by John McPhee
Beside the cage, the plump, impervious woman, red-faced, red-nosed, kept shouting to the crowds, but she said to me, leaning down, her own eyes bloodshot, “Why don’t you move on, sonny, if you ain’t going to buy a ticket? Beat it. Come on, now. Move on.”
“We argue about what it is,” Skelton said. “I’m inclined to think it’s a giant slug, but there is an amazingly impressive theory for its being a worm. You can’t rule out that it’s one of the big dinosaurs, but I think this is more wishful thinking than anything else.” In the late nineteen-thirties, a large and exotic footprint was found along the shore of Loch Ness. It was meticulously studied by various people and was assumed, for a time, to be an impression from a foot or flipper of the monster. Eventually, the print was identified. Someone who owned the preserved foot of a hippopotamus had successfully brought off a hoax that put layers of mockery and incredibility over the creature in the lake for many years. The Second World War further diverted any serious interest that amateurs or naturalists might have taken. Sightings continued, however, in a consistent pattern, and finally, in the early nineteen-sixties, the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau was established. “I have no plans whatever for leaving,” Skelton said. “I am prepared to stay here ad infinitum. All my worldly goods are here.”
A dark-haired young woman had stepped into the caravan and poured herself a cup of tea. Skelton, introducing her to me, said, “If the beast has done nothing else, it has brought me a wife. She was studying Gaelic and Scottish history at Edinburgh University, and she walked into the glen one day, and I said, ‘That is the girl I am going to marry.’” He gestured toward a window of the caravan, which framed a view of the hills and the lake. “The Great Glen is one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he continued. “It is peaceful here. I’d be happy here all my life, even if there were nothing in the loch. I’ve even committed the unforgivable sin of going to sleep in the sun during a flat calm. With enough time, we could shoot the beast with a crossbow and a line, and get a bit of skin. We could also shoot a small transmitter into its hide and learn more than we know now about its habits and characteristics.”
The creature swims with remarkable speed, as much as ten or fifteen knots when it is really moving. It makes no noise other than seismic splashes, but it is apparently responsive in a highly sensitive way to sound. A shout, an approaching engine, any loud report, will send it into an immediate dive, and this shyness is in large part the cause of its inaccessibility, and therefore of its mystery. Curiously, though, reverberate sound was what apparently brought the creature widespread attention, for the first sequence of frequent sightings occurred in 1933, when the A-82 was blasted into the cliffsides of the western shore of the lake. Immense boulders kept falling into the depths, and shock waves from dynamite repeatedly ran through the water, causing the creature to lose confidence in its environment and to alter, at least temporarily, its shy and preferentially nocturnal life. In that year it was first observed on land, perhaps attempting to seek a way out forever from the detonations that had alarmed it. A couple named Spicer saw it, near Inverarigaig, and later described its long, serpentine neck, followed by an ungainly hulk of body, lurching toward the lake and disappearing into high undergrowth as they approached.
With the exception of one report recorded in the sixth century, which said that a monster (fitting the description of the contemporary creatures in the lake) had killed a man with a single bite, there have been no other examples of savagery on its part. To the contrary, its sensitivity to people seems to be acute, and it keeps a wide margin between itself and mankind, In all likelihood, it feeds on fish and particularly on eels, of which there are millions in the lake. Loch Ness is unparalleled in eel-fishing circles, and has drawn commercial eel fishermen from all over the United Kingdom. The monster has been observed with its neck bent down in the water, like a swan feeding. When the creatures die, they apparently settle into the seven-hundred-foot floor of the lake, where the temperature is always forty-two degrees Fahrenheit—so cold that the lake is known for never giving up its dead. Loch Ness never freezes, despite its high latitude, so if the creature breathes air, as has seemed apparent from the reports of observers who have watched its mouth rhythmically opening and closing, it does not lose access to the surface in winter. It clearly prefers the smooth, sunbaked waterscapes of summer, however, for it seems to love to bask in the sun, like an upturned boat, slowly rolling, plunging, squirming around with what can only be taken as pleasure. By observers’ reports, the creature has two pairs of lateral flippers, and when it swims off, tail thrashing, it leaves behind it a wake as impressive as the wake of a small warship. When it dives from a still position, it inexplicably goes down without leaving a bubble. When it dives as it swims, it leaves on the surface a churning signature of foam.
