In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,42

hinge on our perception of space. Bigfoots may be unbelievable to so many people simply because most of us are disconnected from the true depths and expanses of the earth and its wild areas. We simply may not be able to conceive of Sasquatch habitat. Two-dimensional maps completely downplay the surface area that exists in three-dimensional terms, especially where mountains are concerned. Few, if any, seasoned travelers or explorers think the planet has been comprehensively probed. I find it is mostly those living in and around big cities, with little or no experience with or appreciation for remote, unpopulated areas, who most often declare, “But the world has been explored!” Their limited urban or suburban existence has deeply conditioned them to this view.

Modernity and technology have further eroded our ability to judge space. Cars, trains, and planes make it possible for us to cover huge distances in very little time, rendering the spaces we travel through inconsequential by comparison. Whereas, for example, a medieval religious pilgrim from Morocco would have needed several months filled with hardships and ordeals to travel overland to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula, today it takes only several uneventful hours to get there by plane (a form of teleportation by comparison). When you or I fleetingly fly over, or even drive through, a large wilderness area, we experience almost nothing of its real depths or dimensions, compared with someone who covers that distance on foot. Even hikers experience only the immediate environs of their narrow trajectory: a mere sliver of a wide expanse.

In March 2014, I was working as a TV newswriter when Malaysia Airlines flight 370 mysteriously disappeared off the radar shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur. Several days after the tragedy, when neither the plane nor any of its wreckage was found, the newsroom, like much of the astonished world, was shocked and bewildered.* “How could a commercial airliner simply vanish?” the newsmongers asked in the story meetings, as if Harry Houdini or aliens had a hand in it. But no one had conceived of the idea that the airliner had possibly, or probably, wound up in the middle of the Indian Ocean—an immense body of water. Even when we learned later that indeed that was where the plane most likely had crashed, it still didn’t occur to anyone that maybe the plane had come down fully, or largely, intact—and thus couldn’t easily be found, especially if it sank underwater. Many of us know oceans only as bodies of water we leapfrog during airplane flights. Any sense of scale is conditioned out of us.

A similar conditioning occurs when we watch TV or a movie or read a children’s storybook that depicts someone moving through a forest. Fictional characters in forests are often shown traveling unimpeded along a more or less easily navigable trail or through wide-open spaces between trees. Our frequent exposure to these backdrops in the media makes them seem normal. Though some forests may look like that, the reality is that much backcountry wilderness is dense, overgrown, and obstacle-littered, with little visibility and sometimes rent with cliffs, gorges, gullies, and canyons. It’s hard for humans to travel through in the best of times. A friend who works on a remote stretch of the British Columbia coast once tried to hike up a creek bed to a mountaintop. It took him eight hours to cover just one mile. He gave up and turned back. Many of the areas I have seen are no less impenetrable.

If the Sasquatch exists, perhaps the reason it hasn’t yet been discovered in the eyes of the establishment boils down to the creature’s reported determination to avoid people in those vast and difficult terrains to which it has adapted. Being a rare and mostly nocturnal animal would only make it that much more difficult to find.*

That evening we all loiter impatiently around the cookhouse in the soft light of dusk, waiting to swoop down on the dinner in its final stages of tending. The campfire crackles and pops, drawing in camp staffers clutching mugs of hot tea. Down in the bay is a scene of perfect tranquillity: the curving beach and its unflinching bodyguard of hemlocks and cedars bask in the honey-tinted rays of the setting sun.

The crew of Achiever, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s research vessel, has arrived. The captain, Brian Falconer, a tall man in his mid- to late fifties, is surrounded by several younger members of his crew. They stand in a row, almost at attention, decked