The As It Happens Files Read online

  TH: I’ll be going to British Columbia, and the attack itself will be a controlled attack.

  ML: Oh, it will.

  TH: Oh, absolutely. Getting in close to grizzly bears in the wild, doing research alone, is hard enough, never mind counting on the bear attacking to see if, in fact, the suit would work if things went awry.

  ML: So you’re going to be attacked by a tame bear?

  TH: Yes. A 1,300-pound Kodiak.

  ML: And what kind of a test is that?

  TH: It’s a test that could kill you if it doesn’t work.

  ML: Okay.

  TH: You’ve got 1,300 pounds, 10 feet, real claws, real teeth—real power. So basically, the suit’s a toy to the bear.

  ML: Okay.

  TH: And when he’s told to go at the suit, it will rip apart the suit. I’ve no illusions that the outside skeleton will [not] be ripped apart, which is the rubber base that holds the electronics in place. That’ll be completely ripped apart.

  ML: What are you saying? You think it will be ripped apart?

  TH: Oh, the outside of the suit—absolutely. He’ll make his way to the titanium and then that’s, of course, what’ll stop him. I’m not so much worried about the claws and the teeth as I am about the power. Basically, what I wanted for 15 years is [to see]: could the suit withstand that kind of force? I mean, I’ve tried against trucks and everything imaginable to man, but never against the power.

  ML: The weight and power.

  TH: No, not so much the weight. I mean, we’ve done 3-ton pick-up trucks at 35 kilometres an hour, and that’s not a problem.

  …

  ML: What did it feel like—getting hit by the truck?

  TH: Oh, I guess the equivalent of being in an inner tube. You know, rolling-down-the-hill type of thing, maybe hit a tree.… You know you were hit only because you hit the ground, because you left the ground and flew back 50, 6O feet.…

  ML: So how will you signal if you’re in some distress?

  TH: Well, that’s basically a voice command. And if he’s knocked the wind out of me, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do about that. I mean if I can’t talk, there’s no way the handler’s going to be able to know. He can’t get face signals, because I’m enclosed in a titanium shield.

  ML: Yes.… Do you not think the bear might just be scared out of his wits and run in the other direction … when he has a look at you?

  TH: You’ve hit it on the head. In all the research that I’ve done with grizzly bears—you know, winter den studies and testing the deterrent sprays and that—you’re right: a wild bear might, possibly, nine out of ten times, look and say, That’s a formidable thing in front of me, and I don’t like what I’m looking at—and actually take off.

  ML: Of course, it works that way. I mean, if that’s what happens, if that’s how you protect yourself, it works—right?

  TH: Yeah. So when you’re talking about a controlled attack, where you have a handler, the bear will do what the handler says, so I don’t have to worry about the Kodiak looking at me and saying, I don’t want to play with you.

  ML: Now, Mr. Hurtubise, I sort of forget why you started this. I mean, why would a can of Mace not do the trick if you’re trying to protect yourself against a bear?

  TH: Well, that’s why I originally built the suit. I tested deterrent sprays under actual field conditions. I’m the only one able to do it in the world for companies that market it to the public … who are told that, if you’re in the backcountry and things go awry, just simply spray the bear and it goes away. Well, that’s a fallacy, of course … But to test that, you’d actually have to do it against a grizzly bear. Well, nobody could do it, because if it doesn’t work, you’re going to get killed.

  ML: Yeah.

  TH: So they come to me and I have this suit. And I start out with black bears—I don’t wear a suit with black bears. You don’t need it. It’s a totally different species. And then you move your way up to grizzly bears. And I’m able to say whether it works or not, and of course, it wouldn’t stop a dog, let alone an enraged grizzly.

  ML: So it’s not as though your life will be totally without purpose if you meet the bear challenge coming up.

  TH: Oh no. We’re already into the next suit. My whole point is, after all these years, I would like to know—though I tested it against everything man can throw at me—would it have survived what a grizzly can do? And now I have the chance, a safety-controlled chance, and I’m more than happy to do it.

