Remembering the grizzly bear obsessed Troy Hurtubise and his infamous suit
The most eccentric person I ever met was a self-styled inventor who grew up on the east Mountain in Hamilton and developed a peculiar obsession with bears.
His name was Troy Hurtubise, and he gained international attention for his over-the-top efforts to design protective suits against grizzly attacks. His life was a relentless saga of bravado, blind ambition, and daredevil stunts that included being pushed off the escarpment, struck by a pickup truck, and pummelled with baseball bats.
It all caught the attention of filmmaker Peter Lynch who immortalized the quixotic adventurer in the 1996 NFB cult-classic film Project Grizzly" that became one of the most successful Canadian documentaries ever. Troy's own videos went viral on the internet. Even The Simpsons" television show paid homage to him with an episode that had Homer try to develop a bear-proof suit called the BearBuster 5000.
But, tragically, Troy died four years ago this month in a fiery collision with a fuel tanker truck in North Bay. He was 54.
His widow, Lori Hurtubise says the police told her that he swerved his Chevy Cavalier into the pathway of the truck. She says he had been despondent about hard times he was experiencing and frustrated about falling short of his dreams that involved a series of oddball inventions in addition to the bear suit. Thankfully, the truck driver was not seriously injured.
But no one will ever truly understand what was going through Troy's mind that day. He was as much an enigma in death as he was in life.
With the anniversary of his death on June 17, I reached out to Lori, 51, to reminisce about Troy and to see how she was doing. She had been married to him for more than three decades and says she madly loved him, despite everything. She still lives in North Bay and works six days a week as a manager of a storage facility.
Lori welcomed the call. We've talked a few times over the years, most notably a couple of days after Troy died.
As expected, the past four years have been difficult and a time of reflection by her and son Brett, 29.
I went through a lot of emotions, as did Brett, because of the way he died, the choices he made," said Lori who has not remarried. He wasn't himself the last couple of years. He was just struggling emotionally, mentally.
After he died, I went through the anger ... hating him. Loving him. It took a lot to get where I am today. I think I have just come to the acceptance level. It is what it is. I can't do anything to change it now. I just have to make my peace with it."
In a 2016 interview, Troy told me he wanted one last chance at his dream, to take the most sophisticated version of his suit and go face to face with a grizzly bear. Through all the years of design and testing, an encounter had never actually taken place.
Working with filmmaker Tony Wannamaker - who was the cinematographer for Project Grizzly" - he was hoping to raise enough money for a sequel movie that would capture it all. But raising funds was difficult and the project stalled.
Around that time, Troy was suffering personal financial problems and was forced to pawn his Ursus Mark VIII" suit at a North Bay hock shop for $1,500. Things were not going well at home and a couple of weeks before his death, he had separated from Lori. Although, she says, he was planning to move back soon after he got his life straightened out."
Troy's fascination with grizzly bears developed in the 1980s after a chance encounter with one at the age of 20 in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. From that he decided his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear-repellant spray.
But, he realized field testing with bears would be needed. That would require a protective suit for the person doing the test. So, he set out to design one, spending countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades that followed.
Through time, the spray idea was abandoned, and he obsessed about suit design modifications and further strange trials of its endurance that more recently included crashing into a brick wall in front of film cameras. The suit survived, Troy was uninjured, and the wall collapsed, although the car they used, that had the suit with Troy inside strapped to the front bumper, was badly damaged.
Filmmaker Wannamaker says he was devastated when he learned that Troy had died a few months after the wall crash.
His death was an absolute tragedy. We lost somebody we loved," he says. He was quirky and that's what we loved about him ... You didn't know what to believe and what not to believe but the bottom line is you were always entertained."
Wannamaker has moved onto other film projects after trying to put together the Project Grizzly sequel that was tentatively titled The Bear Odyssey."
Lori says last year another filmmaker emerged, this time with plans for a movie with actors to tell his story. Last October, she says, she signed a retainer with Florida-based Lance Oppenheim who, among other credits, had his debut feature Some Kind of Heaven" made an Official Selection" at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
As for Troy's suit, it still sits in the Canadian Hock Exchange in North Bay, as more of conversation piece than something for sale.
People ask me what I want for the suit. But I don't know what to say. It's not like I can go to the internet and find out what they are selling for. It's one of a kind," says store owner Rob Boucher. I've had hundreds, maybe thousands, of people take selfies with it. It has paid for itself with all the people who have come to the store to see it."
As for the man who designed it: Troy was an interesting guy. We certainly lost somebody of interest."
For me, after first meeting Troy 35 years ago, I've evolved in my thinking about him. It was easy to see his antics as comic relief, like Wile E. Coyote developing a crazy series of inventions that always failed to capture the Roadrunner.
But today I see him as more of a tragic figure who amplified something that is a basic part of human nature. We all have dreams, but most of us put them on a shelf and get on with family responsibilities and working at a job. As kids we might have imagined ourselves as Batman or Superman, or Supergirl, wearing a cape and running down the street.
We grew out of that. But Troy didn't.
In September 1998, he was presented with an Ig Nobel Prize" at Harvard University as part of annual awards that parody the Nobel Prize ceremony to honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."
Perhaps in Troy's case, the honour was especially fitting.