In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,5

waters beyond it, could get into an accident, resulting in a spill from which a widely affected area might never fully recover.

It is into this wild and immaculate landscape, marred by the gathering storm clouds of human discord, that my journey in search of the Sasquatch is taking me. As I drive along the edge of the forest, past patch after patch of enormous clear-cut, it becomes obvious just how destructive unmitigated capitalism can be. For many, the Great Bear area represents a frontier territory, entirely up for grabs, whose sole, underlying, purpose is to provide salable resources and incomprehensible wealth for a select few.

Running up against the avarice of Big Oil is the iron will of residents. Their determination is reflected in a Heiltsuk First Nation art installation on display at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver: a cedar mask depicting the supernatural sea creature Yagis. The round and slightly hook-nosed face, draped in a mane of horsehair, stares in wide-eyed, inconsolable rage. In its jaws, about to be crushed, is a plastic model of a supertanker. The ship sits tilted and moribund, like a salmon trapped in the fangs of a bear. The installation comes across as a harbinger and prophecy, as it rests amid the wealth of indigenous artifacts looted in the same impulse of greed about which it forewarns.

I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Though leafy and spacious, my neighborhood was a largely dull and uninspiring place. Like many big city suburbs, mine was a monument to mediocrity, a lazy arranging of things whose hallmarks are almost always an affront to creativity: from the fanatical separation of commercial and residential life to car-centric dictates on movement to the sprawling rows of insular cookie-cutter castles.

There was one redeeming quality, however, that mitigated the ennui felt across our residential tundra: a wooded ravine through which a creek ran. It has become a vogue for suburban developers building on former woodlands to leave small patches of token forest as decoration to help lure potential home buyers. Our wood was considerably more vast, one that the plastic surgeons of sprawl, either in their wisdom or out of neglect, had not entirely neutered. The ravine was part of a series of interconnected greenbelts that extended from the city and meandered north through the nascent suburbs and into the outlying fringes where forests mingled with farmland. Its mystery was enhanced by rumors, related by other kids, that it linked to some larger, deeper wilderness.

This thicket, comprising maples, spruces, ashes, and elms, turned out to be a salvation. It offered us adventures and experiences—unmitigated by parental control—that broadened our minds: a feeling of danger and risk, and the sense of achievement that comes with the successful transgression of limits. Some of those dangers were far-fetched, like the murderous recluses who were rumored to live there, hidden among the trees. Others were considerably more real, the dangers implicit in nature, evidenced in a large eastern white pine that stood in a clearing. It had been struck by lightning, its hollowed-out trunk roasted char black. The tree, which somehow clung to life, stood as a warning to interlopers. Its message: humans don’t rule here. Our parents understood this better than we did. But what they didn’t know was that their own exaggerated account of rabid creatures, homicidal hermits, and malign shadows upped the ante of excitement for us. It made the place doubly seductive.

So we ventured there, going on micro-adventures, alone or in small groups. We roved, sifted, and explored. Built fires. Climbed trees. Built forts. Observed wildlife. Lounged in the tall weeds. Got into fistfights. Dabbled in the forbidden.

We stretched ourselves, relishing a rare sense of privacy and control.

Each incursion into that surviving woodland was a journey to a kind of underworld from which we emerged reborn, brimming with new knowledge. What these forest experiences taught me early on was that learning and adventure were inextricable, and that a dose of discomfort and risk was an essential part of that formula. It was an approach to learning that stands in contrast to the practices of our safety-obsessed, overstructured education system, with its regimented activities and endless sitting at desks.

Something else happened in this period that became apparent only later: the forest made me one of its own, in the same way it does to those growing up or living in real wilderness regions. Its essence was injected into my blood, its pattern imprinted on my