  Troy Hurtubise was as good as his word: he went out west to test his suit against a Kodiak bear, and a couple of weeks later, we called him back to find out how it went. It turned out that I had indeed hit the nail on the head with that question about the bear maybe being more frightened of Troy in his suit than the other way around—sort of.

  ML: Mr. Hurtubise, how’d it go?

  TH: Well, I didn’t get actual contact, but I got everything else I needed. I found out whether the suit would be able to handle the pressure. The other fascinating thing was—I guess the irony of it all—was that the bears are terrified of the suit. They wouldn’t come near it.

  ML: Well, I told you that!

  TH: I sensed that over the years, but I didn’t think against a Kodiak …

  ML: Tell us in detail what you did. You were going to go against this Kodiak …

  TH: Yes. The handler himself had never seen the Ursus Mark VI other than on TV, so when I got up there with the suit, he looked at me and said, “Well, I want to get my bear accustomed to the suit. So without you in it, I’m going to bring it into his cage.”

  I said, “Sure, no problem at all.”

  So he brought it in, and we slowly worked the bear to get used to the suit, and at one point, he said, “Okay, you can have it,” and to our surprise, the Kodiak actually claimed the suit. And if you know bears “claiming,” it’s like a kill. It’s his. He took it underneath him. So that was pretty scary.

  ML: Oh. Aren’t you glad you weren’t in it?

  TH: Well, yeah, at that time, yes, because what I wanted to know was—it wasn’t built for a Kodiak—so I wanted to know, would he be able to crush it like a pop can?

  ML: And?

  TH: No. He tried everything he could. That got him mad, so he started to go at the rubber, and of course, he was taking pieces of the rubber off—we expected that—and then he got to the chain mail, and that’s where the problems started. He was peeling back the chain mail like it was a banana.

  ML: Uh-oh.

  TH: Because it’s not shark chain mail.

  ML: It’s not shark chain mail?

  TH: No. You see, real chain mail is shark chain mail used for great white sharks.

  ML: Right. That has to be strong.

  TH: When we shot the movie with the [National] Film Board and I was building the suit, we didn’t have time to get that, so I went with butcher’s chain mail, which is fine against a grizzly, not a Kodiak. So we had a heck of a time getting the suit back from him. We finally got the suit out, and I mean there was chunks taken out of it.… No problem; once he got to the titanium, it wasn’t a problem.

  ML: The titanium held up. It wasn’t squashed.

  TH: It wasn’t squashed, which was a great success for me. So he took me aside and said, “Listen. Not against this bear; not with this chain mail. I will not allow you to do that.”

  ML: “Don’t want to see you killed.”

  TH: Sure. So he said, “But I have a 320-pound grizzly …” And I said, “Wow. That’s great.”

  He said, “I have more than enough confidence in your suit against the grizzly bear, without even me here—like, inside the cage—that if she actually took you to the ground and had fun with you type of thing, you’d be okay. And I said, “Well, that’s great.” So I got in the suit, walked in the cage by myself—there’s this 320-pound grizzly—and, sure enough, not so much to my surprise but to his, there was no way on this earth that that bear was going to come near that suit. There was no way. See,
he assumed that, okay, if she becomes accustomed to it, then she’ll investigate. No. I mean, forget it.

  So now Troy Hurtubise had the grizzly thoroughly cowed by his bear-proof suit, and the Kodiak, at least, had managed not to completely destroy it, but still he wasn’t satisfied. He persuaded the handler to give him another crack at the Kodiak, and this time he would be wearing the suit. He thought the bear might have more respect for the suit if it was standing up, and he wasn’t wrong.

  TH: They let the Kodiak out, and it’s just me and the Kodiak and—no way. I mean, for ten minutes that bear was not coming near that suit. I mean, he was scared. I’m six foot two and I’m formidable in this suit; he’s on all fours. There’s no bear in the world that’s bigger than me when they’re on all fours, so when he’s on all fours, he’s looking at me and saying, I don’t like this.

  But now the handler yells back to me. He says, “How long can you stay in the suit?”

  I said, “25, 30 minutes.”

