In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,97

sure?” Daniel says, with desperate, mocking sarcasm.

“The first rule I learned while goat huntin’ is that if you can climb down without killing yourself, you should be OK to get back up. So, there’s only one way to find out.”

I concur with Daniel that it’s a bad idea and decide to challenge Leonard. “What if we make it down without killing ourselves, but we still can’t climb back up?” I ask. “What happens then?”

Leonard shrugs. “Maybe there’s a boat at the cabin? That’s the only other way out of here. That west shore is even nastier than this. And the way things are going with my knee …”

Daniel fumes and shakes his head again, glaring down at his father as Leonard strains to get up from the rock he’s sitting on. Leonard grabs his pack and shotgun and starts hobbling toward the chute. Josie follows him, but when they reach the top of the grade, she stops in her tracks and turns around feebly.

“I’ll check it out and let you know,” Leonard hollers. Using his shotgun like a cane, he disappears down the slope, past a few small trees.

Daniel and I sit silently, staring at the ground, for what feels like ages.

“What’s with your dad?” I say, finally giving in to the temptation to ask.

The teenager makes a slightly dour face before glancing at me embarrassingly. “He likes to push himself sometimes.”

I’m stranded atop a rocky bluff in a remote and rugged wilderness. My frazzled and injured guide wants to fling us down a steep mountainside in a desperate bid to reach shelter. Our sense of vulnerability has long ago turned into fear. But running parallel with it, like an undercurrent, is a sort of excitement.

I’ve given little serious thought to Sasquatches in the last few days. But in this moment, perched atop an avalanche chute, with the weight of adversity bearing down, I get a flash of insight, however irrelevant and unhelpful: this visceral fear I’m experiencing, the thrilling kind, which bursts our reservoirs of adrenaline, is what Bigfoot enthusiasts seek. It is an excitement born of adventure, glory, and self-sacrifice.

Somewhere in that mist-laden landscape between Koeye and the Hoodoo Valley, when the surrealism became almost intolerable, I was struck by a notion that has remained with me ever since: there is a process of personal mythmaking in play here. What began as a research trip, albeit an adventuresome one, to solve a puzzle, has morphed into an all-consuming journey, an epic, whose hero is none other than me. And whether I admit it or not, that was probably the intention all along.

All of us yearn to be heroes in narratives of our own making, if only to live lives brimming with purpose. Most of us take up that call, at one time or another, to a greater or lesser extent. Others make it a recurring part of life. It’s the underlying motive, almost a default setting, that pushes rational people to sometimes do seemingly irrational things. Anywhere there is an opponent, or obstacle, standing between the hero and his or her goal—where difficulty and adversity lie—there is a mythical quest with its attendant moments of high drama.

Journalist Will Storr says that a “compulsion for emotional narrative” underlies this deep desire to fling ourselves into the push and pull of human circumstance. He describes the mind as a kind of “Hero-Maker,” seeing the world in terms of stories in which we are cast into the virtuous leading role. Our minds, Storr says, are addicted to story templates because that is how we experience life. “The mind reorders the world,” he writes, “turning the events of our days into a narrative of crisis, struggle, resolution, and casts us in the leading role. In this way our lives gain motivation… . We are coaxed into hope, into heroic acts, into braving impossible odds.”22

The Sasqualogist, whether lay investigator or scientist, is no different from the other self-styled heroes. His or her particular brand of journey rests heavily on literal adventuring—questing—through a physically wild landscape, with all of its exciting fears and challenges to test one’s mettle. But this quest, it seems to me, is also metaphorical. He or she is in pursuit of what may be the most elusive prize that ever existed—a modern-day holy grail. And the obstacles are duly massive. The Sasqualogist wrangles against snickering hordes of skeptics and debunkers (who are themselves heroes of their own mythical journeys). He or she struggles to awaken an indifferent public and a