It started with a book.
My 1990s elementary school classroom had titles ranging from The Baby-Sitters Club to Anamorphs, but my favorite was one slim mass market paperback, published by School Book Fairs in 1979. I suspected the book had been added to the collection then and had never left; the cover was torn in places, corners of pages were missing, and the spine was reinforced with tape. The book was Big Foot and Nessie: Two Mysterious Monsters by Angelo Resciniti and Duane Damon, and whenever we were given quiet reading time, this was the title I chose to read again and again. I don’t know what drew me to it — perhaps the well-worn volume made it seem more desirable, more loved.
I feel like I had already been intrigued by the Loch Ness Monster before discovering the paperback — I remember being disappointed when my dad explained our family’s ancestry to me when I was a little kid, how boring to be regular old Irish like everyone else in the greater Boston area as opposed to Scottish the ancestry of the Loch Ness Monster herself. But regardless of how I first learned about Nessie, Resciniti and Damon’s book cemented my love of her and all those other wild, wonderful, and mysterious cryptids.
Big Foot and Nessie contained grainy black and white illustrations alongside eye witness accounts. I studied the 1933 “surgeon’s photograph” of Nessie (taken by a doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson). I examined the images of the plaster cast made of Bigfoot’s footprints, made by Robert Patterson in Northern California in 1967, and I learned how in 1972 in Missouri a young boy saw a Bigfoot walking through his backyard with a dog tucked under his arm. I dove into the dark underwater photos allegedly of Nessie’s face, taken using sonar, by the Academy of Applied Sciences. The blackened drawings and blurry photographs swirled in my mind. I couldn’t stop staring at them, my eyes jumping back and forth between the text and the images, and the pictures seared themselves into my brain.
But then at night the things that so fascinated me during daylight hours would turn sinister. As I thought about lake monsters and humanoid apes, my hands grew clammy, my heartbeat sped up. Suddenly swimming in the ocean didn’t seem so carefree, and I definitely had no interest in diving into any murky, deep lakes. Who knew what could be in the depths below? Even though I started having nightmares, I couldn’t stop reading the book at school. It was akin to looking at the wreckage of a car accident or my later-in-life obsession with true crime — I was so scared of what was in the dark, but I felt like it was better to look and see what was in there than to close my eyes. But it sure did screw up my sleep patterns.
In particular, when I visited my family’s ski house in Warren, Vermont, the tall, old pines seemed something directly out of the Pacific Northwest accounts of Bigfoot sightings. I swore I could see yellow eyes glowing in the moonlight. Fallen tree branches looked like hairy limbs. Every footprint in the snow looked suspiciously large. I spent the nights in Vermont wide awake, staring at the wooden beams on the ceiling of the ski house, listening to the crunch and crackle outside — logically knowing it was probably just another racoon, or my older cousins sneaking into the hot tub, but deep down certain that it was the actual Sasquatch, all the way from the Pacific Northwest, here to attack. I kept thinking about the part of Resciniti and Damon’s book that describes how a lumberjack named Albert Ostman had been kidnapped by a family of Sasquatches in 1924 and barely escaped alive. I began to panic whenever I knew there was an upcoming trip planned to Vermont, and I stopped sleeping days before. My dad finally confronted me and asked what was wrong. I explained that I was certain Bigfoot was going to get me. My dad, who has always been a science-brain kind of guy, decided to use logic to help me through it.
“So, assuming Bigfoot really does exist, he lives in Oregon and Washington, not in Massachusetts or Vermont.”
“Yeah, but he has legs. He could travel.”
