COVER STORY
H A I RY H O M I N I D D E P T.
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On
the
Trail
of
IGNORED
BEASTS
Cryptozoologists head
into the wilderness
looking for something
bigger than themselves.
Suzannah Showler reports
from Sasquatch country.
P h o t o g r a p h s b y S y lva i n D u m a i s .
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HOMAS STEENBURG went into the Brit-
ish Columbia wilderness in April 1986,
and he didn’t come out again until Halloween. He was twenty-five years old
and had just left the Canadian army
after eight years stationed in Victoria
and Calgary. He had several months’
leave at his disposal and he was going
to look for Sasquatch.
One day in early summer, he was
searching for prints in the soft dirt
shoulder of an unpaved forest service road northeast of Whistler. As he
scanned the ground for signs of the
Sasquatch, he heard a noise. Suddenly, something huge was charging at
him, “like a freight train.” He started
shimmying up a cluster of young, thin
trees, but claws grabbed him by the
backpack and dragged him toward the ground. “For whatever reason, she let go,
and I climbed right back up those trees,” Steenburg says.
Turning his head, Steenburg saw that the creature was no Sasquatch, but a
grizzly bear. The bear shuffled and huffed around the base of the trees before
lumbering back towards deeper forest. Steenburg’s backpack was shredded, and
two of the bear’s claws had left puncture wounds in his lower back—he still has
the scars today.
He was shaken, but Steenburg wasn’t ready to abandon the hunt. A few weeks
later, an American couple said they’d seen something pace through their camp on
the north bank of the Chehallis River. Steenburg went to the site near Chilliwack,
found his first Sasquatch tracks and never looked back. “That sealed my fate,” he
says. “If it wasn’t for that find in 1986, I might have given up on the Sasquatch
mystery and gone on to what my ex-wife used to call ‘more important things.’”
Today, Steenburg wears round, wire-rimmed glasses and an over-sized khaki
fishing vest with dozens of pockets. He drives a conifer-green SUV with “Sasquatch Research” and his phone number printed in big, white letters on the
side. Steenburg runs a one-man cryptozoology operation; he’s a kind of freelance
’squatcher-at-large. In Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia—the unofficial
capital of Sasquatch country—he is known as the man to call if you see anything
strange in the woods. “Hopefully they find me instead of one of the nuts,” Steenburg says, speaking around a pipe hanging out of one side of his mouth.
26
Broken down into its component
Greek parts, cryptozoology means “the
study of hidden animals.” Hinted at
by folklore, legend and eye-witness
accounts, the subjects of cryptozoologists’ dogged pursuit are creatures
not proven to exist. (“Not yet proven,” cryptozoologists hasten to add.)
Famous examples of these unknown
animals—called cryptids—include the
elusive, white-haired Yeti of the Himalayas (aka the Abominable Snowman);
the long, rippling Canadian lake serpent Ogopogo; the spiny, goat-sucking
reptile Chupacabra of the Americas;
and, of course, perhaps best-known,
the hairy bipedal hominid Bigfoot,
called Sasquatch in Canada.
The study of cryptozoology is still
young enough—and fringe enough—
that to even call it a field is controversial. There’s no governing body monitoring the practice, you can’t earn a
degree in it and, except in rare cases of
oddball private patronage, no one will
pay you to do it. The only requirement
for being a cryptozoologist is to call
yourself one. As a hobby, it’s hunkered
down where science and not-quite-science meet, attracting its share of the
out-there.
When modern cryptozoology
emerged in the mid-twentieth century,
its proponents kept up a tone of academic seriousness and there remains
a movement among some cryptozoologists towards rigorous application
of scientific methodology. These researchers want their work to be appreciated as a valid offshoot of ortho27
dox zoology, rather than a pursuit of
the paranormal. Convinced there are
creatures roaming woods and waters
that still haven’t found a place on the
officially sanctioned species list, these
self-described investigators hunt for
evidence, hoping to find the definitive
proof that will earn their cryptid—and
maybe themselves—a place in mainstream science.