Skelton leaned back against the wall of the caravan in a slouched and nonchalant posture. He was wearing a dark blue tie that was monogrammed in small block letters sewn with white thread—L.N.I. (Loch Ness Investigation). Above the monogram and embroidered also in white thread was a small depiction of the monster—humps undulant, head high, tail extending astern. Skelton gave the tie a flick with one hand. “You get this with a five-pound membership,” he said.
The sea-serpent effect given by the white thread on the tie was less a stylization than an attempt toward a naturalistic sketch. As I studied it there, framed on Skelton’s chest, the thought occurred to me that there was something inconvenient about the monster’s actual appearance. In every sense except possibly the sense that involves cruelty, the creature in Loch Ness is indeed a monster. An average taken from many films and sightings gives its mature length at about forty feet. Its general appearance is repulsive, in the instant and radical sense in which reptiles are repulsive to many human beings, and any number of people might find difficulty in accepting a creature that looks like the one that was slain by St. George. Its neck, about six feet long, columnar, powerfully muscled, is the neck of a serpent. Its head, scarcely broader than the neck, is a serpent’s head, with uncompromising, lenticular eyes. Sometimes as it swims it holds its head and neck erect. The creature’s mouth is at least a foot wide. Its body undulates. Its skin glistens when wet and appears coarse, mottled, gray, and elephantine when exposed to the air long enough to become dry. The tail, long and columnar, stretches back to something of a point. It seemed to me, sitting there at Headquarters, that the classical, mythical, dragon likeness of this animate thing—the modified dinosaur, the fantastically exaggerated newt—was an impediment to the work of the investigation bureau, which has no pertinent interest in what the monster resembles or calls to mind but a great deal in what it actually is, the goal being a final and positive identification of the genus.
“What we need is a good, lengthy, basking sighting,” Skelton said. “We’ve had one long surfacing—twenty-five minutes. I saw it. Opposite Urquhart Castle. We only had a twelve-inch lens then, at four and a half miles. We have thirty-six-inch lenses now. We need a long, clear, close-up—in color.”
My children had watched, some months earlier, the killing of a small snake on a lawn in Maryland. About eighteen inches long, it came out from a basement-window well, through a covering lattice of redwood, and was noticed with shouts and shrieks by the children and a young retriever that barked at the snake and leaped about it in a circle. We were the weekend guests of another family, and eight children in all crowded around the snake, which had been gliding slowly across the lawn during the moments after it had been seen, but had now stopped and was turning its head from side to side in apparent indecision. Our host hurried into his garage and came running back to the lawn with a long shovel. Before he killed the snake, his wife urged him not to. She said the snake could not possibly be poisonous. He said, “How do you know?” The children, mine and theirs, looked back and forth from him to her. The dog began to bark more rapidly and at a higher pitch.
“It has none of the markings. There is nothing triangular about i
ts head,” she told him.
“That may very well be,” he said. “But you can’t be sure.”
“It is not poisonous. Leave it alone. Look at all these children.”
“I can’t help that.”
“It is not poisonous.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
He hit the snake with the flat of the shovel, and it writhed. He hit it again. It kept moving. He hit it a third time, and it stopped. Its underside, whitish green, segmental, turned up. The children moved in for a closer look.
Josie’s Well
THE LAPHROAIG DISTILLERY IS ON THE SOUTHERN SHORE OF ISLAY, one of the isles of Argyll, in the Inner Hebrides. The buildings are all white and rise among dark-green Scotch pines by the water’s edge. A clear burn flows to the distillery through acres of peats, over rocks, more peats, more rocks, more peats, into the buildings, and out in barrels and bottles of the whisky, Laphroaig. The distiller’s home is a part of the compound and is full of light, for its seaward walls are largely glass. His living room is upstairs and is cantilevered toward a spectacular and often misty view over the pines and the sea. Multiple white couches are covered with pillows in blazing color. The bar is quilted. There is a white grand piano. Two golden retrievers lie on the floor. The distiller, whose name is Wishart Campbell, stands beside a Sony solid-state stereo tape recorder, his hand on the bass control. He wears a sport jacket, and he is somewhat heavyset but nonetheless athletic in carriage, a glib man, quick, fluid, idiomatic. He refers to his wife as “Mrs. C.” His whisky is so smoky, so heavy, so redolently peaty that a consumer feels he is somehow drinking a slab of bacon. There is some Laphroaig—a few drops per fifth—in Ballantine’s, Teacher’s, Dewar’s, White Horse, Johnnie Walker, Black & White, Haig & Haig, thirty-odd Scotches in all. “If the blenders want a Hebridean malt, they come here and get it,” Campbell explains. “In a proper blend, Laphroaig is the foundation, the real gutsy base.” George Gershwin’s “Love Walked In” is pouring out of the Sony. Campbell turns the bass control knob as far as it will go, and the Gershwin deepens into broad profundities of sound. Campbell says, “There you have it. That is the Laphroaig.”
