Roanoke Ridge Read online

  The sky opens and rain pours down slowly and steadily. The weather is prone to its moods just like the rest of us — it’ll stop when it damn well feels like it. The raindrops hitting the gravel outside sound like slow-moving maracas. Such is the Pacific Northwest: a swath of damp earth spanning two countries, sandwiched between mountains and an ocean, with rain like London.

  Aunt Barb turns and looks through the part in the curtains, to the rain falling in the parking lot. Her profile shows her age, her worry. The gravity of her missing husband presses down hard on her shoulders. I can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it than that, if it’s not just this one crisis, but the life of potential crises that her husband’s obsession brings with it. Professor Sorel ducks ridicule from his fellow academics like a champion boxer slips punches. But he isn’t comfortable just flying below the radar. He releases his papers online and defies his peers to poke holes in his research. He haunts talk radio studios at every opportunity, has become the butt of jokes on call-in shows that stretched through the night.

  “When was the last time you ate, Aunt Barb?”

  “I had a doughnut and a coffee at the ranger station this morning,” she says.

  All I have left from my road trip snacks are a granola bar and a bag of dried mangoes. I offer both to Aunt Barb, who waves at them and shakes her head. She pinches her eyes closed and the skin on her face folds inward.

  “If I never see any more granola …”

  “You’ve got to eat something.”

  “I … I can’t …”

  “Let’s go into town and get something hot.”

  We stand up in unison, slowly. Her perfume makes the jump across the carpet, and it smells stronger to me than it did when I hugged her.

  Saad is unzipping each of the hundred pockets on his suitcase. His laptop and its power cord are already on the nightstand, and his contact lens solution and the case the lenses come in are on the little table between the bed and the bathroom.

  “Saad, want to go into town?” I ask.

  All the unzipping noises stop, and the bedsprings creak as he stands up. He takes a bright orange rain slicker out of his suitcase, slides it over his head, then opens his umbrella and waits for Aunt Barb, walking her out through the rain like she is the First Lady. Saad turns to perform the same service for me, but I’m already at the car, raindrops tapping on the bill of my baseball cap.

  We drive down moss-banked roads under a grey sky. It’s not hard to believe that the trees and rocks out here hide a large primate who watches from the woods, its massive feet sinking into the damp earth. Bigfoot, for many, is the face of the unknown, the manifestation of a million miles of wilderness, of every cave and creek where people have never set foot.

  As we get closer to the centre of town, driveways and storefronts increasingly interrupt the trees. There’s a tavern, a bait-and-tackle shop, and a place advertising wood furniture, carvings, and “authentic Indian” arts and crafts. Roanoke Village proper is pretty much just a crucifix on the land: a long strip of old one- and two-storey shops, bisected by a shorter strip with more of the same. Saad parks the car between two trucks by the curb on the main street, right in front of the open sign of Shirley’s Bigfoot Diner — née Shirley’s Diner, before the Bigfoot craze took hold.

  Inside the diner, a few feet from the front door, is a wraparound glass counter filled with baked goods, sandwiches and bagels, juice bottles and pop cans, even jars of honey made locally. It’s L-shaped and stretches all the way toward the back wall. The walls and ceiling are panelled with wood. The clock on the wall has the Pepsi logo on it. On the pillar holding up the back of the diner is a poster showing all the fish species native to the local waters.

  A heavy-set waitress, her blond hair escaping her dark roots, tells us to grab a seat anywhere we’d like, and promises to be with us in a “sec.” We take a booth next to a poster that reads Fish Oregon Waters … Drive Oregon Highways. There’s an illustration of a man in hip waders with a salmon on the end of his fly-fishing line, while his wife waits patiently by the passenger door of their 1940 Chevrolet Special Deluxe sedan.

  We start with three cups of coffee. I drink mine black; I have ever since I was a little girl, on camping trips with my dad, when he’d boil a blue, enamel kettle over the fire and pour two cups of the nastiest instant coffee for us. I’ve heard other people reminisce about their fathers letting them take a sip of beer from them while watching Sunday football, or even whisky after dinner — but sharing that gross coffee, that was some serious bonding.

