USFS 2019 — Part 3, Chapter 2

To say that everything on the Peninsula west of the Olympic Range was wilder than the Neighborhood of Hood Canal felt like a gross understatement. It felt disingenuous, too, to describe something as wild just because it more closely resembled what it looked like before white settlement, which had always been far more disruptive than anything that occurred naturally. All the counterpoints—volcanic eruptions, fires, floods, earthquakes—worked within processes with a prehistoric precedent.

Pete and I looked at each other without saying anything. If not for a few long bird calls, it would’ve been entirely silent.

“What do you make of that?” I could’ve sworn Pete grinned faintly when he asked.

“I don’t fucking know. That’s why I’m confiding with you and nobody else on the planet. Honestly, I haven’t ruled out Glorified G’s reappearance as a total hallucination yet. I think it’s just as likely that somebody’s pranking me.”

“When did Glorified G show back up?”

“Tuesday morning.”

“Well, I stopped in the Hood Canal district office between 7 and 8am Tuesday morning. The rest of the seasonals were there. I don’t think it could be any of them.”

“Yeah, there were also some Squatchers that were supposed to still be out there. Bridger, Ian, and I caught them coming in as we were headed back out last week, but their permit was supposed to overlap with my hitch this week. I don’t know what happened to them, but I didn’t see them. Is there a species of goat that looks like an angora that just sheds?”

“Like a dog? I don’t think so, Kenz.”

“I’m just spitballing here.”

Pete sighed. “Can I suggest a wild possibility?”

“Is it as wild as our new favorite explanation at the Rain Shadow?”

“What’s that? Sasquatch?”

I nodded.

“That’s not exactly where I was going. But it’s kind of related.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, I can’t speak to the situation with the goat—neither of us can. And I don’t think you and I could ever determine if you were hallucinating when you were alone. But you’re talking about the realm of material, Kenz. Sometimes, whether or not you witnessed something real in that sense is, well, immaterial. You get what I’m saying?”

“You sound like Tully.” I was afraid that that came out sounding more antagonistic than I’d intended. I quickly followed up, “I mean, I hear what both of you are saying.”

Pete asked when was the last time I had seen Tully, which had been before the Fourth (which I had openly referred to as “dismantle nationalism day,” much to the chagrin of my fellow seasonals). I had started getting the sense that some of my coworkers’ morbid curiosity with astrology had escalated to passive interest in meeting with Tully themselves. More and more, astrology was striking me as a way into the province of the spiritual that had enough crossover with materialism to attract the interest of even the most world-weary seekers. None of my coworkers had yet asked me for Tully’s information, which was good, because I wasn’t sure if it was mine to give. She still hadn’t asked me to pay for services or whatever the hell it was we were doing when I traveled out to Marrowstone to meet with her.

In the spirit of training my attention toward determining how I wanted to live, Tully had been pushing me to start mining from what I saw and experienced in lieu of questioning if it was even real or in any way consequential. Talking to Pete about my work with Tully made me realize that what she was pushing for probably had a lot in common with the principles of listening by which Pete lived and died.

There were at least two things I had seen previously in my life that I’d dismissed as delusional or otherwise meaningless. One was a fireball meteor I’d turned around and spotted at the exact instant it fell in the sky. That was at the end of my second year of undergrad in Virginia. Another was a wolverine that I saw running across the road entrance to a government area in 2014 when I worked a summer in Yellowstone. I guess it made sense that I had always kept the meteor to myself, but I regretted that I had never told my dad about the wolverine. I wondered if I had missed out on some vitally significant perspective by chalking both events up to random coincidences that may or may not have been “real” in the conventional sense.

Pete and I had migrated back inside by the time I asked him how the material/spiritual divide connected to Bridger’s Sasquatch theory. I followed Pete into the kitchen and watched him empty the psilocybin from the bowl to a paper bag, which he then handed to me. I told him I’d take the bag, but couldn’t promise that I’d make use of its contents instead of regifting them to one of my housemates.

“That’s fine,” Pete said. “You know what we were talking about with psychedelics when you were out here last time?”

“Like treatment for addicts?”

“That’s right. It’s a good comparison to how the wild-man beings function in Wakashan and Coast Salish cultures up and down the coast. In a lot of traditions, it’s a foregone conclusion that these things exist as terrestrial beings, but they also have a psychological dimension.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It varies across cultures. For example, I know a Heiltsuk man in Bella Bella who quit drinking and smoking after he saw Thla’thla—their word for Dzunuḵ̓wa or Seatco.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. And that’s a particular example, but most communities in the north and central coast of BC have it that the creature reflects our psychological state. Encounters are usually solitary. So, comparing it to your misgivings about Glorified G, don’t take for granted that even a possible hallucination doesn’t qualify an experience as invalid in all worldviews. And with Sasquatch specifically, that’s why it should be no surprise that nobody has ever ‘found’ the creature. It’s not something you’re supposed to seek out. They find us. On their time. Not ours.”

“Did my dad just miss that memo?”