IN 1962, philosopher Thomas Kuhn
coined the term “paradigm shift” to
explain how science moves forward in
fits of upheaval, repeatedly razing and
rebuilding assumptions. In the lulls between scientific revolutions, evidence
that contradicts the way we see the
world is either missed entirely, or written off as an inconsequential anomaly.
But as out-lying evidence mounts and
reaches a critical mass, what we hold
as scientific truth must eventually be
overhauled. Paradigms that gain traction—the Copernican cosmos, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity, to name a few—cause whole-scale
turnovers in how we think, forcing
normative and radical world-views to
swap places. Once the paradigm shifts,
we can never go back to seeing things
as we once did.
While early adopters of soon-to-prevail paradigms will later be validated as
harbingers of reason, they invariably
start out looking like crackpots. And
not every paradigm will shift. Many
theories from the fringes of science
never garner enough evidence to crawl
their way into favour. But that doesn’t
stop many believers from trying.
The first definitive piece of cryptozoological literature—a more than
600-page tome published in 1955 by
a Belgian-French zoologist who went
crypto—was called, in its original
French, Sur la piste des bêtes ignorées.
Literally translated: on the trail of ignored beasts. Cryptozoology has always
hinted at the loneliness that comes from
looking where no one else is, listening
in the bush for the rustle of something
cast aside and following where it may
lead. Cryptozoology offers the hope
that, somewhere beyond the beaten
trail, every ignored beast has a path.
THERE MIGHT BE NO BETTER PLACE on
earth to stage a game of inter-species
hide-and-seek than here in Canada,
with its landscape of millennia-old
trees and ocean-sized lakes. Canada
has one of the lowest population densi-
ties of any industrialized country; only
3.7 people per square kilometre. When
it comes to Man vs. Nature, the odds
aren’t in our favour.
Least of all in British Columbia,
where nature has the upper hand in
both size and diversity, scape-shifting
from rainforest to mountain to desert
to ocean. Everything here is oversized
and surreal, possessing the kind of
beauty that saturates as much as de-
and Ocean Atmospheric Sciences at
the University of British Columbia.
The BCSCC’s mission is to support the
study of cryptozoology with a scientific bent. To this end, they conduct field
research, maintain archives and do
education and outreach. They believe
they’ve identified dozens of cryptids in
BC alone, and they support field work
abroad.
The BCSCC is arguably the only con-
lights the senses, that seems to veer towards the sublime, the too-much. Even
without the embellishment of undiscovered creatures, British Columbia’s
natural spaces are Sendakian. This is
where the wild things are.
The British Columbia Scientific
Cryptozoology Club is coming up on
its quarter-century anniversary. It was
founded in 1989 by current president
John Kirk, the late James Clark, and
Dr. Paul Leblond, a now-retired professor from the Department of Earth
temporary cryptozoology organization
that defines itself by its relationship to
science. These days, the field is largely populated by ardent, cryptid-specific groups with chaotic websites and
fractious online message boards. (For
example, on “The Bigfoot Forums” a
recent thread, entitled “Messages from
Uncle Hairy,” discusses a member’s psychic communion with Sasquatch before
the conversation devolves into in-fighting and a moderator intervenes.)
The BCSCC makes every effort to
28
distinguish themselves, trying to wield
the tools offered by science in their amateur investigations. While the BCSCC
members might believe in cryptids,
they self-identify as skeptics.
“Time-keeping is the last thing a
Sasquatch investigator is capable of
doing,” Kirk declares. Things aren’t
going as planned at the Club’s annual
barbecue. A rogue bear was sighted at
their usual venue in Sasquatch Provincial Park, so the BCSCC has settled for
a manicured patch of grass at an RV
park closer to town. Worse, the guy
who’s supposed to bring the meat has
gone AWOL.
Finally, Bill Miller pulls up in an
open-air UTV—normally used to ferry
passengers to Sasquatch-sighting locations as part of the adventure-tourism
company he runs with Steenburg—and
a cooler of hamburgers, hot dogs, and
sausages is carried from the trailer in
back. The club’s VP and webmaster
fires up a portable grill, and the de
facto annual general meeting of cryptozoologists kicks off.