  Aunt Barb warms her hands on a cup of coffee, empty creamers scattered between us. How many leaning towers or pyramids have I made out of creamers on tables just like this? She lets the rising steam warm her face. “I couldn’t sit there waiting around that ranger station a second longer. I’ve never felt so helpless in all my life,” Aunt Barb says.

  The door chime rings and a pair of men dressed like hunters walk in. The rain continues to fall, and I try not to think about it washing Professor Sorel’s footprints away, making it difficult for the search party to track him. My dad taught me about tracking not far from here, on day trips up the mountain. The terrain of the Cascade and Klamath Mountains offers lots of challenges to even the most experienced tracker, and the rain certainly doesn’t help.

  “Professor Sorel knows how to pack for this kind of expedition,” I say. “He has at least two days’ worth of food, a first aid kit, waterproof matches, and a thermal blanket. He’ll be fine.”

  Aunt Barb leans across the table. Her eyes follow Saad as he walks to the washrooms at the back of the diner, past the curved glass display case displaying cakes, pies, tarts and brownies. “Berton didn’t take his meds with him,” she whispers.

  “His meds?”

  Aunt Barb reaches into her purse and gives me a pill bottle, concealing the label as she passes it to me. Sensing her privacy concerns, I hold the pill bottle just above my lap, squinting to read the small print. I expected pills for his heart or perhaps diabetes. The word Risperidone stands out as if written in neon.

  “Professor Sorel is schizophrenic?” I say, just loud enough for Aunt Barb to hear.

  She looks down at the Formica tabletop and nods.

  “Does the search party know about this?”

  Aunt Barb shakes her head. “Nobody knows except Berton, his doctor, me, and now you. He’s worked so hard to maintain his credibility. His colleagues already mock him; if his struggles with mental illness become public knowledge, his career is over.”

  I once asked Professor Sorel if he was ever afraid of people thinking he was a kook. He smiled, leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling.

  What really keeps me up at night, he’d said, is the thought that I’ll die, a coronary or stroke or something, maybe just peacefully in my sleep, and then a year or two down the road someone finds a Sasquatch finger, or a femur, not even a whole body, just a decaying piece of meat and bone. Just a hiker or climber, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. That’s what really scares me — the idea that my time will run out before then.

  I roll the pill bottle around to read the label more carefully. I check the date it was filled and the prescribed dosage. I open the lid, shake the bottle until all the pills are flat against the side, do a quick count, then do the math in my head.

  “At least he brought some extra with him,” I say.

  “Nobody’s more careful than Berton,” Aunt Barb says. “But sometimes that scares me more. Lots of harmless things can cause a careless person to get lost. But a careful man …”

  Aunt Barb’s eyes flash as she looks toward the back of the diner. I turn and see Saad walking back to our table, his eyes lingering on a pie in the display case. I palm the pills back to Aunt Barb instinctively and immediately feel guilty. I know I can trust Saad, but it’s not my secret to tell.

  “That silly reality show was to start taping next week,” Aunt Barb say
s. “The Million Dollar Bigfoot Hunt. Berton wanted to do some preliminary scouting. He told me he was going to where your father filmed those two Sasquatches.”

  “I’m confused,” Saad said quietly, looking from me to Aunt Barb and back again.

  “In the world of Bigfoot research,” I say, “there are two films of the creature that have so far stood up to scrutiny, or at least can’t be easily dismissed. The Patterson-Gimlin film, and the Roanoke Ridge film, which was shot close to twenty years ago. By my dad.”

  Saad raises his eyebrows, leaning back slightly as if to get a better look at me.

  “Only a handful of people knew exactly where that video was shot, and only two of those people are still around. Professor Sorel and myself,” I say. “I didn’t meet Professor Sorel when I was in college. I’ve known him for most of my life.”

  “Only, Berton doesn’t remember where the video was shot,” Aunt Barb says. “At least, I don’t think he’s sure anymore.”

  “But my dad took him to the spot a few times.”

