I’m 81 and I’m Half Sasquatch — I’ll Tell You The Truth About Them Before They’re All Gone
I’m 81 and I’m Half Sasquatch — I’ll Tell You The Truth About Them Before They’re All Gone
The Edge of the Light
I am eighty-one years old and I am half Sasquatch. My father was not a man. He stood close to eight feet when he was young, and I have spent most of my life making sure nobody outside my family ever learned that. I am telling you now because the mountains where he still lives are quieter every year, and the ones like him are running out of room to hide. I would rather you hear the truth from me while I can still say it clearly than have it disappear the way so much of that range has already disappeared.
My name for the purposes of this account is Iris Calendarer. I was born Iris Spear in June of 1944 in a cabin above the Trinity River in what was then a nearly roadless stretch of Trinity County, California, about eleven miles from the small town of Coffee Creek. If you have ever driven Highway 3 along the Trinity River between Weaverville and the Scott Valley, you have passed within a few miles of where I grew up, though you would never have known it from the road.
The Trinity Alps do not announce themselves. They are granite and cedar and old fir, cut through with creeks that run cold even in August. In 1944 there were more black bears in that country than people. My mother’s name was Winona Spear. She grew up in Weaverville, the daughter of a hardware store owner. She loved to draw. She kept a sketchbook full of birds and wildflowers. In the fall of 1943, with her older brother off fighting in the Pacific and half the young men in the county gone with him, she took to hiking alone more than she probably should have. Being alone in those hills was the only place the war did not follow her.
On the second Saturday of October that year she went farther up Coffee Creek than she had planned. The light dropped the way it does fast in that country in October—gold to gray inside of ten minutes. She lost the trail. She was standing in failing light trying to find the creek by sound when she heard movement behind her that was not the creek. When she turned, there was a shape at the edge of the brush that she first took for a bear standing up. It was not a bear. It was close to eight feet tall, covered head to foot in coarse dark hair, and it was watching her the way you watch someone you are trying to decide whether to trust.
She did not run. Some old quiet part of her understood immediately that running was the wrong thing to do. She stood still. It stood still. After what she guessed was close to a minute, it took one step back into the brush and was gone. She found the creek about ten minutes later and made it home in the dark with her flashlight batteries nearly spent.
She told her father what she had seen. He told her she had likely startled a bear on its hind legs in poor light. That was the end of it as far as he was concerned. It was not the end of it for my mother. She went back the following weekend and the one after that, telling her family she was sketching birds. She did not see him again for almost a month. When she did, it was because she had left half a sandwich on a flat rock near where she had first seen him. When she came back through that spot two hours later, the sandwich was gone, and in its place was a fistful of late blackberries, set neatly on the same rock.
That was how it started between them. Not with fear and not with rescue, but with an exchange—food for food—over the better part of a year, until by the following autumn she was sitting within twenty feet of him at dusk while he ate, and he had stopped bothering to hide the sound of his approach through the brush.
She named him in her own mind Tull, which was her attempt at a sound he made often, low in his chest, almost a single syllable that she came to understand meant something close to “here” or “steady.” It was not a name in any language. It was the closest her human mouth could get to a name at all. I have used it my whole life because I never had anything better to call him.
My mother married him, if you want to use that word, in whatever manner made sense for two beings who shared almost no language. There was no ceremony. There was a winter—the winter of 1943 into 1944—when she stopped coming home for two, three, sometimes five days at a stretch. Her family assumed she was staying with a school friend in Weaverville. Instead she was in a shelter of woven fir boughs and cedar bark eleven miles up a drainage that did not have a name on any Forest Service map, learning to survive a Trinity Alps winter from a being who had been doing it his entire life.
I was born in June of 1944 in that shelter, with my grandmother as the only human witness. By then Winona had finally told her parents enough of the truth that her mother insisted on being there for the birth, even though she believed right up until the moment I arrived that her daughter had simply fallen in with a very large, very strange man living wild in the hills. My grandmother’s version of events—the version she carried to her own grave in 1968—was that my father was a hermit, possibly a man too disfigured by some accident to live among people. That explanation, false as it was, protected all of us for decades because it was a story the rest of Trinity County was willing to accept without asking more questions.
I weighed nine pounds at birth. What drew my grandmother’s attention was that I did not cry as a newborn is supposed to cry. I made a low sound instead, more hum than wail. She told my mother years later that the sound had gone through her like a struck bell, and that she had known in that moment that the baby in her arms was not entirely her daughter’s alone.