Once a year, the BCSCC’s membership is invited to get together at Harrison Lake to discuss the latest in their
field: new research, promising sightings, tricks of the trade. Members come
every year, Kirk says, because cryptozoologists are more than just dedicated:
“They’re like addicts. They’ve got to
get their fix.”
Kirk has a voice uncannily like Alan
Rickman’s, with the same half-muffled
authority, like someone expounding
on a dialectic with a blanket over his
head. Dressed in camo flood pants
and a sleeveless black T-shirt, with
clip-on shades on his sunglasses and
a Liverpool FC baseball cap over his
long, dark-brown hair, Kirk looks like
he’s been cast in a Harry Potter spinoff
where Professor Snape cuts loose and
goes on vacation.
I ask Kirk how much time he devotes to cryptozoology. “Too much,
eh?” he asks his wife beside him.
Between staying up-to-date on the literature, writing his own articles, and
handling the club’s newsletter, he says
it’s about five hours. A week? I ask.
No, he says, a day. Not counting time
in the field.
On shows like the Discovery Channel’s Finding Bigfoot, investigators
thrash and bellow their way through
the woods, always just barely missing
a cryptid encounter. It’s Sasquatch cast
as a more dangerous Polkaroo. For seri-
ous researchers, the reality is far more
mundane: drive into the backcountry
or to the site of an alleged sighting,
and very carefully pick over trees,
mud, bushes, and logs. The aim isn’t
to encounter the creature face-to-face,
but rather to find physical evidence
of its presence: footprints, hair, tissue,
Sasquatch scat. “On TV you see these
bigfoot guys go tramping through the
bush at high speeds. What are you going to find that way?” John Kirk asks.
“You’ve got to work like a forensic
identification technician.” Kirk might
spend a whole day combing a small
patch of woods; interesting finds might
come only once or twice in a lifetime.
The BCSCC members show me plaster casts of famous Sasquatch footprints. These aren’t originals; they’re
second and third generation, casts of
casts of casts, but still, there’s something unnerving about them. These
could very easily be the work of hoaxers, but they’re certainly not bear
prints, or random squelches in the
mud, or anything else from nature as
we know it. They look like human
footprints, but much, much bigger.
And there are details. On one, it looks
like the front of the foot has pressed
down and gripped the mud, the earth
rising under and between the toes before whatever it was pushed off and
walked away.
Some of the better-known cryptids
the BCSCC covers don’t leave footprints. They’re water-bound; Ogopogo, the huge, lean lake serpent of the
Okanagan, and Cadborosaurus Willsi,
an ocean-dwelling creature said to inhabit British Columbia’s coastal waters. In Victoria, BCSCC members run
a surveillance operation called CaddyScan: a CCTV camera recording the
waves over Cadboro Bay, hoping to
spot something more. The camera’s
been running for fourteen years. No
luck yet.
Cryptozoologists go searching in
their spare time, not as a job. Many BCSCC members believe that if they were
able to get out more often, they’d have
greater success. And they’d be happy
to. After all, “A bad day of ‘squatchin’
is better than a good day of work.”
But this is no easy-going hobby. The
places cryptids might turn up are wild
and isolated, and investigators must
beware of all kinds of dangers: wildlife,
harsh geography, even grow-ops with
their booby traps. “It is wilderness,
and it’s not for the timid,” Steenburg
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says, recalling his grizzly encounter.
“There is a chance that you will run
into something that may want to eat
you.” Most go into the woods armed
with emergency supplies, navigational
tools and often guns.
And of course, no ‘squatcher is
without recording technology in case
they actually find something: surveillance equipment, audio recorders,
top-of-the-line cameras. Cryptozoology’s not cheap. BCSCC VP Adam McGirr estimates he’s invested a good ten
grand, and he hasn’t been at it for as
long as some. By day, McGirr works
as a technical writer for BC Housing,
where, he says, he’s “out of the closet”
as a cryptozoologist. His work with the
BCSCC, however, is his “dream job.”