  “He certainly did, I remember it clearly. And Berton was up there, oh, just three years ago, setting camera traps. But two nights ago, I brought him his evening tea and found him poring over maps of the area. Laura, there were maps scattered all over his study. Topographical maps, BLM prospecting maps, maps drawn up by the Army Corps of Engineers. I asked him about the maps, and he said that they were part of his work, preparing for this reality show. I was ready to believe him, but then he pulled me down onto his lap and put his arms around me. Let’s just say Berton got out of that habit before the kids went to college. But he held me tight like we were newlyweds and said, ‘No matter what, we’re going to be all right.’”

  Aunt Barb wipes a tear away with the side of her index finger. I reach over to the shiny stainless steel napkin dispenser, pluck a few out, and pass them to her. She takes a few deep breaths, looking down at the tabletop. The chimes above the door ring and a man walks in wearing a T-shirt with an image of Bigfoot and the words Bigfoot saw me but nobody believes him written down the front.

  “When the producers of The Million Dollar Bigfoot Hunt approached Berton, he was only supposed to be a judge, with Dr. Duncan Laidlaw and some other fellow. But Berton pushed the producers for a bigger role. He wanted a chance to win that prize money.”

  “He’s never been the greedy type,” I say.

  “It’s for his project. Unmanned aerial vehicles or some such. He’s become obsessed with it.”

  “He wants to use drones to search for Bigfoot?” Saad asks, his brown eyes wide with incredulity.

  “If a population of Sasquatches still exists today, it would have to be in territory that is both vast and remote, like the B.C. interior — a place that is still largely untouched by humans, even today,” I say.

  “He hoped to raise enough money to have a drone built with an infrared camera, so they could track animals through thick tree cover,” Aunt Barb adds.

  “I remember the Kickstarter campaign,” I say.

  “It never got off the ground,” Aunt Barb says. “So he convinced the producer, Danny LeDoux, to let him compete for the prize. That only escalated things. This LeDoux fellow thought that Berton had a tremendous advantage, given his field experience, so he made sure to bring in serious competition. There’s this big game hunter from Australia, and several of the top Bigfoot enthusiasts from North America. Even that con man Rick Driver was approached to compete.”

  “Anything for higher ratings,” I say. “What do you expect from the channel that marketed a mermaid movie as a ‘documentary’?” I turn to Saad, who is lacking in Bigfoot context at the moment. “Rick Driver is a notorious hoaxer, known for claiming to have a dead Bigfoot in his freezer.”

  “Please don’t associate my husband with such men,” Aunt Barb says to Saad pleadingly.

  “Don’t worry, he won’t,” I say. “Saad just finished his master’s degree in chemical engineering. He knows the difference between hard science and pseudoscience. Not to mention flim-flam artists like Rick Driver.”

  “I’d like to think so,” Saad says.

  I think of the stories Saad’s told me about all the con men in his native Pakistan, ones who use Islam the way faith healers here use Christianity to try and make a buck off the devout. He may be a stranger to our monsters, but he is no stranger to monsters in general. From what I’ve heard, there are as many folk creatures in Pakistan, the djinn, for example, as there are here. Many predate Islam and never seem to go away, even though the Qur’an doesn’t seem to have room for them. Like how the Bible tried to eliminate the fairies and ogres that have persisted in European cultures past the onset of Christianity. The more I learn about Saad’s home, the more it seems like people are the same everywhere.

  “I’m so exhausted, dear,” Aunt Barb says. “I’m just so exhausted.” Her forearms slide back along the tabletop toward her body, ready to fall into her lap.

  “We’ll take you back to your motel so that you can rest,” I say.

  A few minutes later, Saad sits behind the steering wheel of our rental car, watching me. I put Aunt Barb’s jeep in reverse and drive a few minutes down the highway to her motel. Saad stays close behind and I smile at him in the rear-view mirror, knowing full well that he can’t possibly see me. Aunt Barb is close to falling asleep in the passenger seat, like I might have to carry her into her room and put her to bed like a toddler.

  The Golden Eagle Motel is on the north end of Roanoke Ridge, the opposite side of town from the ranger station where Aunt Barb spent her day. It’s obvious by its sign: a tacky gold eagle set against a backdrop of the American flag.