“I think his relationship to the material/spiritual divide was complicated. Of course, he knew all this stuff. But he staked a lot of his identity in being a cryptozoologist. Once that had been denied him, I think he had so much riding on physically proving the existence of Sasquatch because he thought that was the only way to justify his existence. I’m not licensed to psychoanalyze the guy or anything. But that’s my guess of what was going on.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I can relate to that. In fact, something Tully caught the first time I met with her was my obsession with figuring out why I exist.”

“You and your dad are similar that way. I have to admit it worries me.”

“Well, I’m trying to get better,” I said, opening the bag of psilocybin and attempting to waft it. I didn’t expect there to be a smell to the mushrooms and there wasn’t. Stimulating as conversations with Pete were, I still grew restless and eventually found I needed to do something with my hands.

Before we could get off the subject of my dad, I told Pete that I had, for the second month in a row taken some of Elliott’s advice against my better judgment and called my grandmother before leaving for Moclips that morning. Pete asked how that had gone and I said I would describe it as mostly triggering. But it wasn’t her fault. She was a product of a particular time and setting. And because that happened to be World War II in Germany, which she and her mother left when she was 10, almost everything she said was grounded more or less directly in economic terms. She had, however, mentioned that Pete was the one who contacted her about Dad back in June. I thanked him for doing that and said I didn’t think I could’ve—even if I hadn’t forgotten her initially.

“What’s the first advice you took from Elliott against your better judgment?” Pete asked.

I said the astrology stuff. But I also admitted that I was glad, in retrospect, that I had taken that detour in lieu of continuing a traditional Western version of therapy or doing nothing at all once I got to the Peninsula. Once I kind of understood the mechanics of birth charts, I really thought it was too bad that that stuff was so often dismissed as woo-woo. “There’s really something there for everyone,” I said. “And even thinking about what you were saying about Dad, I think there’s actually a lot there that materialists can admire for the precise reason that all carbon-based things are dead star matter. It just feels like a way of ordering when and where you were born relative to the position of other matter in the universe. I get that the scale is kind of overwhelming, but it starts looking a lot like physics when you think about it.”

In one of the last veritable twists in our conversation before I packed up, Pete piggybacked on the mention of dead star matter to wax about stars on their way out. He asked if I’d heard that Betelgeuse was dimming at an unprecedented rate and believed to be nearing the end of its life. It took me a second to figure out he was talking about a supergiant and not the character, who’d become a recycled bit in my periodic meetups with Tully and was fresh in my mind. Once I was tracking, I said let’s hope Betelgeuse went supernova soon so the planet could start over. But Pete clarified why that wasn’t exactly possible. Not only was Betelgeuse so far away that a supernova would be unlikely to affect Earth, but also, at the rate that light pollution was proliferating, we wouldn’t even be able to enjoy the show. I thought that was a shame—that a problem we’d created would prevent us from observing an event that would create the carbon for the cells and oxygen for the lungs of future animals. We’d prematurely blown the opportunity to witness the birth of life that would come after us—our own survival, in a way.

On that uplifting note, I made moves to head back to the Rain Shadow, nearly forgetting the psilocybin Pete had bagged expressly for me. I had already loaded into Cheryl, backed out, and was pointed toward the road back to the main highway when Pete bounded out the front door waving the paper bag. I rolled a window down to take the mushrooms from him and thanked him before I continued driving.

Although I’d fared alright through my teens, it was images like that that made me wonder what kind of parent my mother would’ve been if I’d grown up with her. Would she have rushed out the door after me if I’d forgotten, maybe not psilocybin, but a book or a lunch? Would she have even been home on weekdays? Would she be alive now? I seemed to recall being told that it had been Ayla, not a physician, who’d told Mom about the side effects of prenatal exposure to DES. I thought back to that idea that humans were the only animals who didn’t think we were animals, and about our tendency to think we could get away with being solitary. Mom’s cervical cancer seemed to be proof that our prospects, or at least our access to information, improved when we weren’t socially isolated. How long would her cancer have gone undetected if she had just relied on the colonized system of professional medicine to intervene? Or to own up to the fact that they unwittingly sanctioned a drug that poisoned women’s bodies, presumably so their mothers could carry them to term?

It’s not that I left Pete and Ayla’s house with new confidence that I could safely use psychedelics without being made to recall a traumatic birth experience. But I did continue to think about what he’d said about hallucinations. With or without the aid of psychoactive substances, perhaps it was responsible to consider that what we witnessed and felt weren’t just anchored to a chain reaction of cosmic accidents. Shifting from an obsession with why things happened to one of how I’d respond—something that Tully had been advocating for me to do since our first meeting—seemed to be in line with that. In that spirit, I wondered if it behooved me to inquire more deeply than I had into the events surrounding the goat’s disappearance and reappearance—developments for which I’d presumably been the only witness.

I again didn’t see the dogs before making it back to the highway. And it occurred to me for the first time that I couldn’t remember Pete and Ayla ever commenting on the dogs. Likewise, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard the dogs make a sound. If I was already growing suspicious that I was prone to hallucinations on the Peninsula, I had failed to consider that it might’ve been the case even in my earliest visits to the area.