  OCEAN FALLS

  (LAIQ)

  Sasquatch is a fulsome liminal symbol, containing fundamental paradoxes of being and non-being, mind and matter, life and death. It straddles and incorporates boundaries that we consider absolute, that are fundamentally required by our system of rationality. To the extent that it is as it appears to be—a being of the mind which leaves footprints in the earth—Sasquatch remains absolutely inexplicable, a genuine mystery.

  —Marjorie M. Halpin, Manlike Monsters on Trial

  Tales of haunted valleys. Hairy mini-men with a bad attitude. Shaggy colossi shaking log cabins to their foundations. James Bond–style speedboat adventures. Bear politics. Environmental wars. At most I had been expecting just a handful of Sasquatch reports. Instead the floodgates had opened, sweeping me along in the deluge. There is simply too much to digest at once.

  I book myself a spot on the Queen of Chilliwack, a three-hundred-foot passenger ferry that carries me, slowly, methodically, and soberly, to the next precinct of this adventure. I forgo the action-hero dramatics of floatplane and speedboat, opting for something calmer, less kinetic. I need an interval of perspective.

  My next stop is the all but abandoned pulp and paper mill community of Ocean Falls, located in Heiltsuk territory at the head of Cousins Inlet. The ferry journey, beginning in Bella Bella, is a circuitous, full-day affair, first heading north along the Inside Passage route to the village of Klemtu, in Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory, before doubling back and then turning east through the upper channels of the inlet system toward Ocean Falls.

  Earlier, in Bella Bella, snide remarks had followed any mention I made of taking the ferry. The government-run ferry monopoly is widely considered overpriced and inefficient, the product of an inept bureaucracy. Though many locals depend on its services, it’s reviled with the intensity of an oppressed people’s hatred for their dictator. But I have a fondness for ferries. Having spent my early travel years plying every possible ferry route in the Mediterranean, often sleeping on the deck, I learned to appreciate their austerity and patient plodding. The slow-rolling vistas and the sense of impending arrival set to the smell of oily grime on metal, sea breeze, and engine exhaust can, strangely, have an almost soothing effect.

  The Queen of Chilliwack feels, in that sense, familiar as it plows leisurely through the forest-lined arteries of ocean. On the front deck, a few dozen tourists lean over the railings, gazing toward the rugged slopes of Swindle and Dowager Islands. I find myself thinking about Leonard Ellis, the former bear hunter turned bear-viewing guide from Bella Coola. Though he offers no obvious connection with the Sasquatch, I’m eager to visit this controversial mountain man again. The more I hear of him, the more I envision an antihero, a kind of Clint Eastwood cowboy.

  While waiting to catch the Chilliwack in Bella Bella, I brought up Ellis with Ian McAllister at Pacific Wild. Ian, who has butted heads with Ellis many times over the latter’s bear and wolf hunts, described him as a hard—but also charismatic—man. That second quality chimed more with my memory of him.

  “He’s a skilled predator who’s bagged a lot of animals,” Ian said. He took a moment to mull his next words, before deciding to say nothing else.

  The Queen of Chilliwack docks in Klemtu’s bay shortly after noon to a litany of metallic screeches and clanging noises. The hamlet of 450 people, a cluster of homes set in a few rows, hugs the curving bay beneath a pair of scruffy conical hills. I go ashore for the afternoon and find many of Klemtu’s residents, whole families, crowded outside the boat. For a moment, I think they’re a welcoming committee for someone important getting off the boat. The Kitasoo/Xai’xais have a reputation for being the friendliest First Nation community on the coast. But then residents impatiently board the ship. I learn that the townsfolk gather weekly to have lunch in the ferry’s cafeteria.

  This is my second visit to Klemtu. I had come here by floatplane as part of my magazine assignment the year before. At the time, Klemtu, like other nearby communities, was experiencing a surge in reported Sasquatch activity. Kitasoo/Xai’xais territory has a long history of reports, with documented cases going back to the 1930s—long before the words Bigfoot and Sasquatch became commonplace. Residents here claim some of the creatures live on the shores of Kitasoo Lake, nestled in a bowl in the mountains just above the community, which serves as the town’s water reservoir. Sasquatch sightings over the decades have always come in periodic waves. During my previous visit, the creatures were showing themselves again after years of inactivity.

  In the few hours I have in Klemtu I visit the Spirit Bear Lodge—a world-class ecotourist bear-viewing resort, owned and run by the Kitasoo, that has completely revitalized the community. While there, I run into Charlie Mason—a jovial storyteller and hereditary chief. I ask him about Bigfoot activity in the village. He tells me the earlier spike in incidents has already dropped off.

  “How do you account for that?” I ask him.

  Mason shrugs his shoulders. “That’s just how it is with them Sasquatch,” he says, in his characteristically baritone voice. “You won’t see ‘em for years, and then suddenly they’re back like they never left. Then one day, you realize they’re gone again—poof—like they were never there to begin with.”

