Читать книгу The Bushman’s Lair - Paul McKendrick - Страница 9

“Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.”

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

Shuswap Lake has four arms of unequal length that give it the shape of a lopsided H. The southwestern arms that form the bottom half of the H are home to towns, farms and industry amid a landscape ranging from rolling grasslands sprinkled with ponderosa pine to fertile farmland incised by meandering waterways and flanked by evergreen hills. In contrast, the top half of the H is more inaccessible and untamed. Towering alpine peaks capture moisture from the Pacific, sustaining the unique inland rainforest ecosystem below and building up large snowpacks in the winter that replenish the lake, which in some parts is over five hundred feet deep.

Having four arms makes the lake attractive for tourism. Not only does the elongated shape provide more explorable shoreline—the reported length of which ranges from over 1,400 kilometres to a more credible 405 kilometres, depending on the source—but it also provides four different destinations. This is particularly attractive to houseboaters who want to feel they are captains of their own ships and not just on the same journey as the other roughly two hundred houseboats that could be plying the waters at the same time. Of course, they need not leave the comforts of their lavish floating homes, which are up to three storeys high and ninety-four feet long and sometimes outfitted with essentials like air conditioning, hot tubs, large-screen TVs, hardwood floors and granite countertops.

Houseboaters seeking solitude generally head north into Anstey Arm, nestled among abrupt, forested hillsides that sweep upward on the east side to the peaks of the Monashee Mountains. Anstey’s upper end cannot be reached by road, and its lower end, at the middle of the H, can be reached only via a rough, washboardy logging road that takes an hour to travel from the nearest town, Sicamous, and only accesses the private lakefront properties that occupy some of the shoreline. Except for a few beaching spots that can host houseboats for the night, most of the remaining shoreline is rocky and uninhabited except for wildlife and, for a brief period, the Bushman.

I had the good fortune to spend some time on the Shuswap as a teenager and into my early twenties, when my family had a cabin on Salmon Arm, the southeast arm of the lake. Our slice of lake life provided plenty to occupy us, so there was little justification to spend a full day in a boat touring all the way up Anstey Arm. That changed, however, when I learned that the Bushman’s cave had been discovered there. The prospect of seeing it was reason enough to explore the arm, and so on a sun-soaked summer day in 2002, I set out with some similarly curious friends for a visit.

Roughly halfway up the arm, past all the cabins, we saw a cluster of boats moored along a particularly forbidding section of shoreline. There was no obvious attraction there, so we wondered if perhaps we had stumbled upon some other cave seekers. We moored our boat against the serrated shoreline and found the switchback trail leading up the slope. It was tricky to navigate in flip flops, but it wasn’t long before the doorway to the cave appeared abruptly in front of us.

Beyond the wood-framed entrance was an impactful glimpse into the Bushman’s life. Even though the police had cleared out many of the contents, it felt like we were encroaching upon someone’s home. It had a sensible arrangement, with enough space in the kitchen to comfortably prepare and enjoy a meal, and the bedroom chamber felt like it was located deep enough in the earth to safely ride out Armageddon. The custom-built framing and furniture suggested the Bushman had kept busy and was prepared to stay awhile. The reading material lying about suggested he enjoyed some leisure time—notwithstanding that the newspaper on the bed, folded over to reveal the picture of Osama bin Laden, felt slightly ominous in that setting. Putting that and the mildewy aroma aside, it was possible to see some attraction in the den as a short-term hideaway. It was also possible to see how living there day to day might lead to anti-social tendencies or exacerbate any pre-existing ones.

Over the years since I set foot in his lair, I have continued to marvel at the effort required to construct it, and questions have percolated about its bearded occupant’s motivation. He didn’t seem to fit the profile of a refuge-seeking hermit who had drifted onto a wayward path or a freeloading, curmudgeonly misanthrope who had always been askew. There seemed to be more to him.

Curiosity kept pulling me in, and I began digging deeper and deeper. At some point, that curiosity morphed into a determination to answer the question of what had driven him to the cave. If nobody else was going to tell the full story, perhaps it would have to be me.

