Troy Hurtubise is one of my favorite oddball characters. Many years ago a grizzly bear knocked him to the ground, and the incident set him on a new path in life: designing high tech armored suits.
Here’s an excerpt about Hurtubise from my book, World’s Worst.
When a wild animal attacks a human being, the psychic wounds are often worse than the actual bodily injury. While some people undergo psychotherapy to deal with such post-traumatic stress, a few Old Testament types seek revenge on the beast that hurt them by retaliating in kind. And of all the modern-day Captain Ahabs on Earth, none is more determined to settle the score than a Canadian scrap-metal dealer by the name of Troy Hurtubise.
In August 1984, at the age of 19, Hurtubise went camping alone near Humidity Creek in British Columbia. One afternoon after panning for gold, he discovered a giant grizzly bear in his camp. The bear ran over to him and knocked him in the dirt with a head-butt to the chest. Certain that he would die, Hurtubise decided to go out with a bang. He leaped to his feet and pulled out not one, but two, hunting knives (he carries as many as 10 at a time) and, according to his own account of the incident in Outside magazine, told the bear, “Take what you want, but I’ll take both of these knives and I’ll shove them right up your ass.” The bear, apparently getting the gist of Hurtubise’s declaration, retreated into the woods, never to be seen again.
Because the bear that attacked him had gray chin hairs, Hurtubise dubbed it “the Old Man.” In fact, Hurtubise now calls any grizzly “the Old Man.” To him, they’re all the same bear—the one that knocked him down.
Brooding over the incident, Hurtubise decided that he wanted to meet the Old Man once again, this time on more even terms. To do that, he began work on a suit of armor that could withstand the crushing blows and deadly bites of a grizzly bear. After six years, $(removed),000 scraped together from his personal income, and several versions of the suit, he felt he had finally designed a model that was ready for combat. The Mark IV consists of toughened rubber, chain mail, inflatable cushions, an arm-mounted canister of bear repellent, and a titanium encased motorcycle helmet. The end result, which weighs 147 pounds, looks like a cross between a deep-sea diving suit and RoboCop.
Here’s a video about Hurtubise’s latest invention, the “Trojan.”