{"id":650,"date":"2020-11-24T21:25:23","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T01:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/?page_id=650"},"modified":"2021-12-01T16:16:39","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T20:16:39","slug":"harbor-man","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/creative-nonfiction-archive\/harbor-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Harbor Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rhythmic Coincidence<\/em> by Aaron Lelito<\/p><\/div>\r\n

\u00a0<\/h3>\r\n

Harbor Man<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n

Mackinzie Brink<\/p>\r\n

At the base of the Olympic Peninsula in a still fragment of Washington State sits Grays Harbor County. The sparsely populated upper half is home to only the Quinault Indian Reservation and a coniferous rainforest whose constant drizzle accumulates to nearly 180 inches of rainfall each year. The lower half is interspersed with small towns and a large bay that cuts even deeper into Washington\u2019s jagged coastline, and at the mouth, where the Chehalis river pours into brown saltwater, sit empty lumber yards and pulp mills that belch steam into a grey sky.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Founded in 1854, Grays Harbor\u2019s economy was held aloft on the back of the timber industry until the 1980s\u2019 recession caused hefty cutbacks in lumber and pulp production. However, the final blow didn\u2019t land until the 1990s, when the Forest Service began designating millions of acres of timber as protected areas for an endangered species of spotted owl. Mass layoffs put thousands out of work, mills were mothballed, and local businesses permanently closed.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

A small portion of the community was able to scrounge up the last remaining jobs in the timber industry, but most locals found themselves out of work and financially trapped. Most residents today are born-and-raised locals who never left. They still hold on to their memories of the pre-\u201880s boom when middle-class wealth defined their childhoods. However, when looking at the county today, it\u2019s hard to miss the ever-rising homeless population and addiction crisis that\u2019s overtaken the larger towns and public school systems.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Aberdeen, at around 16,500 inhabitants, is the largest town in the county, and on the welcome sign that once read \u201cLumber Capital of the World\u201d now sit the words \u201cCome As You Are,\u201d a eulogy to the town\u2019s most successful export. Grunge is in the streets of Aberdeen; it\u2019s an accumulation of Grays Harbor art and culture that\u2019s found its place on the sidewalks of downtown where corroding sculptures of fantastical creatures sit in cages and tweakers in the midst of a drug-induced metamorphosis squawk at pedestrians like seagulls.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Harry spends his days in a blue\u00a0\u201898 Ford Ranger that is so filled with empty Brisk tea bottles and Camel cartons that the rattling of trash almost hides the rattling of the engine as it putters down the road. He listens to thrash-metal bands that exist on the fringes of even their own genres, and I admire this about him\u2014because despite the looks of disapproval from his community, he continues to listen to what he enjoys. Harry is my uncle, and I\u2019ve always thought of him as the last man remaining in a dying generation of my family.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For nearly 100 years, my mother\u2019s folk have lived in Grays Harbor. However, starting in the late 1990s, they began to scatter. It started with Harry\u2019s brother, then it was my cousins, then my grandparents, and then it was my parents, who took me and my brother in the early 2000s and left. The only ones who remained were Harry and a few offbeat aunts and uncles.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At 45 years old, Harry has lived his entire life in Grays Harbor and, over the past 20 years, has grown to become a recognizable face whose name and infamy stretch across the county: he is the man who knows Bigfoot.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

His first encounter happened in 2000 when he discovered a set of human-like footprints while scoping out a valley for hunting season. An obsession quickly formed and he began frequenting the valley, exploring deeper into the forest while searching for prints to cast in plaster.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He collected brown, red, and black hair caught on the trunks of evergreens and sent in 36 of these samples to the Sasquatch Genome Project, setting the record for having collected the most specimens in North America. Some of the samples were determined to be from different members of the same nuclear unit of unidentified great apes, meaning the valley Harry discovered is home to a family of Bigfoot.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Due to his contributions, he has been cited in numerous books and articles about the genetics of Bigfoot and has been described by authors as a \u201cprofessional hunter.\u201d However, Harry has never thought of himself as a hunter. His goal has never been to kill a Bigfoot, it was always to gather enough evidence to prove their existence. He got into contact with larger research groups such as the Bigfoot Field Researcher\u2019s Organization and the Olympic Project and took field biologists sent by each organization back into \u201csquatchy\u201d valleys.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