I grew up in that country the way most Trinity County children of my generation grew up—barefoot half the year, more comfortable on a game trail than a sidewalk—except that I ran a body temperature that hovered around 101 degrees my whole childhood. I could hear a truck coming up the county road a mile before anyone else in the house could. I could smell rain coming a full day before it arrived, a mineral metallic smell most people cannot detect at all. My hands, even as a girl of eight or nine, could grip a fence rail hard enough to leave marks in the wood.
My mother raised me mostly alone in the practical daily sense in a small frame house she and my father built with help from her own father. But my father was never far. He came to the edge of our clearing most evenings. For the first ten years of my life I thought that was simply what fathers did—stayed at the edge of the trees and only came closer after dark—because I had no other father to compare him to.
I did not see him clearly in full daylight until I was five years old. Before that he was a shape at dusk, a smell on the wind, a set of eyes that caught lamplight from the tree line if you looked at the right angle after dark. The day I finally saw him clearly, it was early summer and I had wandered farther from the house than I was supposed to, chasing a garter snake into the trees. I came out into a small clearing and there he was, sitting on a fallen cedar with his forearms resting on his knees, watching me as you would watch a fawn that had wandered too close.
I was not afraid. I remember being struck instead by how still he could hold himself, and by his eyes, which were dark and deep-set under a heavy brow and which moved over me with an attention that felt, even to a five-year-old, plainly like love. He made the sound my mother had taught me to call Tull, low in his chest, and I said it back to him. Something in his shoulders relaxed that I now recognize, having raised children of my own, as the specific relief of a parent watching a child recognize them.
From that summer on he was a consistent, if quiet, presence in my life. He did not come into the house. He did not sit at a table or wear clothing. He stayed at the edge of what was ours and what was the forest. I came to understand as children understand things without being told directly that this edge was not a wall keeping him out so much as a line he respected because it mattered to my mother.
My schooling was managed carefully. I attended the one-room school near Coffee Creek through the eighth grade. My mother was strict about making sure I understood which parts of my life belonged inside that schoolhouse and which parts did not. From around the age of six I was told plainly that I was never to speak of my father to anyone outside our own family, and that if anyone asked where my father was, the answer was that he had gone before I was old enough to remember him.
There were moments when the truth nearly surfaced. In the summer of 1953, when I was nine, a Forest Service trail crew working a fire line above our drainage found a set of tracks in soft mud along the creek that measured close to seventeen inches long. The crew foreman told the story at the general store for the rest of that summer. My grandfather, who by then knew the truth, sat at the counter and agreed with everyone that it was probably a bear with an odd gait, and never once let his face show what he actually knew. That kind of near miss happened four or five times over the course of my childhood. Always the same pattern: evidence found, a rational explanation offered by someone in the family who knew better, and the story dying out within a season.
I left the Trinity Alps for the first time in the fall of 1962 at eighteen years old to attend the University of California at Davis, where I studied to become a veterinarian. My mother had insisted on this over my own hesitation because she wanted me to have a life that could exist fully in the human world if I ever needed it to. She was right. I graduated in 1967, one of a small handful of women in my program, and came back to Trinity County almost immediately. I set up a large-animal practice out of Weaverville, driving a truck full of instruments and medicine up logging roads and ranch lanes across three counties for the next four decades. A significant part of my success in that work came from abilities I never explained to a single client. I could smell infection in a cow’s udder before it showed in the milk. I could hear a horse’s labored breathing from the far end of a barn. My hands could set a dislocated joint on a full-grown bull with a force that most men twice my size could not have managed.
In the spring of 1968 a young internist at the Trinity County Hospital ordered a routine blood panel on me after I came in with poison oak. He called me back two days later with an expression somewhere between fascination and alarm. My white count was elevated in a pattern he had never seen. My resting temperature read 100.9. A component of my blood typing had come back inconclusive on three separate runs. He asked whether anyone in my family had a known blood disorder. I told him no, and that the elevated temperature was simply how I had always run. He let me walk out. He ordered no further testing. That set the pattern for the rest of my adult life. There would be moments again and again when someone came close enough to the truth to see its edges, and each time the truth survived, not because I was clever, but because most people, when handed something that does not fit the world they understand, will choose the explanation that lets them keep sleeping at night.