  We go in as Saad waits in the car, presumably eating the rice crispy square wrapped in plastic that he bought from the diner as we were leaving. Luggage lines the walls of Aunt Barb’s room; it looks like she and Professor Sorel were planning on staying awhile. Aunt Barb sits down in the wingback armchair in the corner of the room, a quilt over her legs. She blinks ever so slowly, resting her head against the wing of the chair, and calls out instructions in a voice just a touch louder than a whisper. “There’s a box of chamomile tea in the cupboard to the right of the sink, dear.”

  I go to the small kitchenette at the back of the suite and boil a kettle on a hot plate. I pour the tea and bring it over to Aunt Barb, setting it on the table beside her. She waves her hand over the steam before reaching for the handle.

  “Are you going to be all right, Aunt Barb?”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without Berton,” she says. “He’s my life.”

  Kneeling down next to her chair, my hand on hers, I look down at the lint and hair scattered across the grey carpet. She lets out a long, laboured breath. She’s trying not to cry and I’m pretending not to notice the glistening coat of saline on her eyes.

  TWO

  The horses reared suddenly in alarm and threw both the riders. Luckily, Roger fell off to the right and, being an experienced horseman, disengaged himself and grabbed his camera. Why? Because he had spotted what had turned their horses into mad broncos. About 100 feet ahead, on the other side of the creek bed, there was a huge, hairy creature that walked like a man!

  — Ivan T. Sanderson, “First Photos of ‘Bigfoot,’ California’s Legendary ‘Abominable Snowman,’” Argosy,

  February 1968

  WHEN THE LUMBER MILL CLOSED IN THE late nineties, the chamber of commerce created the Roanoke Valley Bigfoot Festival to bring business to the town a few weeks before the tourist season. There’s a similar festival in Willow Creek, California, that’s been around since the sixties, but since it takes place on Labor Day weekend, both festivals coexist peacefully. Roanoke Valley’s festival tends to attract more Canadians, given its proximity to the border, but both festivals seem to make a pretty penny off of Bigfoot (who likely doesn’t see a cent of it).

  The parking lot of the Rotary Club building is full and bustles like a county fair. There’s lots of denim and plaid in the crowd funnelling throu
gh the back door of the building. There are, too, a lot of Bigfoot T-shirts and Tilley hats. Saad is taken aback. This is the other side of the spectrum from what he expected.

  Saad walks several steps toward the door before he realizes I’m no longer by his side. I’m fascinated by the stickers of Sasquatch prints on the backs of all the pickup trucks, every Bigfoot bumper sticker you can imagine. I want to read each one, maybe snap a few pics. They run the gamut from playful to sarcastic, some self-aware, others blindly faithful. There’s one that reads Gone Squatchin’ on a minivan, next to a pickup with a sticker that reads Bigfoot Research Team. One rust-covered bumper on an old Chevy has two stickers, typical bumper clichés with Sasquatch rolled in: I Brake for Bigfoot and I’d rather be squatching. I see a picture of Bigfoot with the words Undisputed Hide and Seek Champion that puts a smile on my face, then a faded sticker that reads Sasquatch 2012: Anybody but Obama and the smiles disappears. At least a dozen cars have stickers that read, simply, I Believe, paired with either images of Sasquatch or silhouettes of massive humanoid footprints.

  “I don’t get this one,” Saad says, pointing to a sticker that reads How many bear skeletons have you found out in the woods?

  “That’s a reference to Grover Krantz, an anthropologist who was pro-Bigfoot. It’s a counter-argument to the problem of why we don’t have a Bigfoot body or any part of one. Supposedly, Krantz asked a forest ranger about the number of bear carcasses he came across in his duties, and the ranger said none. Or something like that.”

  As the words leave my mouth, I stop and realize how much I know about this stuff. It’s like I hear my dad’s voice in my head, the soundtrack to the long car rides up to the mountains. I remember the religious fervour in his voice, his thumbs drumming on the steering wheel, as he explored every theory, quoted every expert, listed the reasons he agreed or didn’t.