  There one moment, gone the next.

  Is this the cunning of some unknown being? Or the shenanigans of the most complex piece of machinery in the known universe—the human mind?

  I’ve lost track of time. The long blast of the Queen of Chilliwack‘s horn, signaling its imminent departure, yanks me away from Klemtu’s relative normalcy—a state that will prove to be short-lived.

  The Chilliwack pushes on into the advancing dusk. I am standing on deck, alone, as we backtrack through Heiltsuk territory, crawling through the channels and passes dividing jigsaw slabs of land. As we go from Return Channel to Fisher Channel, the mountains, with their heads above the clouds, transform into shadowy prese
nces. At midnight a distant light appears through the sea of blackness at the head of Cousins Inlet. The Chilliwack’s intercom announces our impending arrival in Ocean Falls. I gather my things and queue up with an older couple from Oregon at the ship’s exit. As the ferry pulls up to the illuminated pier another message comes over the intercom warning passengers disembarking with their cars not to drive while talking on their cell phones, or they may incur a hefty fine.

  Two ferry employees walk by as the message is broadcast. One of them laughs at the announcement.

  “What’s so funny?” his colleague asks.

  “That message. There’s no cell-phone reception in town. No cars are getting off the boat here. And you wouldn’t be able to find a policeman in this place if your life depended on it.”

  Blessed with a charming name, Ocean Falls is an outlier, a place neither here nor there. The carcass of a once thriving pulp and paper mill metropolis, today’s village of two dozen people is beyond description. How does one define a locale that is at once a ghost town, a squatters’ camp, a settlers’ outpost, and a safe haven for misfits and runaways, situated somewhere between lost and forgotten?

  It all started with a waterfall.

  In the industrial boom of the late nineteenth century, the future site of Ocean Falls—the location of an old Heiltsuk village—was earmarked for its potential to generate hydroelectricity. The crystalline waters of a stunning glacial lake (later named Link Lake) that emptied into Cousins Inlet, below it, made the location the perfect spot to situate energy-dependent industry.

  Construction on a pulp and paper mill began in 1909, followed later by a dam to power it. Meanwhile, Heiltsuk residents were encouraged to relocate. Soon a hospital, a school, a hotel, and numerous homes and apartment buildings had been built to house and service the people who would run this factory deep in the heart of the northern rain forest. Within a few decades, Ocean Falls, a company-run labor-camp paradise, would swell to five thousand people, becoming the largest pulp mill town in British Columbia.

  Archival pictures taken at the town’s apogee in the 1950s show row upon row of terraced, barracks-style white homes sitting beneath cumulus-like plumes of vapor spewing from smokestacks ringing the gargantuan mill. At the time, any job in Ocean Falls was considered a plum position. The mill and town, owned first by Pacific Mills, until 1954, and then by Crown Zellerbach, until 1972, provided for every need of the employee. In addition to a decent income, workers received lodging, meals at the mill cafeteria, and a list of social and sporting clubs to choose from. Forest cottages lined the shores of Cousins Inlet and Link Lake for those who wanted to escape the monotonous work grind but didn’t have it in them to make the long and tiring pilgrimage to vacation spots in the outside world, and back in again.

  As all societies do, Ocean Falls would boast its own milestones and achievements. Its man-made wonder, its Parthenon, was twelve miles of boardwalk that crisscrossed the town. A huge swimming pool produced a pedigree of world-class swimmers. One third of Canada’s national team at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki were swimmers from Ocean Falls. For a period, the town was considered so important that it had its own daily news pages in the Vancouver Sun.

  Sometime in the 1950s (no one remembers exactly when), the residents of this exurban outpost in the rain forest started referring to themselves as the “Rain People.” By some unknowable configuration of air currents, mountain relief, and sea, Ocean Falls was said to get more rain than any other place on the British Columbia coast.* Close to two hundred inches fell annually on average. It is now an accepted though apocryphal theory that the noxious gas cloud emanating from the pulp mill and hanging almost permanently over the town created its own weather system, amplifying the rainfall. Whatever the truth, those old downpours remain the stuff of legend. The Rain People emblemized this mythology by adopting as their official mascot and corporate logo a Disneyesque Daffy Duck knockoff holding an umbrella happily over its head. The weather may have been uncooperative, but life for Ocean Fallers couldn’t have been better.

  And then everything changed.

  As in other places on the coast, boom went to bust with little or no warning. By the early 1970s, Ocean Falls’ viability became increasingly tenuous. Geographical isolation, obsolete machinery, growing competition, rising overhead, and shrinking markets made Ocean Falls less and less profitable for its owners. In 1973, Crown Zellerbach pulled the plug on the mill’s operations. The provincial government stepped in at the last minute and bought Ocean Falls to keep it alive. But persistent fiscal issues dogged the town. By 1980, the community was shuttered for good, consigned to the long list of canneries and sawmills whose lifeless, rotting husks pepper British Columbia’s coast.