I met my husband, Walter Calendarer, in the fall of 1969. He was a big, quiet man, a contractor by trade. We were married in June of 1971. I did not tell him the full truth about my father until four months before the wedding, sitting on the tailgate of his truck above the same stretch of Coffee Creek where my mother had first seen Tull. I expected him to leave. He was quiet for a long time. He asked me two questions. He asked whether my father had ever harmed anyone. I told him no, not once, not in twenty-seven years. Then he asked whether I loved him—meaning Walter—the same way my mother had loved a being who was not human. I told him I did, in the plain ordinary way two people love each other, and that the rest of it was simply the shape my family happened to take. He sat with that for most of an afternoon. Then he said that he had grown up around enough strange, stubborn, half-wild country to know that the mountains kept secrets a lot bigger than most people gave them credit for, and that he would rather spend his life with a woman who trusted him with the truth than one who didn’t.
We had two children. Our daughter Fay was born in 1973 and our son Owen in 1976. Both of them carried a milder version of what I carry. Fay ran a fraction warmer than average. Owen was broad and strong for his age. Neither of them had anything close to the strength of the senses I grew up with, and neither of them ever met their grandfather quite as I had, though both of them knew from an early enough age exactly what he was.
The 1970s brought the first real external danger, and it came from television. The Patterson-Gimlin film had already been circulating for several years, shot not far from us in the Bluff Creek drainage. By the middle of the decade the entire region had become a magnet for amateur expeditions and men looking for an excuse to fire a rifle at something they could brag about. In the late summer of 1976 a group of four men from the Sacramento area set up a hunting camp less than three miles from where my father’s clan typically summered. One of them mentioned at the general store that they had brought a .30-06 and a case of dynamite. I did not sleep that night. What I did instead was drive up as close as I could get to that hunting camp on the pretense of checking cattle, and make as much ordinary human noise and presence in that stretch of country as I possibly could for three straight days. It worked, or at least nothing worse happened. The men stayed eleven days, fired their rifles at what they later said was a bear, and left.
My father’s kind moved in a small clan through a territory I would estimate at somewhere between sixty and ninety square miles of the Trinity Alps and the adjoining Salmon Mountains. There were in my childhood at least six of them that I am aware of. My father was, as far as I could tell, the group’s most consistent presence near the human boundary. Besides Tull there was an elder female, a younger male with a scar across one shoulder, two females closer to Tull’s age, and at least one juvenile. My mother kept a private ledger of these sightings in the back pages of one of her old sketchbooks. It records eleven separate individuals across the eighteen years she kept it.
In October of 1989, when Owen was thirteen, he came back from checking a salt lick pale and quiet. He had seen a very large dark shape moving along the tree line about sixty yards away, upright, with an unhurried rolling gait. It had paused once to look directly at him before continuing into heavier timber. I sat him down at the kitchen table and told him the full truth for the first time. I told him about his grandfather. I told him that what he had seen was very likely a member of the same family. That conversation changed something in how Owen carried himself for the rest of his life. He became, in his own quiet way, the most protective of our family’s secret among all of my children.
The closest I ever came to losing my father happened in the winter of 1989 during one of the worst cold snaps Trinity County had seen in decades. He had taken a fall on ice along a talus slope above ten thousand feet and torn muscle badly enough in one hip that he could not put full weight on that leg. I half-carried him for stretches. My own strength—the strength I had spent my whole life quietly using to set dislocated joints on full-grown bulls—was the only reason either of us survived that descent. By the time we reached lower ground he was able to bear enough weight to make it the rest of the way to the timberline on his own power, where I left him, because that was always the agreement. I could go as far as the edge of what was still recognizably wild. I could never follow him past it.
My mother died in the winter of 1991 at the age of seventy of heart failure. In her final days she told me more than once that the years she had spent with my father were the truest years of her life, and that she had never once regretted turning back up that creek after the first time she saw him. On a cold clear afternoon in December of 1990 I drove her up to the old property one last time. He came at dusk. She got slowly to her feet and walked to the edge of the porch steps to meet him. He did not come all the way to the house, even then. That boundary had held for forty-seven years, and it held on that last evening too. But he came close enough that she could reach out and rest her hand against his forearm, and they stayed like that for the better part of twenty minutes.
I did not see him again for nearly four months after the funeral. When he finally did come to the edge of the property that spring, he stood there for a long time without approaching and made a sound I had never heard from him before—low and broken, held long enough that it needed no translation at all. I walked down off the porch past the line I had respected my entire life, and I put my arms around as much of him as I could reach. He did not pull away. We stood like that in the last of the daylight, an eighty-one-year-old creature who was not a man and his forty-six-year-old daughter who was not entirely human either, both of us grieving the same ordinary singular woman who had spent her whole life as the bridge between us. For the first time in my life the boundary between his world and mine simply did not exist at all. Grief, in the end, does not care what species is carrying it.