On the weekends, when it’s nice out,
he’ll sometimes set up a booth in Vancouver’s Stanley Park and, armed with
literature, he’ll chat with interested
passersby.
McGirr barbecues non-stop while
we talk. Two boxes of cookies go unopened, and even the chips are barely
touched: everyone here is hungry for
meat. John Kirk jams a wrinkled hot
dog into a bun alongside a hamburger patty and enjoys the meat-on-meat
mash-up. “The ultimate carnivore’s
meal,” he affirms between bites.
It’s generally thought that Sasquatch is omnivorous—it’s likely the
only way it could get enough calories
to stay alive. (Skeptics say there’s simply not enough space in the food chain
for a caloric vacuum Sasquatch’s size.)
Though the group theorizes about the
cryptid’s behavior based on eyewitness
accounts, Kirk is quick to emphasize
that nothing about Sasquatch can be
counted as certain. “There is no such
thing as a Sasquatch expert,” he says.
“Everything is hypothetical.”
The definition of a cryptid can be
as difficult to grasp as the creatures
themselves. Modern cryptozoologists
disagree about what is worth pursuing
at all. Do animals that are reported
far beyond the reaches of their known
habitat count? What about mythical
creatures that no one (or next to no
one) reports seeing, like unicorns, centaurs, or mermaids? Tug at the edges,
and “cryptid” could be opened up to include werewolves, aliens, even ghosts.
For those trying to gain legitimacy
in scientific circles, this kind of thing
is deadly. All it takes is one blog post
explaining the relationship between
Sasquatch and extra-terrestrials (and
there isn’t just one—there are many)
or one pseudo-scientific paper that
claims to have mapped the Sasquatch
genome and found the DNA of angels
(which happened in Texas just this
year) and a big, fat brush comes down
and paints all cryptozoologists the
same shade of crazy.
NOT EVERYONE WHO GETS into cryptids
is a lifer. Michael Woodley, a British
evolutionary psychologist, became interested in the field several years ago
as a graduate student. For academics,
territory not already mauled by other
researchers is a scarce resource, and
Woodley felt cryptozoology was full of
opportunities to do new, novel science.
After a flurry of academic output, however, he dropped it. “Essentially cryptozoology is not science,” he says now.
“I exhausted the possible space of all
scientific developments, shall we say.”
When he was still at it, Woodley
published several academic papers in
peer-reviewed journals, and a book
about sea serpent classifications. In one
paper, Woodley proposed a new nomenclature for describing cryptids using a
modification of mainstream zoological
classification. In another, he looked at
a Cadborosaurus case study by Edward
Bousfield and BCSCC founder Dr. Paul
Leblond and used a ranked index of
characteristics to show that what they
were touting as a baby Cadborosaurus
was, in fact, a pike fish.
To Woodley, the point was to do
good science. He thought that was
what cryptozoologists would want, too,
but not everyone shared his ambitions.
“It’s not true of all cryptozoologists, but
there’s a hardcore there that would be
very resistant to the de-amateurization
of the field,” he says. He sees a fundamental conflict they can’t seem to get
over: “There is an irony, an irreducible
pluralism, between these objectives
of cryptozoology: to obtain some kind
of mainstream credibility on the one
hand, whilst on the other hand there’s
this large following who are non-technical in orientation and who don’t really want their mysteries to be taken
away from them.” If a Sasquatch was
found, the cryptid would upgrade to
animal, and the whole operation would
drop the crypto- and find itself squarely
in zoology. But where would that leave
the amateur ‘squatchers?
“If and when—this is a big if and
a big when—a specimen is obtained,
guess what they’re going to do?” asks
Kirk. “They’re going to come in and
say ‘Okay, get out of the way now.’ No.
You’re not getting in the way.” “They”
are the scientists, the pros, the Man.