The Talisker distillery is also by the sea, by a long, narrow bay on the western coast of the Isle of Skye. Talisker was a farmer who grew barley. In 1834, he began to roast it over burning peat, ferment it with yeast and water, distill the resulting wash, and then sell—“A wee drop of himself,” as Skye men say—the whisky that continues to carry his name. A syndicate with headquarters in London owns Talisker’s distillery now, and the syndicate has installed as general manager Peter Hogg, a young and serious man with tie and pullover, bright eyes, dark hair, a dangling forelock. Hogg grew up in whisky in the way that some people are born to the stage. He belongs to Craigellachie, a Speyside town, seat of the great Macallan distillery. He is knowledgeable, modern, and technical. He explains that barley is the choice of grains because barley seeds have a high content of starch and, further, are protected by double skins, so air has less chance to get at the starch and produce mold. He explains that germination of the seeds promotes the enzyme diastase, which, in hot water, helps convert the starch to the sugar that will ferment into alcohol.
Hogg opens a door at one end of a germinating floor (where barley is four inches deep and doves fly through open windows to help themselves) and he steps into the kiln. The floor of the kiln, a gridwork of thousands of thin metallic plates, is covered with several inches of germinated barley, and the smoke of peat that is burning below filters up through the grid. When the barley goes into the kiln it is known as green malt. Distillers use coke as well as peat for their fires, and the ratio they choose determines the peatiness of the ultimate whisky. Unblended, pure Highland malt whiskies are made in only a few places in Scotland—in the Hebrides, on the Mull of Kintyre, and in the riparian counties of the River Spey. They vary in taste as pronouncedly as regional wines. Talisker, on the tongue, unique among the malts, is halfway between the characteristically heavy flavors of the island whiskies and the patrician subtleties of Speyside.
By an entirely different and much cheaper process, whisky is also made in Scotland from corn. It is called grain whisky, as distinguished from malt whisky, and it is very nearly tasteless. A bottle of blended Scotch whisky consists mainly of grain whisky and is flavored by various malts. The malts are known as the top-dressing, and the grain whisky is known as the pad. In some blended whiskies there are as many as forty different malts, sitting on the pad. Twenty is average. Blended whisky, bland and facile, was developed for bland Americans, who drink most of the whisky distilled in Scotland. Highlanders, who can’t tell the difference between one blend and another, roll on the floor in laughter at the thought of American sophisticates who think they can. Meanwhile, they drink their ranging malts, resonant as cognac, and so replete with flavor that a few drops are enough to perform an aromatic alchemy.
The barley has roasted for forty-eight hours and is now, in the term of the trade, malted. Peter Hogg picks up some of the seeds and eats them, like malted peanuts. They are delicious. It is dram time. Twice daily, the men working in the distillery—malt men, mill men, wash men, tun-room men, still men, some twenty-five in all—line up for their dram. At Talisker, the whisky comes in a copper jug from the warehouse, and is poured into something called “the horn.” It is a two-inch segment of cattle horn, fitted with a metallic bottom. Carved on it are the words A Wee Doch an Doris, “a wee drink before you leave.” Everybody drinks a full measure from the horn—everybody but Peter Hogg and the government excise man. Each distillery has its resident excise man. This one is a Londoner, outposted far up here on Skye, a decent enough chap. “He turns a blind eye to the horn,” says Peter Hogg. “For myself, I taste the whisky but I never drink it. It would take a very special occasion to get me to drink it. Working with it, it’s not policy to drink it. One might get addicted to it. I smell it once a week to see if there’s enough peat in it. When I drink something, I like a little beer.”
