by Steve Alten
“We’re approaching Urquhart Bay on our starboard, or right side. Urquhart Bay is one of the deepest parts of the Loch, descending to depths of two hundred and forty meters, almost eight hundred feet.
“Loch Ness is one of four long, narrow lochs that run diagonally through the Scottish Highlands. Forty rivers and streams, what we call “burns”, feed into Loch Ness, with only one, the River Ness, running out of the Loch and into the Moray Firth and the North Sea. Did ye know that Loch Ness holds more water than all the lakes and rivers in England and Wales combined? The water’s extremely cold, about five degrees Celsius, and visibility’s very poor. This is because of peat, which are particles of soil brought down from the rivers, giving the Loch an acidic taste. Of course, if yer gonnae drink it, we recommend addin’ a shot o’ cheap Scotch.”
The German woman, Bibi, nudged me and laughed, wondering why I was taking the tour with my eyes squeezed shut behind my sunglasses.
“Now, who can tell me what Loch Ness is famous for?”
“The Loch Ness monster!”
“That’s right. There’ve been thousands of sightings over the years, but the very first took place over fourteen hundred years ago, when Saint Columba traveled to the Highlands to bring Christianity to the native Picts. According to legend, a fearsome monster rose from the murky depths of Urquhart Bay and grabbed a native swimmer. The Saint raised his hand, and yelled, ‘Thou shall go no further, nor touch the man,’ and the monster released him, then returned to the deep.”
The children oohed and ahhed, while I ground my teeth, wishing I had slept in.
“On our starboard side is the town of Drumnadrochit where the first modern-day Nessie sighting took place. Mr. and Mrs. Mackay, owners of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, were traveling along the A82 in 1933, just after it was built. From the road they saw a huge beastie rolling and plunging in the middle of the Loch. Soon, hundreds of other people reported similar sightings, and now the Loch attracts the attention of monster hunters the world over. Dozens of documentaries have been filmed on these waters, including a movie starring Ted Danson. We’ve also had our share of famous scientists visit the Loch, and today, ladies and gentlemen, I’m excited to say we’ve got us a very special treat ...”
Oh shit!
“... exclusively, only on board the Nessie-III, is one of the world’s top marine biologists ...”
No, Brandy, don’t do it...
“ ... the only man ever to witness a giant squid in its own habitat ...”
Stupid bastard! See what happens when you think with the wrong side of your brain! You should’ve stayed in Inverness. You should’ve ...
“ ... straight from the United States, by way of the Highlands, Drumnadrochit’s own Dr. Zachary Wallace.”
I opened my eyes to applause, my heart pounding like a timpani.
“Raise your hand for us, Dr. Wallace. Dr. Wallace? Come on, now, don’t be shy.”
I raised my hand, clutching the bottom of the bench with the other.
“I’m sure Dr. Wallace would be happy to answer any questions you might have, isn’t that right, Doctor?”
In the corner of my left eye I saw Clay Jordan’s older boy excitedly raise his hand. “Dr. Wallace, do you believe in Nessie?”
“No.”
“Why not?” This from the gabby German woman.
My clenched throat managed, “Nessie’s folklore.”
Brandy rescued me, if only temporarily. “Oh ... kay, tell ye what, if you could hold yer questions for Dr. Wallace a moment, we’re just drifting by Urquhart Castle, one of the most popular sites on the Loch. Many famous photos of the monster have been taken from the shores of these castle ruins and—”
“Hey,” called out a dark-haired Canadian woman, “isn’t this the spot where that rich guy was murdered?”
“John Cialino, that’s right,” answered Wezzi Hoeymans, visiting from the Netherlands. “Maybe we’ll see his body!”
Passengers followed the purple-haired youth to the starboard rail, snapping pictures of the shoreline like a bunch of ravenous paparazzi.
The dramatic redistribution of mass was too much for the overloaded, under-ballasted craft, and it began rolling, its two-foot freeboard quickly disappearing as its starboard rail dipped precariously close to the water.
Brandy fought the wheel. “Take yer seats, people ... please, we need tae keep the boat balanced. Please, take yer seats, we don’t want tae tip.”
They ignored her and continued to film, oblivious of the danger.
“Sit your asses down ... now!”