Though he can’t name names, he says
the BCSCC has made contacts at major
Canadian universities who are prepared to include them in the research
if they bring in a specimen. “We have
it all set up,” he says. “The protocols
are in place for us to say, ‘Okay, here it
is, let’s go.’”
Just talking about what might happen if a Sasquatch was actually discovered—the thing he’s been working towards for half of his life—Kirk sounds
nearly panicked. “Stuff science!” he
says, as close to yelling as I’ll ever hear
him. “Where were they when we, the
amateurs, were spending our own time
and money doing this? And here are
these Johnny-Come-Latelies taking the
ball and running with it. The ball belongs to us. That is a fact.”
Brian Regal, a science historian at
Keane University in New Jersey who
studies the tug-of-war between amateurs and scientists in the hunt for
cryptids, says the only advantage Kirk
and his like have comes from being ignored. Science thinks there’s nothing
there to find, but if they were proven wrong, they wouldn’t waste time
choking down their humble pie. “If it
was found to be real, the mainstream
scientific community would move in
and take over,” Regal says. “You could
still be an amateur and go around the
woods and take pictures and things,
but as far as real research is concerned,
that would be out of [amateur ‘squatchers’] hands. Very few of them have the
kind of training you need to do it.”
Michael Woodley’s post-cryptid focus, on the development of human intelligence over generations, has taught
him something about his one-time interest: he says both the desire to be
tantalized by mystery, and faith in
our beliefs in spite of evidence to the
contrary, are hard-wired in the human
brain. “People have these heuristics at
their disposal, these biases of processing and reason which make them want
to see monsters, which make them
want to think that the world is a more
fantastical, surreal place than is actually the case. To take that away and replace it with a sterile, cold, fact-driven
scientific model of reality is something
that is deeply disconcerting.”
Tallying up the amateurs’ batting
record is hard, because it depends on
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who you ask. Cryptozoologists have
their wins: totally, definitively-real species like the okapi, the bondegezou,
and even the mountain gorilla, all of
which have crossed over from folklore
to reality. Once considered so far-flung
into myth territory that it was called
the “African unicorn,” the okapi—an
improbable-looking ruddy, stubby giraffe with zebra legs—is widely considered cyrptozoology’s biggest get. Its
existence was confirmed by amateurs
in 1901.
But you don’t have to be a cryptozoologist to find new animals. Scientists
practice what amounts to cryptozoology all the time, hunting for new species
based on ancient and contemporary local accounts. In academic circles, this is
called practicing ethno-zoology rather
than goin’ ‘squatchin’, but the idea is
the same: follow a story into the woods
hoping to emerge with something new.
The difference, some will tell you,
is that modern cryptozoologists have
whiffed at most, if not every, ball
they’ve been thrown. But they never
stop coming up to bat. This persistence
is one of the things that discredits
them. No cryptid is ever dropped entirely. There is always someone, somewhere still on the case.
JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE the barbecue,
two new Sasquatch videos surfaced
from Mission, B.C. The first records a
group of Chinese tourists crowding the
side of the road, photographing something unidentifiably ape-like not far
into the woods. The second shows a
dark, upright creature strolling casually
along a ridge near a logging road. The
shot’s not close enough to be able to say
how big the creature is, or how much it
might resemble a man in a gorilla suit.
The BCSCC encounters a lot of
hoaxes, and they don’t have high hopes
about the validity of the Mission videos. The biggest red flag: though the
videos were allegedly taken by anonymous sources, they’ve been brought
forward by the creators of “Legend
Trackers,” a site-specific smartphone
app for virtual reality cryptid-hunting
in real places. Though most hoaxers
are just looking for attention or fame,
the stink of profit-grubbing tends to
diminish the field’s credibility. “When
you’ve been in this business a while,
you develop a good dose of common
sense,” Steenburg says.
The BCSCC has heard rumours that
Mission is planning to rebrand itself
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as “the gateway to Sasquatch country” in an effort to draw tourists. The
same thing has happened where we’re
camped out today: for many years, Harrison Hot Springs tried to disassociate
itself from the embarrassing Sasquatch
connection, but last year, the municipal government and the Sts’ailes First
Nations revived Sasquatch Days, a celebration of local culture that hadn’t
taken place since 1938. (The word
Sasquatch is in fact an anglicization
of the Sts’ailes word for “wild man.”)