Wishart Campbell, of Laphroaig, generously and almost evangelistically presses Laphroaig on friends and strangers alike. But after booming up his hi-fi, he moves to the quilted bar to fix his own drink, Demerara rum and Pepsi-Cola.
It is a beautiful afternoon in Banffshire. The lush, green, rural valley of the Spey is ablaze with mustard-colored whin. The river is fast and occasionally shivers with white water. The sky is clear. The air is warm. The branches of birches and pines move in a moderate wind. Distillers hate a day like this. It’s bad for germination, bad for whisky. Too many days like this could put a distillery out of business. Whisky thrives on gloom, fog, rain. Above the Spey in Macallan Parish, Craigellachie, is the Macallan Distillery, which collects water from the Ringorm Burn and from various springs in the local gneiss and produces one of the three malt whiskies that are by general consent regarded as the best distilled in Scotland. The other two distilleries—J. & J. Grant, and George and J. G. Smith—are only a few miles away.
The executive offices in the Macallan distillery are expensively designed, darkly paneled, shining with polished wooden desk and table surfaces and rich leather upholstery, and could be the offices of a remarkably successful law firm in London. The offices have emptied out at the end of the working day. George Harbinson, managing director and chairman, is there alone. He is a slim man, bald. At the back of his head is a thick fringe of curly silver hair. His manner is quiet. His face is sensitive and in its strong lines there is a suggestion, among other things, of melancholy, but he seems to be only mildly put out by the lovely weather. He wears a dark suit and holds in his hand a narrow, stemmed glass that is tapered toward the top and partly filled with Macallan Pure Highland Malt Scotch Whisky. He adds a little water “to bring out the nose.” He inhales the aroma. He seems to like what he is doing. “When it’s free, it has a very sweet, aromatic nose to it” Harbinson says. “It makes me immediately think of mountain air.”
The whisky in his
glass was made in 1950, drawn from the cask in 1962, and is part of Macallan’s “library,” or, perhaps more appropriately, bibliothèque, kept for the record, to assure the continuity of standard.
“Other single whiskies have a heavier nose,” he goes on. “We don’t aim to have a heavily peated malt.” He sips. “One has to drink in moderation,” he says. “Otherwise one wouldn’t last very long. Many years ago, they used to say that whisky was old if it was cool from the stills. It went straight to the pubs. The body gets along better with older whisky. In maturer whisky, you’ve got rid of a lot of the lighter, rather objectionable alcohols.”
Twelve years is the prime age, most agree, but Harbinson dissents. He thinks whisky gets better the longer it ages. Whisky is sold the day it is made, but is stored by the maker. In the vastness of the warehouses, barrels sometimes become misplaced and are found many years after they would otherwise have been delivered. Such a barrel was recently found at Macallan. The whisky in it was thirty-five years old, and Harbinson places it among the best he has ever tasted.
The greatness of Macallan whisky, Harbinson says, is “a matter of luck—the people that developed the plant happened onto the right shape of stills.” Barley soup ferments in tuns and is then boiled away in wash stills. The resulting liquor—called low wine—is boiled again in spirit stills. The wash stills are tall and bulbous, often shaped like lamp glasses; the spirit stills are smaller and conical, suggesting the hats of leprechauns. All are copper, for the heat transfer is better in copper than in any other metal. Much in the way that Ph.D. candidates will fasten upon and attempt to explicate a great work of the imagination, minor and would-be distillers examine the stills of a place like Macallan. Some distilleries permit no photographs, nervously keeping to themselves the exact curve of the shoulders, the style of the ogee, the relative grace of the swan neck, the size and attitude of the lynne arm. The lynne arm extends away from the uppermost part of the still, above the neck, and carries the vaporous liquor to the condenser. Some lynne arms curve like the tops of coat hangers. Others wiggle away in right angles. Some are narrow, some wide. The lynne arms at Talisker go straight out horizontally, as if to suggest that there will be no nonsense at Talisker. The lynne arms at Macallan are extraordinarily thick—about fourteen inches in diameter—and slope downward on a gentle grade. Harbinson seems to doubt that this could open the secret of Macallan.