“Okay, but how fast does the average human walk?” This conversation pre-dated Google, so my dad used the best estimates he could. If an adult human man could walk maybe 4 miles per hour, and, say, Bigfoot’s legs were a little bit longer so he could walk a bit faster, then maybe Bigfoot could get up to 6 miles per hour and, let’s say he decided to run the whole way, maybe 10 miles per hour, if we are being super generous. The distance between Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts was approximately 3,000 miles, meaning it would take about 300 hours or 12.5 days for Bigfoot to travel all that way, and that is assuming he never stopped to sleep or eat. It’d probably be more like 24 days or a whole month for Bigfoot to get here, again, assuming, he stuck to the path. My dad seemed triumphant as he reached this conclusion.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, skeptical. “But what if he left a month ago?”
My dad sighed heavily. “Okay, well, in that case — of all the little girls in Vermont and Massachusetts, what are the odds that Bigfoot would find and get you?”
He had a point there. I thought about how many people lived in the Pacific Northwest and how few Bigfoot sightings there had been in comparison — the ratio seemed pretty low. It seemed the odds of me being the one little girl that happened to see Bigfoot — and in Vermont of all places — didn’t seem super high. I exhaled, and felt a wave of relief flow through my bloodstream. I was going to be okay.
But that feeling was quickly replaced by another. The odds of a sighting were so low that happening to see Bigfoot — or Nessie, or Yeti, or Lake Champlain’s Champ or the Jersey Devil or any of them — would be something pretty special. Maybe I wanted to be that one little girl. And suddenly, just like that, I went from being afraid of stumbling upon the unknown to being desperate to find it.
I returned to my elementary classroom and began to write my own stories inspired by this revelation. A Tale of Loch Ness: A Story of Friendship was forty-four pages long, hand-written with full-color illustrations, laminated and bound in the teachers’ lounge. Chapter one begins: “In northern Scotland is a lake. It is called Loch Ness. Dark shadows are in the water. Most people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster think nature made that lake to hide something!” The plot goes something like this: a young woman named Judy lives in house near Loch Ness. One day, she is walking by the lake when she sees Nessie. Some men throw nets into the water to try to capture the Loch Ness Monster, but one of the nets knocks Judy into the water instead. She nearly drowns, tangled in the net, but Nessie escapes the men and saves her, and thus begins a beautiful friendship that lasted the duration of the rest of the book and even into a sequel: A Tale of Loch Ness, Part Two: A Story of Adventure.
Judy was, obviously, a stand-in for me. I started to dream of living in a little cottage near Loch Ness, of spending my days strolling the shores, of casually spotting Nessie and becoming her friend. I had decided — before reaching even middle school — that I would go to college at the University of Edinburgh, move to Inverness after graduation, and live out Judy’s life. I even got to visit Loch Ness the summer after I finished ninth grade, in 2003, when I was lucky enough to be taken on a bus tour around England and Scotland by my parents and grandparents. The trip was a blur of pastoral countryside and London musicals, punctuated by one crystalized moment: when we arrived at that lake. When our bus stopped and the group poured out and looked upon that deep, enormous, murky lake… something caught in my throat.
I kept my eyes locked on the surface. My third-grade-self resurfaced and all I could do was keep my breathing steady and tried not to blink as I stared at Loch Ness. I was sure if I just looked long enough, I’d see her. When my eyes started to get dry from staring, I asked my mom to take photo after photo of me standing in front of the lake. I became certain that when we got home and had the film developed, there would be Nessie, smiling cheekily behind me. I felt like if I just looked at the water long enough, I would see something, something, and know that she was in there and had been all along. But after a few minutes — we had only really stopped to take some pictures and use the bathroom — it was time for our tour group to move onto the next stop, and I had to leave. I wrote later in my journal: “We did not see Nessie while there but we did pick up two Japanese girls who missed the last bus to Inverness.” Part of me felt if I had just a little more time, just a few hours, I definitely, certainly, would have seen something.