  And he said, “Good. Stand there and chew some gum, because in about five minutes, this bear is going to figure out that he’s bigger than you and it’s going to turn into curiosity and then it’s going to turn into, I’m not scared of you anymore.

  And, sure enough, five minutes pass and he’s catching my scent and he’s looking at me and you know what he’s saying—

  ML: Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside?

  TH: No, no, that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying, I know you smell like a human. I know what a human smells like and I know what a human looks like—but you don’t look like a human. What are you? So he starts to get more curious and more curious. Finally, he makes it to five feet and then he gets a huge whiff of me and stands up all on his own, ten feet tall—

  ML: Uh-oh.

  TH: At five feet away. Now I’m terrified. I’m terrified. The grizzly I had no fear of, because I knew the suit could handle a grizzly. The Kodiak blocking out the sun in front of me … Okay, this isn’t a good thing here; I’m getting scared. So he’s up there ten feet, and he comes back down, and in that instant we both knew he knew he was bigger than me. He says to himself—I mean, you just know, the way the look was—I am bigger than you and I betcha I’m stronger than you. So he starts to get very curious to the point of brave enough to get within six inches of me, on all fours. His mouth’s open and I’m looking down at these canines—I mean, just huge—

  ML: You’re waiting for the handler to say, “Here, Rover!”

  TH: There was a couple of instances the handler knew that he was ready to take a shot at me and would say, “No! No!” and the bear would back off. It’s like a mother to him, the handler. So the bear’s looking at the handler and me at the same time and thinking, Geez, I wonder if I can slip one in there.

  So we went at this for a half-hour and it was just, you know, teeth and standing up and this and that.… So we ended that, we got out of the cage and—it was a big compliment to me—the handler said, “Listen, it’s not over. I have full confidence in your suit. I honestly thought that he’d crush it. He can’t do it; I’m shocked. But if you switch the chain mail—get rid of that garbage you’ve got on there and put the real shark chain mail on—you come back in the spring and I have full confidence that if the bear goes beyond curiosity to taking you to the ground, he won’t be able to do nothing to you.”

  ML: So back to the shop.

  TH: So yeah. I’m going to strip it down, put the real chain mail on. I’m going to go back in the spring, be fully confident that I’m going to be able to do what I’m going to do.

  ML: And we’ll talk to you then.

  TH: Absolutely.

  ML: You know you’re crazy, don’t you?

  TH: Oh no, just a researcher who does things a little different.

  Different … yeah.

  We did talk to the Bear Suit Man again, when he was about to test the Ursus Mark VII. It had no chain mail whatsoever, but it was much stronger, he told us. Plus, it had air conditioning and on-board computers—oh yes, and fingers. The better to climb up and out of the cage, I figured, when the bear came after him.

  That was in May 2002. When I checked back the other day to see how his quest was doing, there was good news and there was bad news. The good news was that his bear suit days were over; he felt he’d topped the charts in the bear suit category and no further improvement was required.

  As it happens, though, there isn’t a huge market for bear-proof suits, and since a guy’s got to eat, Mr. Hurtubise has been trying to interest the military in a modified version of his body armour. According to an article I saw in the Hamilton Spectator, his new suit is called the Trojan. It’s described as a “practical, lightweight and affordable shell to stave off bullets, explosives, knives and clubs.” In the picture accompanying the story, the Trojan doesn’t look very lightweight, but there are other great features that come with it: a knife, a pepper-spray gun, emergency morphine and salt, a laser pointer, a solar-powered fresh-air system and a detachable transponder that can be swallowed “… in case of trouble.” And all this could be yours—or the Canadian Armed Forces’—for the bargain-basement price of two thousand dollars a pop.

  This is where the bad news comes in. The Canadian military aren’t in a rush, apparently, to phone in their orders for the Trojan suit—maybe because Mr. Hurtubise doesn’t seem to have a regular phone line. He does have other inventions to peddle, though—like the spray-on Fire Paste that would prevent anything coated in it from burning up. He says it costs next to nothing to make and it’s biodegradable. That sounds pretty good, no?