What deep recess this guttural bellow came from, I’ve no clue, but come it did, straight out of my mouth, and it echoed across the Loch as if Sir William himself were leading a battle charge.
The passengers froze, then hustled back to their spots on the benches, tails between their legs.
Brandy stared at me, aghast.
Clearly in trouble, I stumbled out an apology. “Sorry. I ... uh, it’s just that I don’t want us to tip, not in these freezing waters ... uh ... not with the monster lurking so close.”
Having crapped on deck, I voluntarily stepped in it.
“But Dr. Wallace, you just said—”
“I said I didn’t believe in the folklore of Nessie, but there’s definitely something large living in Loch Ness, of that I’m certain.”
The words came out of my mouth, and again I didn’t recognize them. The crowd did, and they quickly gathered around, aiming their video cameras at me as if I were Mel Gibson.
“Go on, Dr. Wallace,” coaxed Brandy, “don’t stop now.”
With nervous perspiration flowing from every pore, and my boxer shorts hopelessly wedged up the crack of my butt, I gritted my teeth and focused on the distant shoreline. “In ... in order to understand the mysteries of Loch Ness, first ... well, first we have to separate the real science from all of this legend nonsense. For instance, some Highlanders speak of a Kelpie, a sort of water horse, that lives not only in Loch Ness but in other Lochs and ... and even in lakes across the world. At Loch Lochy, they call their monster Lizzy, and at Lake Champlain, the beast is known as Champ.”
A pale, blonde American woman suddenly pointed from her wheelchair, crying out, “Oh my God, look! There it is!”
Passengers stood, several searching with binoculars.
“Hey, she’s right, there it is! It’s the monster!”
An avalanche of flesh tripped over itself to get to the port side rail, the crowd gesturing at a series of humps that were indeed moving along the otherwise mirrorlike surface, several hundred yards away.
“Dr. Wallace, Dr. Wallace, do you see it?!”
The boat began rolling again, this time to port.
“It’s not the monster,” I commanded, “now take your seats.”
“No, look, it’s moving right ... aww, see, it’s gone.”
“It was just a boat wake, people. Sit down, and I’ll explain.” Reluctantly, they returned to their seats, their eyes still lingering to the east as the Nessie III resettled in the water.
I turned to the woman in the wheelchair. “Miss, what’s your name?”
“Kate Coffey.”
“Kate, do you see the mountains that form walls along either side of the Loch? Those mountains actually continue straight underwater, creating a sort of geological trowel, seven to eight hundred feet deep. Think of Loch Ness as Mother Nature’s version of a giant bathtub. When you splash in your bathtub at home, you create waves, which strike the far side of the tub and reflect back again. Loch Ness sort of works the same way. When a boat like ours passes a steep shoreline like the one below Urquhart Castle, the boat’s wake will strike the cliff face, then reflect back out again. Loch Ness is so big that sometimes the boat that created the wake is long gone by the time it’s reflected back to the next passing boat. In calm conditions like today, a reflected wake moving at an angle toward another reflected wake will create a disturbance that looks very much like multiple humps in th
e water.”
“And that’s what I saw?”
“That’s right. Don’t feel bad, Kate, it fools a lot of people, though people tend to see what they want to see. Another popular illusion is created by large-keeled boats, like ferries or tugboats. As they move through Loch Ness, these powerful vessels create deep wave disturbances that travel along the bottom. When these waves eventually reach the shallows, the energy is forced up to the surface, causing a great upheaval of water that people swear is the monster breaching.”
“Tell us more,” said the German woman, as she snapped a picture of me with her digital phone-camera.
I continued, the diversion of the lecture, combined with the effects of my prescription pills combining to lessen my hydrophobia. “The abundant wildlife at Loch Ness has been deceiving tourists for decades. The area is home to cormorants—water birds with large necks that stick out of the water. And Merganser ducks, they can drive Nessie watchers crazy. As they move through the water, the ducks create V-shaped wakes, which resemble something large moving below the surface. From far away, a line of ducks can resemble humps in the water. Deer, otters, and seals are also found in Loch Ness, then you’ve got your pumas and badgers, leopards, bobcats, sheep, goats, and rats—”
“Rats?”
“Don’t worry, the Anguilla eat them.”
“What are Anguilla?” Kate Coffey asked.