The event is now shaping up to be an
annual thing. The village has found
that there’s an economic upside to embracing their monsters.
On the one hand, the BCSCC is
happy to see cryptids enter the popular imagination; on the other, anything
that draws cryptozoology closer to entertainment and further from science is
worrisome. Same goes for popular TV
shows like Monster Quest and Finding
Bigfoot. They know the stars of these
shows and like them well enough, but
they also think they’re sell-outs. “Those
guys can’t walk fifty feet without Bigfoot patting them on the butt,” an
American ’squatcher with an absurd
amount of surveillance equipment says.
They laugh about it, putting on southern accents and doing impressions of
the show’s more extreme moments, but
it also seems to depress them.
Some of the members of the BCSCC
have known each other for over twenty
years. They’ve seen the old guard of
investigators die off, all without seeing
the mystery solved. The grandfather of
all things Sasquatch, John Green, is the
last of that generation still standing.
“He’s the A-1, number one guy,” Kirk
says. He lives not far from where we’re
sitting. At eighty-six, he didn’t make it
out today, though the group says he still
gets out in the field.
Many long-time ’squatchers sacrifice more than just time and money.
“Cryptozoology has resulted in many divorces,” John Kirk admits. The
group talks about René Dahinden, a
contemporary of John Green’s who famously abandoned his family for what
he called “the big, hairy bastard.” He
spent a lifetime looking, and never saw
the beast. (Canadians might remember
Dahinden, with his deadpan delivery
and thick Swiss accent, as the star of
several Kokanee beer commercials in
the ‘90s.)
At the BCSCC barbecue, there are
just two women: the fiancée of a man
with large Sasquatch tattoos on his
arms, and Paula Kirk, John’s wife. Paula has been on the cryptozoology scene
since the early ‘90s, but sees herself as
more of an enthusiast than a researcher. She estimates that the community is
more than 90 percent men.
Kirk has been told she’s a “reverse
skeptic”: someone who believes everything is true until proven false. The
way she sees it, she isn’t looking to
find magic, she’s just open to it. “You
just have to be awake, alert to the idea
that you might see something,” she explains. “I see a bald eagle almost every
day. Now, why do I see one? Because
I’m looking up in the sky.”
And why should looking bother
anyone? To the non-believer, cryptozoology field research might seem like
nothing more than eccentrically motivated camping trips. Where’s the harm
in searching for something, whether or
not it’s really there?
The harm is that cryptozoologists
are not the only ones with a vested
interest in seeing mainstream science
proven wrong. There are many notquite and even far-from sciences jonesing for credibility, attention and money. Cryptozoologists are often counted
among warriors against academic science and its stranglehold on truth, held
up as an example of championing the
personal freedom to believe whatever
you want, evidence (or a lack of it)
notwithstanding.
Setting science up as a bastion in
want of a good storming puts cryptozoologists in the same camp as creationists, and the two are not just
hypothetical bedfellows; there’s a bid
on the part of creationists to co-opt the
pursuit of certain cryptids, believing
their existence to be the thread-pull
that will unravel Darwinian evolution.
Mokele Mbembe—an alleged sauropoda or “long-necked” dinosaur living
deep in the Congo Basin—has particularly caught the eye of fundamentalists,
who mistakenly believe that a modern dinosaur co-existing with humans
would corroborate a literal interpretation of Genesis. Most expeditions to
the Congo in search of Mokele Mbembe
have been executed and funded by
Young Earth creationists, and many
of these so-called scientific excursions
have doubled as missionary trips.
Daniel Loxton knows cryptozoology can act as a slippery slope to more
insidious ways of resisting science, but
the question of whether it’s ultimately
32
harmful is one he struggles with. An
editor at Junior Skeptic magazine and
co-author of a book that examines
cryptid case studies from a historical
perspective, he makes a living at debunking. But he stills sees a lot of good
in cryptozoology. As far as he’s concerned, the complicated mess of wheels
and pulleys behind the curtain is just
as entertaining as the illusion. He really loves cryptids—he just happens to
know they aren’t real.