Margaret Atwood is partly responsible. While pondering the Bushman’s story, I stumbled upon her 1972 book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which identified survival as the central symbol in Canadian literature. Her take on “survival” is broader than just fending off menacing elements in the bush: “In earlier writers these obstacles are external—the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being. Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle, and a character is paralyzed by terror (either of what he thinks is threatening him from the outside, or of elements in his own nature that threaten him from within).”

As I learned more about the Bushman, his story seemed to hold the possibility of confronting most, if not all, of the obstacles to survival that the enduring author described a half century ago. Thus, with the prospect of unravelling a quintessential narrative—for vintage Canadian literature, at least—I sought to understand how someone ends up living in a cave in the bush. Or, as Atwood would say, into the darkness, looking for light, we go.

The Bushman’s real name was John Bjornstrom, and the most recent address I could find for him was in the city of Williams Lake, a few hundred kilometres north of the Shuswap. I mailed letters to addresses I found for him there, tried various phone numbers and sent emails. No response came.

I had seen a comment from a user called “Shuswap Bushman” on an online message board dedicated to living off the grid that I had previously stumbled upon while doing some unrelated research on anchors. In response to a post on how to make your own anchor, the Bushman had offered a helpful modification. I revisited the site to see if I could retrieve any further information on his whereabouts, but his location was shown only as “Lake in the Woods,” and the most recent reference to “Shuswap Bushman” on the forum was from another poster, calling himself The Hermit:

I know it’s been over 2 years and things change in life. I was never one of the stronger, most replying members in this forum, but this site/forum has always been a part of me since I signed in. The folks on this site are amazing. Polite, courteous, gracious and very helpful people. Over the years you gain and lose members, some come and go, faster than they came. Some are like a legacy and gone—Shuswap Bushman. That is the joy of the Internet, we have our space to explore and learn, learn from other people’s experiences and mistakes. Sad but part of life, we lose people in life, in our lives and on this forum.

But trawling online message boards didn’t feel like the optimal approach for tracking down a man known as the Bushman. That is, until I stumbled upon a Kijiji ad offering documents for sale that, rather serendipitously, were being marketed to anyone interested in writing a book on the Bushman. The seller was a retired private investigator and friend of Bjornstrom’s named Rob Nicholson, and the documents included a transcript of an interview with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and correspondence from Bjornstrom. Nicholson explained that he had completed some investigative work to assist with Bjornstrom’s trial preparation, which led to a friendship and the handing over of the documents for safekeeping; he had rediscovered them while in the process of moving. I purchased them for one hundred dollars plus postage. (I later learned from a Salmon Arm Observer article that a documentary crew had previously offered $5,000 for these same papers when the story “was still hot in the media,” as Nicholson put it.)

When I initially contacted Nicholson and indicated I was exploring the prospect of a book, he said Bjornstrom hadn’t written a book himself or sold the documents because he was not allowed to profit from his crimes. This was before British Columbia passed legislation in 2016 preventing criminals from profiting from their crimes—after convicted serial killer Robert Pickton proclaimed his innocence in a 144-page book that he authored, had smuggled out of prison, and then had published under a different name and made available on Amazon—but Bjornstrom, at the time of his sentencing, was given a specific court order to make sure he didn’t sell his story in any fashion.

Nicholson volunteered to put me in touch with Bjornstrom, who he speculated was panning for gold in northern BC and might be unreachable for a while. He also cryptically warned that if I decided to write the book, I should be wary of potential “security concerns,” but he didn’t elaborate further. I wondered how I would explain that to my wife, but concluded that, for the time being, I could ignore the vague and presumably stale security threat.

I pursued a couple of other individuals with connections to Bjornstrom—they were also unsure of his whereabouts—but otherwise left it largely with Nicholson to make contact. A year later, when that had not happened, I concluded the next step was a road trip to Williams Lake to track him down in person. There was only one problem: on January 13, 2018, John Bjornstrom passed away from natural causes at the age of fifty-eight.