  EIGHT

  There’ll Always Be an England

  … and a radio

  If the Bear Suit Man’s clothes weigh a little more than normal, Stephen Gough’s weigh less. In fact, he feels that any clothes at all would be an unnecessary encumbrance when he’s running cross-country: a birthday suit, rather than a bear suit, is more his style. Mark McKelvey, on the other hand, doesn’t feel dressed unless he’s wearing a fridge, which is what he sported on a 160-kilometre trek from Liverpool to Mount Snowdon in Wales back in 2003.

  Gough and McKelvey belong to the species Eccentricus britannicus. Most of the eccentrics who turn up on As It Happens are British, and that’s because the British Isles possess by far the greatest number of odd people per capita in the world. We don’t know why; maybe it’s their diet. You know the sort of people I mean: people who roll cheeses and eat nettles, people who shelter hedgehogs and hate hedges, people who play bagpipes and people who hurl haggis … people who see haggis as an aphrodisiac.

  Once, when I was speaking to a group about how our show gets put together, I described the story meeting we had each morning, where everyone was invited to bring ideas about what to put on the air that night. I told them that the senior producer would run through a list of categories: Lead Story, National, International, Science, Entertainment, Dead Blues Musicians and so on—at which point a woman in the audience put up her hand and asked, “When do you do your Crazy People from England?”

  The answer, of course, was: whenever we could. Before I started hosting the show, my all-time favourite guest was the English bloke who had a stuffed fish—a marlin—mounted on the roof of his house, and although its presence had spawned a pretty intense campaign on the part of local councillors and some of his neighbours to get the thing removed, he was not at all inclined to give way. In fact, the more they went after him, the more stuff he acquired for display on his property, up to and including, if I’m not mistaken, a Sherman tank.

  A man’s home is his castle, he told As It Happens, and how he chose to decorate it was his own affair entirely.

  The King of Redonda didn’t have a castle as such, but he did rule over a small island near Antigua in the Caribbean. We talked to King Robert the First—actually, to the Pretender to the Throne, as he then was—just as he was preparing to sail over from Antigua and plant his flag. He told us that the island, populated chiefly by rats and boobies (t
ropical birds), had been named by Columbus and established as a kingdom in 1865 by an Antiguan citizen as a legacy for his first-born son, Matthew.

  The royal line gets a bit confused after that, since several people not descended from Matthew have claimed to be the King of Redonda. I asked King Robert (aka Bob Williamson) what he based his claim on, and he explained that he’d been anointed directly by his predecessor.

  Robertus Rex (RR): I met the then king, Juan the Second, early last year, and we got along famously. He was here in Antigua on holiday, and over lunch one day, he said he was fed up being king.

  “I’m going to retire soon; I’m going to abdicate.”

  And of course, I asked who the next king might be, and he said, “Well, I’ve drawn up a short list, and a very rich Spaniard is at the top of the list; he bought all the regalia at Sotheby’s last year.”

  I refrained from asking him why he flogged the royal gear, but I was a bit upset, and he said, “What’s the matter?”

  I said, “Thousands of lives and millions of pounds sterling were spent kicking the Spanish out of the Caribbean, and now you’re giving a piece of it back? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Oh God! Didn’t think of that.”

  He then went back to England. I wrote to him, applying to get on the short list, for the following reasons: I’m as brown as the first king after living here for three years; I’m also a writer—which all the kings have been, incidentally. And I have a boat, an 18th-century Baltic trader.

  ML: So you can get to the island.

  RR: Sure. And it’s much the same kind of boat as Matthew’s father had.

  ML: Well, that would seem to qualify you.

  RR: Yeah. “Also,” I said, “I’m five foot six, so please put me on the short list.” So he did.

  ML: You claimed the throne.

  RR: That’s right, with his blessing. He then told me how to go about it. On Sunday, the day after tomorrow, 65 of us are sailing over to Montserrat in a 120-foot square rigger, Sir Robert Baden Powell, and we’re going to invade the island and plant the flag. It’s one of the several things I have to do to secure the kingdom.