From 2000 to 2010, Harry had four sightings of what he believed to be Bigfoot. I don\u2019t know what that number has grown to as of today. Around 2013, Harry cut ties with the larger organizations he had been working with and decided he no longer wanted to take people into areas with high levels of Bigfoot activity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Harry has always been honest to our family about believing in Bigfoot, but for years he hid just how far he had taken things. He never told us about the samples or the research projects. I don\u2019t know why he stayed so secretive; I can only assume it was partly because he felt alone and left behind in the community of his childhood and maybe he didn\u2019t want us to think the constant gray skies of the Harbor had finally gotten the better of him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In 2009, Harry finally came clean and showed my mother and me a grainy picture of what he claimed were two Bigfoot. I was only 9 years old and I don\u2019t remember seeing much more than a mess of bright green foliage with two shadows planted in the middle. He pleaded with us while tracing his finger along the screen, trying to point out their toothy grins, but all my mother and I could see were amorphous blobs of darkness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I don\u2019t know exactly how this event shaped my opinion of him, but I know well into my teenage years I questioned his judgment and sanity. I want to say I always respect and admired Harry, but I can\u2019t. I loved him: he was my loner uncle who spent his days in the woods escaping the anxieties of society by picking mushrooms; sometimes he ate bugs just to make his nieces and nephews laugh; and occasionally, when I did something tough like put hot sauce on my scrambled eggs, he would give me a wink and say, \u201cYou\u2019re pretty alright, kid.\u201d But, despite my fondness for him, I didn\u2019t know him very well. Until I was 11 years old, I lived two counties over from Grays Harbor and he was just the strange man from the strange county who I only saw a couple times a year.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Grays Harbor is a community of people who feel forced to give up on themselves. It has been this way since the logging crash. It\u2019s a feeling that\u2019s become so prevalent, the people have crafted a moniker to define themselves by it: Harbor People.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s a teasing and self-deprecating term meant to feel light against the heaviness of their Pabst-soaked tongues and give them something to laugh about while blaming their problems on the Harbor rather than themselves. The idea is to group everyone together, to build a fellowship of those who have had their lives similarly stolen by the Harbor, and to use this camaraderie to take comfort in who they are. There\u2019s also a degree of isolation that falls into place beside the title; it\u2019s a turning of their back against the world just as the world has done to them.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Harbor People\u2019s relationship with Bigfoot is a complicated one because they don\u2019t talk about it. There is a small counterculture presence that\u2019s become wrapped up in the mythos and lore surrounding the Pacific Northwest, but this is mainly kept alive by outsiders who only visit a few times a year to hold small conventions and spend a couple of days in the woods. To Harbor People, these are just crazed fanatics or thrill-seeking hipsters. The actual locals skim past and put little thought to the existence of Bigfoot even though it hangs like a constant unspoken presence throughout the county\u2019s history. It\u2019s always there, like an apparition in the evergreens, and it has been since the Quinault Indians first stepped foot in the forests.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Harry, for the most part, is a typical Harbor Man; he graduated from high school in the early\u00a0\u201890s, part of the generation that was shoved into a newly collapsed economy and poor job market despite being raised with the constant promise of a career in the timber industry. He has spent his life moving from job to job and occasionally working under the table in order to pay his bills.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He is a beast of a man who stands 6\u20195\u201d with forearms so large that even as an adult, I cannot fit both my hands around them, and his rust-colored beard hides only a fraction of the sun-worn freckles that work their way up his face and into the crevices of his smile lines. His daily uniform consists of a thrift-store flannel, khaki Carhartts that mask the color of dirt, scuffed Georgia Boot Romeos that are beyond broken in, and a greasy ball cap that he swears is to protect society from the blinding white of his balding head. Rather than cologne, he wears cigarette smoke and Irish Spring soap.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In 2011, my parents moved us back to Grays Harbor, where I lived for eight years until I grew old enough to leave both the county and my family behind. I spent my teenage years there as a particularly moody recluse with only a few close friends, and it took until I was 16 before I had a conversation with Harry that consisted of more than just small talk.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He was staying at my house while my parents were away for the week. On his last night there, I ventured out of my room and plopped myself in the living room while he was watching a Travel Channel show called\u00a0\u201cMysteries at the Museum.\u201d This eventually spurred a conversation that started with chupacabras, moved on to cattle mutilation, and ended with Bigfoot.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s a sobering experience to watch someone speak about an encounter with Bigfoot. There\u2019s a special light that ignites their face, and at times they can grow to have such a feverish intensity about them that it becomes difficult to look into their eyes. Harry\u2019s was the first face I had seen with this look and he told me story after story, each one growing more and more bizarre and frightening. At various points, his eyes would become rimmed in red and at others, he would stop himself, take a breath, and bark out a hoarse\u00a0\u201cdamnit\u201d to reset before he continued.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At one point, he stopped himself and cursed, upset that he had said too much and scared me. I was scared\u2014even in the comfort and light of my own home, the hair along my arms and neck stood up\u2014but I told him I was fine because it was mesmerizing to listen to him talk, to see the intensity of his belief on his face and hear it in his voice and I didn\u2019t want him to stop.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