But part of me was also not so sure anymore. The doubt crept in not long after I wrote my Tale of Loch Ness books. In third grade, I was told that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were not real. Part of me had sensed it a long time coming: I have three siblings who are a decade older, and I often listened to them talk when they didn’t know I was listening. I had also observed that Santa’s handwriting and my mother’s were fairly similar. Plus, the logic just didn’t add up — a chimney, really? That seemed so dangerous and messy. And there was the fact that I went to a liberal Montessori school where many of my classmates were Jewish, atheist, or, for whatever reason, had just never grown up believing in Santa. In third grade, I was one of the last to believe, and, finally, after being teased about it one day at recess, I confronted my parents, and they confirmed what I suspected. As elementary school turned into middle school and then middle school turned into high school, I looked at everything more and more skeptically — including my beloved cryptids.
One of my favorite t-shirts to wear in high school was bright green and printed with an illustration of the Loch Ness Monster, styled after the famous 1933 photo, but I wore it with less sincerity than I might have in grade school. My friends knew I loved all that cryptozoology stuff, but while before, when I was younger, I actively planned camping expeditions to the Pacific Northwest to stake out and watch for Bigfoot, discussing with my dad the best way to fashion a Bigfoot-catching trap, now I considered a similar trip with a certain adolescent irony. It would be fun, sure, to go adventure out West, but Bigfoot wasn’t real, right? If I was too old in third grade to keep believing in Santa Claus, by high school I thought myself far too old to believe — really believe — in magic and fairy tales and make-believe, and that included Bigfoot and Nessie. I could enjoy these things but in a self-aware, ironic way.
But something never sat right. Deep down, I knew I wasn’t being true.
After my parents had confirmed my suspicious about Santa Claus and the like, instead of feeling older, wiser, more mature — as I had anticipated I would feel knowing the truth — I felt the floor drop out from under me. I remember running to the couch in the family room and throwing myself face down to sob. I hadn’t realized how badly I had wanted to believe, how much I had denied that truth, until I was confronted with the facts, and then all I wanted to do was undo my question. Even though in my gut I had already suspected the truth, I realized only after I had asked that I preferred living in that in between place. Not confirming or denying. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. By asking the question, of seeking out the hard truth, I had destroyed that gray middle where I hadn’t realized I wanted to live. Getting to believe that an old man makes toys at the North Pole or that a small sprite flies around stealing teeth makes the world seem a little more sparkly and special. I so very badly wanted to believe. And while outside I projected an easy persona making fun of my obsessions — I even dusted off A Tale of Loch Ness and read it out loud at the high school literary magazine’s open mic coffeehouse, poking fun at my elementary school self — deep down, I held out hope.
I held out hope, but I changed my plans. I did not go to the University of Edinburgh after high school. Instead, I went to college not far from home in Wellesley, Massachusetts — I traded the mystique of the Scottish Highlands for a pastoral campus 13.1 miles from downtown Boston. And I never stopped studying the surface of lakes. Wellesley has one of its own — Lake Waban, approximately 100 acres in size, its perimeter 2.3 miles, 40 feet at its deepest — and on loops on the lakeside path, I always kept my eyes open, just in case. What would the Nessie-equivalent in Waban be called? Wally? A joke, a joke, I told myself, and went back to my dorm room to finish the reading for my Russian literature class.
I had become a Russian major, meaning I mostly took language and literature classes, but every now and then a Russian area studies — history or anthropology — course would catch my eye, and I applied to one for the spring and summer of 2007 called “Lake Baikal: The Soul of Siberia.” The course was first offered in 2001, a hybrid offering from a Russian professor and a biology professor, studying the deepest and largest (by volume) lake in the world. Students would spend the spring semester taking a seminar that would cover the scientific, cultural, and historical significance of Baikal, and then spend three weeks the following summer traveling to Siberia to study the lake in person.
Students were drawn to the course from either the science side or the Russian side, and as I became friendly with my classmates who were biology and environmental studies majors, I heard their excitement about the things we would see once we had made the trek to Baikal’s shores: there have been almost 3,000 different species discovered in and around Baikal, and approximately 70% of them are found only at Baikal, like the freshwater seals called nerpa and the various species of omul fish and the over-sized amphipods — shrimp-like creatures — that grew to enormous sizes because of Baikal’s depth. “They’re called abyssal giants!” explained one of my biology major friends, who was always patiently helping me in the lab portion of the course. I turned the phrase over and over in my mind. Abyssal giants. It felt familiar, exciting. It reminded me of something I believed in once long ago.