“It’s easy for me to see cryptozoology as a gateway drug to good science,”
Loxton says. “There’s like seven billion of us: we can afford to have a few
people who flail around on the fringes.
Every once in a while they discover
something really interesting.”
SUBSCRIBING TO A PARADIGM is like put-
ting the world through Auto-Tune:
flick the switch, and the discordant,
random universe suddenly chimes together, falling into harmony with itself.
A paradigm won’t drag an erroneous
note all the way across the scale—it
will just nudge it into place, make it fit
in with what you’re already hearing.
In the key of a paradigm, the world
makes more sense. It becomes hard to
imagine how anyone could hear things
differently.
Cryptozoologists hope, and believe,
that their work will one day be validated as the cutting edge of science.
But it may offer a glimpse into the past
rather than the future. Cryptozoology
recalls an age of the scientist as intrepid explorer, when heading off into
the field meant travelling great distances into uncharted territory, investing
your money and risking your safety in
the pursuit of the unknown. It was a
time when more remained untouched.
When you peered into the woods, you
might see something no one else had
seen before. You just had to be brave
enough to look.
To cryptozoologists, it feels as
though evidence is mounting in the
case for the world they see. Being a
cryptozoologist is like living with the
feeling of something in your peripheral vision, the feeling of a word that’s
always on the tip of your tongue. “I
think that we’re accelerating towards a
critical mass, ” John Kirk says, “We’re
heading towards a resolution.”
The accumulation of sightings,
sound recordings, blurry videos and
tracks might seem like it is all building
towards an end, but it isn’t. It can’t. No
quantity of suggestive evidence—no
matter how intriguing—will ever prove
cryptozoologists right. In the case of
Sasquatch, the only thing that will is
a body: a hairy, seven-foot-plus, fourhundred-pound body that stinks like
a skunk carcass, screams like a barrelchested banshee and walks upright
like a human. If and when that body
is found, all the near-finds and almostevidence that came before it will be
blown away.
If Sasquatch is real, and the BCSCC
comes across a live one, what happens then? Some take the utilitarian
approach that shooting to kill will ultimately protect the creature by allowing it to be treated as rare wildlife. Besides, having a body (specifically the
head. “You have to remove the head
from the carcass,” Kirk says, “because
it’s got the brain.”) is the only way
for cryptozoologists to truly vindicate themselves. But the BCSCC holds
fast to the belief that killing even one
is unethical, no matter how much
they want for proof. At the barbecue,
guests and club members try to steer
clear of talking about what they might
use their guns for, but it still creeps
into the edges of the conversation. It’s
like being at a family reunion where
all’s well until you bring up politics.
“You go in with boom sticks, you’d
better bring lots of rounds,” a huge
man who looks a bit like a cartoon
version of a Sasquatch says. “You kill
one, there’s more that’s going to be
coming for you.”
For Kirk, the issue comes down to
how closely Sasquatch is related to us.
Kirk has a background in law enforcement, and he says killing a Sasquatch
would be homicide: “My belief is that
they are genus Homo, and if they are
genus Homo, you cannot kill one. You
cannot kill a fellow human, no matter
how primitive or backwards.”
The pro-kill camp thinks that, as
the feebler member of the genus, they
could claim self-defence. Kirk warns
that if any of them finds himself on
trial for Sasquatch murder, they’ve left
an online trail betraying their intent
to kill. In such a case, Kirk would not
stand behind the shooter.
I leave the barbecue with the Kirks,
and we follow the winding highway
out of Harrison Hot Springs, driving
away from the mountains and back
towards the suburbs of Vancouver. The
sun hangs late in the sky, lingering over
that long summer hour that makes ev-
erything, even the strip malls cropping
up along the highway, seem suffused
with magic. As I watch Sasquatch
country slowly give way to sprawl, I
think about what Paula Kirk said: we
can only ever see something if we look
at it. We earn our encounters with the
world by paying attention.