After that night, the evergreens seemed sinister; I could feel eyes watching me from behind the ferns and devil\u2019s club and I fell into a type of Bigfoot agnosticism, constantly chiding myself for being illogical but feeling something completely opposite in my chest.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Harry told me about a night he spent at a dive bar in South Side Aberdeen, although calling it a bar is generous. The Northwest Passage is more of a dilapidated shack with peeling baby blue paint. The neon Bud Light signs that hang in the windows are dull under a heavy layer of grime and a whiteboard with interchangeable letters nailed to the side of the building has advertised the same Texas hold\u2019em tournament for the past nine years.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Northwest Passage does not attract outsiders or tourists. Instead, it\u2019s occupied by ancient loggers who have found a sense of purpose by bragging about their glory years back when they cut down trees that were so large a king-size bed could fit comfortably on the stump.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In 2015, Harry walked into the bar for a few beers and a game of pool. At this point, he was already well known for his Bigfoot obsession, and the locals that swarmed the place were mostly old classmates and familiar faces.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

People don\u2019t care so much when tourists drive through Grays Harbor and disrupt the chatter at cafes and coffee stands with questions about where to find Bigfoot because it\u2019s understood that someone who spends $300 on a North Face jacket is also stupid enough to believe in a fairy tale. A local, however, who has grown up in and around the forests, is not expected to fall to such levels of idiocy. By being vocal about his belief years prior, Harry had given himself over to the ridicule of the community, and that night in the Northwest Passage was the same as any other\u2014filled with the teasing comments and laughs of men who hide their cruelty behind a joking smile.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

A couple of hours into the night, Harry went outside for a smoke and was followed by one of his former classmates, William. Rather than meeting him with an onslaught of Bigfoot taunts, he approached Harry sober and scared. When I imagine this, I see William standing there, pale and sweaty and bouncing on the balls of his feet, consumed in such a nervous energy that the cracks in the parking lot seem small compared to the cracks in his voice.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

He told Harry about a night during their senior year when a Bigfoot crossed the road in front of his pickup. He had been driving back to his house in the early hours of the morning when he pulled up to a stop sign, and as he pressed on the brake, an eerie feeling hit him and the hairs along his arms stood up. As he looked forward, he watched his headlights hit something freakishly human and hairy as it walked across the road only 40 feet before him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Over 20 years after the incident, Harry was the first person William had told. But when they walked back into the bar, he rejoined his friends and continued pestering Harry like nothing had happened.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I don\u2019t know how many people in Grays Harbor believe in Bigfoot; I don\u2019t even know if it\u2019s a small sliver or a significant chunk. I only know Harry does and he\u2019s the only one I\u2019ve met who\u2019s willing to talk about it. And sometimes, he inspires others to come forward with their secret, but only to him.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

There\u2019s an inherent fear of being ostracized by one\u2019s community. And in a community in which almost no one discusses the things they see in the woods, no one feels empowered to come forward and admit their belief in a fictionalized monster. So they keep their stories secret, no matter how much it eats away at them, because loggers aren\u2019t supposed to be scared of the trees and the things they harbor; loggers aren\u2019t supposed to be scared of anything.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The forests of Grays Harbor are crisscrossed with a never-ending maze of logging roads that are open to the public. The roads have multiple purposes: they provide access to mushroom and blackberry patches, hunting veins, and firewood; they\u2019re used by teenagers for bonfires and underage drinking; they\u2019re an escape for adults who want to momentarily forget about life in the Harbor; they\u2019re a constant source of money for pickers who harvest ferns, salal, and cascara with or without a forest products permit; they\u2019re access points to hiking trails and camping spots; and, in hard times, they\u2019re a place to sleep for anyone who\u2019s desperate.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