  Today, a dystopian mood has replaced the mill steam hanging over the town. Many of the old derelict buildings left standing—including the four-hundred-room Martin Hotel (once the largest lodging in the province), a few low-rise apartments, the school, and a cluster of homes—have succumbed to the tenacious reclamation program of the rain forest. The aesthetic of abandonment is reminiscent of Chernobyl. Rotted homes covered in lichens and moss. Foliage punching through the buckling pavement of old tennis courts. Forests of berry bushes growing into porches and doorways. A mostly unseen legacy of pollution also adheres to the place. For decades, the pulp mill spewed a cocktail of toxins into the air and water, including dioxins, PCPs, nitrogen oxides, and heavy metals. Crabs and prawns caught in the ocean closest to town are reportedly often deformed. The few fishing enthusiasts in town head far out into the inlet.

  To be fair, a spark of life remains within the festering ruins. Since the town was shuttered, a handful of people have come to live here, and they love the place; their numbers triple or quadruple in summer when boaters moor in town for days at a time. A few historic buildings have survived with their dignity intact. And the old hydroelectric dam still generates power—not only for Ocean Falls but for Bella Bella and Denny Island, too.

  For all its drawbacks Ocean Falls manages to cling on, sustained by an enduring nostalgia, the beauty of the surrounding mountains, and the promise of an unhurried existence devoid of officialdom’s nettlesome interference.

  It’s appropriate, even poetic, that my first experience of rain in the Great Bear Rainforest on this trip comes on my first full day in Ocean Falls. It lasts only twenty minutes—in marked contrast to the weeklong downpours that took place during the town’s golden age. But it’s enough to tear me away from my breakfast in the dining room of Darke Waters, the lodge where I’m staying. Through the window, I watch raindrops the size of gum balls lash the asphalt. The mountains and their wraiths of cloud, visible earlier that morning, are blotted out in the bland, impenetrable gray of precipitation.

  There are a few others staying at Darke Waters. The Oregon couple from the ferry sit at the back of the dining room. At another table are four rugged-looking middle-aged men in construction gear, laborers from out of town who are in Ocean Falls to make repairs to broken sections of the dam.

  Turning pancakes and strips of bacon, maestro-like, in the fully exposed kitchen is Rob Darke—a co-owner of the lodge. A forty-nine-year-old former ski-hill manager from Grande Prairie, Alberta, he has an eighties rocker look and a tendency to cackle at his own jokes.

  “We’re finally back to some decent weather around here,” Rob says, leaving the kitchen with a breakfast plate in his hand to sit at my table. “Terrible with all that sunshine. Hahahaha!“

  Rob’s wife and business partner, Corrina Darke, wipes down a nearby table.

  “I’ll take the sun any day,” Corrina says. “The last thing we need is to get depressed around here.”

  Corrina, formerly, was a graphic designer with the Grande Prairie Herald Tribune newspaper. When she was laid off after thirty years of service, Rob, a fishing fanatic, convinced her to support him in his dream of owning a fishing lodge. Both had grown tired of life in Grande Prairie, a predominantly white, working-class community ridden wi
th crime and recently dubbed “the most dangerous city in Canada.” A simple Google search was all it took to find the property, which, to their surprise, had sat idle on the market for several months. The twenty-three-room, two-story European-style chalet had been built in the mid-1940s as a women’s dormitory. Following a few other incarnations, the building became a lodge once the mill closed down. It remained one of the most intact structures in town. The Darkes purchased it for just over $100,000.

  It’s the couple’s second season of operation. The lodge is still a work in progress—and running it has come with a steep learning curve. Renovations continue, and there still aren’t many guests. But the place is in working order and is slowly accruing charms. Framed nautical charts, old black-and-white photos, and drawings of locomotives hang in the hallways and rooms. Vintage knickknacks looted from the ghost town and placed in the rooms lend the lodge a retro feel.

  Suddenly, a bespectacled woman in her sixties saunters into the dining room. She says hello to us, pours herself a coffee, and sits at our table. Corrina introduces her to me as Glenna, before adding proudly: “She’s one of the original residents of Ocean Falls.”

  The woman smirks. “I’m the longest resident here.”

  “How long is longest?” I ask.

  “Oh, about forty-one years and counting.”

  Rob gets up. “Her family’s been here even longer. She’s a kind of encyclopedia about this place.”

  “John’s collecting stories about the Sasquatch,” Corrina says to Glenna, excitedly.

  “Sas-quatch?” Glenna says, unimpressed. “You mean like … Bigfoot? No, if there was anything like that here, I’d have heard about it.”

  I turn to Corrina. “And you and Rob haven’t heard anything.”

  “Sorry, we’ve got nothing,” she says, shaking her head before turning to look at Rob, who’s pouring himself a coffee at the waiters’ station. “Well, except for …”