As I leave the BCSCC behind, John
Kirk tells me to write honestly about
what I learned today. He believes cryptozoology needs this. “Tell the truth,”
he says. That is, after all, what he’s
trying to do.
The only place where Sasquatch
definitely exists, and won’t be chased
away, is in the human imagination.
The monster’s grip on our culture (the
powerful grip of a twelve-inch-long
hand, if cryptozoologists are right) reveals a deep ambivalence about how
we see both the world we live in, and
ourselves. Are we masters of nature, or
utterly subject to it? As we encroach
further and further into places once
counted as wild, our need to believe
in the earth’s undiscovered enclaves
grows more pressing. We go looking in
order to assure ourselves that there’s
still something left to find.
The Sasquatch is a wild man; us,
but also not-us. It offers fodder for an
ancient and tenacious crisis of human
identity: capable of acting enlightened
as gods, we are stuck in our mortal
bodies, doomed to live as animals. Sasquatch—our dumber, more powerful,
more beastly cousin—looms between
what we fantasize we could be, and
what we fear we are.
“I sense that there’s the possibility
for a kind of post-cryptid cryptozoology, for a more serious, less adversarial
conversation between cryptozoologists,
skeptics and academics about monsters,” Loxton tells me. “Monsters are
more valuable than just the question of
their physical existence: there’s something there that tells us something
about us. It is part of the fabric of our
culture to talk about monsters, and to
wonder about the things that lurk in
the darkness. I think that these are
ideas worth pursuing, even in a world
that has a complete absence of actual,
living cryptids.”
As Steenburg puts it, “This is probably one of the last great mysteries of
the Canadian frontier—or the North
American frontier, for that matter.
Does this animal exist or doesn’t it?”
How would he feel if the Sasquatch
was proven not to exist? “I’d feel I’d
33
done my part to record a great piece of
Canadian mythology,” he says. “When
you solve a mystery, if you reach a conclusion you weren’t hoping for, that
doesn’t make it any less solved.”
In over thirty-five years of pursuit,
Steenburg has only had one possible
Sasquatch sighting of his own. In 2002,
he was driving on the west side of Harrison Lake when far away, at the top of
a hill, he saw something pass through
the gap in the trees where a power-line
cut through the woods. Whatever it
was appeared quickly, and disappeared
faster.
All Steenburg will attest to is that he
saw something big, black and walking
upright. “My basic philosophy is: stick
to the facts, and never deviate from the
facts,” he recites. (Apparently this philosophy is well-known: later, one of his
fellow investigators strikes a pose and
repeats the catchphrase, brandishing an
imaginary pipe.) The possibility that it
was a very large man walking where no
man should have been, or the possibility
that it was a Sasquatch, are both speculation. “If that was a Sasquatch, I’ve
seen one; if it wasn’t, I still have not.”
Suzannah Showler was a finalist for the
2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her first collection of poems, Failure to Thrive, is forthcoming from ECW Press in
Spring 2014.
Steenburg spends a lot of time interviewing eye-witnesses. He keeps his
bullshit detector on high alert for both
hoaxes and innocent mistakes. “To be
a good researcher you have to have a
healthy dose of skepticism. You have to
be willing to admit you may be wrong.
Because if you can’t, you’re not really
a researcher: you’re an advocate. Most
so-called researchers act like ministers
pushing a faith. This is not about faith.”
Steenburg cuts himself off mid-sentence and points down the swampy
creek we’re standing beside. At the end
of our line of sight, two dark shapes
hover where the reeds blend into the
forest. “See that there? Doesn’t that
look strange?” he asks, sounding a
little strangled. And he’s right—following his finger across the water, the
darkness morphs into something more
substantial, and for a moment, I can
see a figure retreating into the woods.
“I’ll tell you what that is,” Steenburg
says, his voice suddenly clear and certain. “Those are shadows, logs, and
bushes.”