In the summer of 1998, when I was fifty-four, he came down out of the timber carrying something cradled against his chest. As he got closer I saw it was a fawn, no more than a few days old, its back leg broken clean through. He set it down in front of me and made a low rising sound my mother had always associated with a request. I understood immediately. I splinted that fawn’s leg while my father crouched beside us and watched every movement of my hands. When I finished, he reached out one enormous hand and rested it with a lightness I still noticed, given his size, on top of my own hands where they were still holding the splint in place. We stayed like that for what felt like a full minute before he lifted the fawn and carried it back into the timber. Whatever else separates his kind from mine, the impulse to protect something small and hurt is not one of those separations. It runs the same in him as it does in me.
Walter passed in 2014 of a stroke. The years after brought my father closer to our old property than he had come since I was a child, as though he understood that I was alone in that house for the first time since 1971. He came most evenings that first winter, staying longer at the tree line than he ever had before. There were nights I sat on the porch in a coat with a thermos of coffee and simply kept him company in the dark.
The losses on the mountain weigh on me now more than my own. In August of 2021 the Monument Fire burned through a significant stretch of the Salmon and Trinity River drainages, through territory that had been part of my father’s family’s range for as long as anyone in my family had known them. I do not know to this day how many of them survived that fire. I know my father survived because he came to the edge of our old family property that October, thinner than I had ever seen him, with burn scarring visible along one forearm. But the two younger members of his clan that I had come to recognize over the previous decade I have not seen sign of since that fire season. A clan I could once reliably say numbered around six individuals seems now, based on everything I can observe from the very edge of that world, to number perhaps two or three.
That is the reason I am telling you this. I am eighty-one. My father, by every account I have of his kind, may well outlive me by decades. But the world that made room for a family like his to exist quietly in these mountains is shrinking every fire season, every logging sale, every new subdivision creeping up the Trinity River corridor. I do not believe either of us has unlimited time left to make sure the truth of what happened here outlives us both.
My granddaughter Dela, who is finishing veterinary school at Davis this year—the same program that trained me sixty years ago—finally convinced me to record this account. She had grown up knowing the family truth, but she was the first of the fourth generation to ask me directly and repeatedly why our family had kept a story this significant entirely to ourselves for over eighty years when every fire season made it more likely that the truth would simply vanish. Sitting with that question over the better part of a year, I came to believe that she was right about one thing in particular: silence protects a family only for as long as there is still a family left in the mountains to protect.
So I am telling you this now, plainly, without the plaster casts or the coordinates that some of you will want and that I will never provide. My father is real. He is a Sasquatch, whatever that word ends up meaning to you by the end of this. He is somewhere in the high country above Coffee Creek tonight, in a range of mountains that Congress decided, for reasons that had nothing to do with Sasquatch at all, to leave wild enough that a family like his could survive there into its ninth decade of contact with my own. He has never harmed a single person in eighty-two years that I am aware of. He has splinted no leg but a fawn’s and held no hand but mine, and stood at the edge of a hundred cold Trinity County evenings simply because the daughter he could never fully claim in the human world was inside the lit window, and that was enough for him to keep coming back.
I do not know how many more autumns either of us has. I know that when my own time comes, whatever remains of his family will likely be the last true evidence—walking and breathing—that Sasquatch families like his ever lived in these mountains at all. And once they are gone, the mountains will close back over the whole story the way they have closed over so much else in this range, quietly, without ceremony, the way the Trinity Alps have always kept their oldest and most private residents.
I am not asking you to believe me. I have lived eighty-one years without needing anyone outside my own family to believe a word of this, and I will live out whatever remains of my life the same way. What I am asking is smaller than that. If you ever find yourself on that stretch of Highway 3 above the Trinity River in the last gold light before the ridge swallows the sun, and you feel for just a moment that the tree line is paying you a kind of attention an empty forest has no reason to pay, I am asking you to sit with that feeling instead of explaining it away. Somewhere up that drainage, an old man who is not entirely a man is very likely doing exactly what he has done every evening of my entire life: standing quietly at the edge of the light, watching over the only family he was ever allowed to claim in daylight, and asking nothing in return except that someone, somewhere, finally understood he was there.
My name is Iris Calendarer. I have spent eighty-one years belonging fully to neither of the two worlds I came from and completely to both of them at once. And if that sounds like a contradiction, I can only tell you that it has never once felt that way from the inside. It has simply felt like love—the ordinary, complicated, protective kind—stretched across a boundary that most of the world still insists cannot be crossed, held quietly for eight decades by two families who crossed it anyway.