But, above all else, they provide access to nature. The most stunning part of the Olympic Peninsula are the evergreens, especially on a wet day. The forest is transformed into a music box as rain falls against the forest floor, teasing up the smell of earth and decay from the duff, and the pale white fog that seeps into the canopy contrasts the near black of the evergreens. The wildlife is abundant and diverse, ranging from black bears that strip huckleberries from bushes to rough skinned newts that use hiking trails as highways.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The pride of Grays Harbor are the forests; they offer a respite from the broken sidewalks of Aberdeen and remind the locals of why this place was settled back in the 1800s. However, in recent years, the logging companies that still own large swaths of the mountains and trees began gating off roads and requiring people to buy access permits that can cost up to $400 per year. The permit system forced the bulk of hunters onto the few remaining public roads, and these sections quickly became bled dry by overhunting and poaching.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The logging roads are still important to Harbor life, but they\u2019re quickly evolving from avenues of escape into symbols of class.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In 2013, Harry was living out of a green Jeep Cherokee. The Harbor had taken his job and he wasn\u2019t able to support himself solely from under-the-table work. He began living on public logging roads, spending his days in town looking for jobs and his nights traversing the woods.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

One night, he pulled a lawn chair from the back of his car and walked 100 paces down the road before sitting down. He placed his head in his hands and began to cry\u2014big wailing sobs that were driven from his body and let out into the solitude of the forest.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When Harry tells the story, he says somewhere off the road, tucked away in the brush, something started to cry with him. Its howls matched his own and together they bawled into the darkness. This creature felt his pain, not why or how, but it somehow understood what he felt and it chose to stay there and feel it with him. Harry believes that creature was a Bigfoot and that it knew empathy and compassion, sorrow and love\u2014emotions thought only to be capable in humans\u2014and there was this creature, thought to not even exist, displaying more heart than anyone else in an entire county could muster.<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I assume that night on the logging road was when he decided to sever his ties with Bigfoot research groups and stop taking people into the valley. His focus shifted from proving their existence to preserving them. If a Bigfoot was to ever be captured or killed in the Olympic Peninsula, cameras and guns would swarm the forests, each person looking for their own slice of fame and sense of mattering.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I once asked Harry why he never left and he told me he couldn\u2019t; he belongs in the Harbor amidst all the\u00a0\u201cmisfits and fuckups\u201d who are just like him. Harbor People are trained to think this way; their sense of purpose was stripped from them and in the vain struggle to regain it, they discovered a deeply ingrained self-doubt that manifested itself into labels like fuckup.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It\u2019s taken me a few years, but I don\u2019t believe any resident of Grays Harbor is a fuckup; how can we assign that label to people who are just trying to build a life for themselves after the one they already had was stripped from them like bark from a tree? I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s one singular word that can define who Harbor People are as they forge forward in a forgotten land. How frightful it is to live in a world where people don\u2019t know you exist, and maybe it\u2019s to mitigate this fear that old loggers still proudly wag fingers and croak out tall tales despite encroaching Parkinson\u2019s and Pall Mall-blackened throats.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In any direction you look, you will see a desperate clutch to both the past and future as locals search for a connection, any connection, to something more tangible than the grey of the present. It\u2019s in the forests that these people live and will always live\u2014the forests that once fed and clothed their community, that are slowly being gated and locked away, and that harbor a reticent force that is overlooked by design. My uncle found something there, some form of partnership with a creature so bizarre and uncomfortable to think about that its entire existence is often taken as a joke.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I still don\u2019t know if Bigfoot is real, but I do know that every time I return and I pull my car onto the packed gravel logging roads that my hands have memorized by the turn of a steering wheel, I can feel something there and I know it can feel me as well. And I wonder if that\u2019s what it truly means to be a Harbor Person, to be simultaneously alone and linked to a world in which our existence does not rest in our hands, but in the boughs of evergreens. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Mackinzie Brink<\/strong> is 21 years old and will be graduating from Eastern Washington University in June of 2021 with a BA in English.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Harbor Man Mackinzie Brink At the base of the Olympic Peninsula in a still fragment of Washington State sits Grays Harbor County. The sparsely populated upper half is home Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3453,"featured_media":0,"parent":1310,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3453"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1587,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/650\/revisions\/1587"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubalt.edu\/welter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}