Dean Pommerville was 59. Eric Straughter was 37. They met at work, at a grocery chain's distribution center, and hiked together often. On Dec. 24, 2024, they set out for what should have been a modest hike. It was in a Washington forest just north of the Oregon line. Straughter had just lost his job. Neither man came home.
A winter storm likely caught them. Cold, rain and snow turned an easy afternoon into a fight they weren't ready for. Search teams found Pommerville three days later. They found Straughter the next day, about 2 miles from the car. Two miles sounds short. In that forest, in that weather, it isn't.
Then the story got stranger. The county sheriff's office put out a release that said the men were “searching for Sasquatch.” News outlets ran with it. Two Bigfoot hunters, lost in Bigfoot country. Neither the release nor the stories offered any evidence. Both families said it wasn't true. Chuck Thompson, a journalist who's worked for CNN, got drawn in through a chance connection with Pommerville's wife. “Something wasn't right,” he writes. His book, Sasquatch Country (Counterpoint, 272 pages, $27), tries to set the record straight.
A county that lost its main job
Skamania County, Wash., used to run on logging. Private logging jobs there have fallen to fewer than 200, from around 700 in the 1990s. That's a drop of more than two-thirds. Tourism had to fill the hole, and it leans partly on Bigfoot, the area's longtime mascot. Thompson writes that the county has Sasquatch on its mind nearly all the time. So when two men died in the woods, the legend made the easy headline. Jack Butler, reviewing the book in the Journal, calls Thompson's digging admirable. He finds the long media critiques tiresome. Still, the two men come out of the book as what they were. They were regular hikers and close friends, caught unprepared by a storm.
Our read
This is a Career story, and a Behavioral one. Straughter had just lost his job. A walk with an older friend may have been a way to cheer him up. We'd never second-guess that. The county where the two men died has lived a bigger version of the same loss. One industry carried the place, then it didn't. Tourism, Bigfoot included, had to fill the gap. A household that leans on one paycheck, or one employer, carries the same risk at a smaller scale.
So here's the check this week. Open the account you'd live on if the paycheck stopped. Count how many months of rent, food and insurance it covers. As a general rule, under three months is the first thing to fix, before any new investing. If your job sits in an industry your whole town leans on, aim closer to six. A cushion gets built in the good months, long before the week the job goes. If you'd like a second look at that number, a short review of the cash cushion is the easiest planning win there is.