After multiple long flights, an overnight train from Ekaterinburg to Irkutsk, and a bus ride to the ferry, the sharp, clear blue of Lake Baikal broke in front of us. While I had spent the semester leading up to the trip studying photographs and texts about the lake, it was nothing compared to how it looked in person. Here was a lake that blew Loch Ness out of the water — a mile deep! I thought about how my Russian professor shared a story of going fishing one night on the lake with some of the scientists, in a small boat called The Nessie. He dislodged a pebble from his boot and tossed it over the side of the boat, only after realizing it could take a half-hour or more for the pebble to fall all the way to the bottom of the lake.
As the weeks went by, I got to experience first-hand the things my science friends had been so excited to see. I held one of those giant amphipods in the palm of my hand. I coiled thick ropes of freshwater seaweed. I spied on the nerpa from behind a blind and caught omul from the water. And with each new experience, seeing the real life magic existing in this one particular lake, it hit me over and over: there is so much magic in the world already. Even if Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are made up, even if the jury is still out on Nessie and Sasquatch, right here, right now, look at all that there is. Before Baikal, I had never thought of myself as a particularly outdoorsy person — I liked taking my dogs for walks, but that was the extent — and suddenly now I could not get enough. I returned to Wellesley with fresh eyes — instead of staring at Lake Waban, hoping for a mythical dinosaur being to break the surface, I took joy in noticing the real creatures that were already there. The pairs of swans, the resourceful squirrels, the circling hawks. One night walking back to my dorm, thick white mist carpeting the campus, I saw a family of deer emerge from the fog as if by magic. We held eye contact, and then they turned and fled. Now, whenever I am by a body of water, I look for the curved island of a turtle’s shell or the flash of a fish. I am thrilled by the explosion of a cormorant, sleek and slippery, or the blood red blotch of a Lion’s Mane jellyfish. Sometimes I will see the two eyes of a frog just under the surface, or the invisible dance of water bugs, or two adult geese with a gaggle of goslings trying to keep up behind.
A couple years ago, I was walking in a wildlife preserve in Maynard, Massachusetts with my husband Richie, we were talking as we strolled along the path, the sun setting, when in the shallow pond to our left we heard an aggressive splash. We looked around startled. What could it be? No fish large enough to make a noise like that lived in a pond in the suburbs of Boston. Or could it? We searched, trying to discover the cause of the sound, and I felt my third grade self-reemerge. Could this be it? Was this the mystery I had always been hoping to find? Would this be the time when we would find the unknown? I began to think of names: the Maynard Monster, the Massachusetts Mystery. And then Richie shouted, “Look!” and I saw it — a large beaver, lurking just under the surface, pissed off by our presence and preparing to slap its heavy tail against the water to scare us off. I gasped. I had never seen a beaver in the wild before, and I delighted in the creature’s size and attitude. I would return home and spend hours the following week watching videos of beavers slapping their tails, gnawing down trees, constructing dams.
I thought back to how much I wanted to be that little girl who happened to catch a glimpse of Bigfoot in Vermont, or the ninth grader who witnessed Nessie while on her family’s European vacation. I wanted to feel special, to be blessed with the chance to witness some piece of the extraordinary. But just look around. There is already so much magic in the world. You just have to keep your eyes open.
Images: “Warning Big Foot Breeding Area sign in Grand Rapids, Minnesota” by Lorie Shaull, licensed under CC 2.0.
Author photo by Small Circle Studio.
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Love your story EB, isn’t it wonderful to open our eyes and see the wonders around us. The simple things which bring peace to our souls.
Chris