“They’re a nasty species of eel that inhabit Great Britain, with sharp teeth and—”
“I saw a moray eel once in the Sea Aquarium,” said the older Jordan boy, Neil. “It was cool.”
“Oh, Anguilla eels look and act nothing like morays,” I said. “They’re long and serpentlike, with thick bodies and two fore fins that allow them to crawl on land. They’ve been called the meanest, moodiest fish ever to grab a hook.”
“How big do they get?”
“The males remain small, maybe reaching twenty-five pounds, but the females ... they can grow to twelve feet, exceeding several hundred pounds.”
“Geez.”
“Are they born in Loch Ness?” Clay Jordan asked.
“Actually, no ...” My voice trailed off, an acorn of thought planting itself in my subconscious, its growth instantly retarded by the squawk of Brandy’s loudspeaker. “Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Wallace, but if everyone would look to starboard, you’ll see Achnahannet. Back in the sixties, this small village was the location for the Loch Ness Phenomenon Investigation Bureau. It was also in these waters that the famous speedboat racer, John Cobb, died tragically in 1953 when he attempted to break the world’s water speed record.”
“Was it the monster that killed him, Dr. Wallace?” This from a thin American woman sporting a dozen painful-looking body piercings.
“Well, Miss—”
“Johnston. Dena Johnston. It was Nessie, wasn’t it?”
“Tell me, Dena, which of the two is more likely, that an ancient creature rose up from the Loch and struck the boat, or that John Cobb simply lost control when his speed surpassed 240 miles an hour?”
“I don’t know, the speed, I guess, but it’s still possible, right? I mean, I’ve seen photos taken underwater, photos that clearly show the monster’s flipper. How can you deny that?”
“Unfortunately, the famous photo you’re talking about was not Robert Rines’s original, it was an enhanced version, created by an ambitious graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. It was his digital signal scanning process that fleshed-out the flipper effect, not Rines’s original negative.”
A heavy silence took the boat, the passengers obviously disappointed with having me shoot holes into the Loch Ness legend.
Brandy quickly attempted to lighten the mood. “Hey, folks, Invermoriston on our right, look at Invermoriston. The hamlet’s surrounded by a dense forest known as the—”
“Not so fast, Dr. Wallace.” An American wearing a University of Iowa T-shirt raised his hand. “James Keigan, I do a lot of freelance writing on the Internet, my blogs deal with the unexplained. After doing extensive research, I happen to agree with the experts that claim Nessie’s a plesiosaur.”
Nods of agreement.
“Okay, James, since you’ve done so much ‘extensive research,’ maybe you could explain to us how a plesiosaur, a prehistoric aquatic reptile that went extinct 65 million years ago, is still living in a freshwater Loch.”
“First, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs used to live in the area of the North Sea. Do you deny that?”
“No denial here.”
“And do you deny that Loch Ness was once open to the North Sea, prior to the last ice age?”
“Technically, Loch Ness still flows into the North Sea, but the depths of the River Ness are far too shallow to conceal something as large as a plesiosaur.”
“I know that, but isn’t it possible an undiscovered underwater passage might still exist, linking the North Sea to Loch Ness?”
“That’s theory, not fact. Even so, you still haven’t used your extensive research to show me how a colony of air-breathing plesiosaurs managed to escape extinction to inhabit Loch Ness without anyone actually seeing them.”
“I never said it was a colony. Could just be a few survivors.”
“From 65 million years ago?”
“Why not? The coelacanth was believed extinct for 300 million years, yet we discovered them to be alive, inhabiting the deep waters off the coast of Madagascar. And Loch Ness is deeper than that.”
Several passengers clapped in agreement.
“Okay, but you’re comparing a forty-foot reptile with a six-foot-long species of lobe-finned fish.”
“What about this!” The German woman, Bibi, held up a copy of a photo she had purchased in Drumnadrochit. It was the famous “surgeon’s photo,” a surface shot of a long-necked animal resembling a breaching plesiosaur taken by an English gynecologist, R. K. Wilson, back in 1934.
“Sorry, Bibi, the photo’s a fake. The photographer claimed the animal had been several hundred yards from shore when he shot it. An analysis of the angle of the shot and its ripples, completed decades later, proves the photographer was only about thirty yards away. The man who took it actually confessed to using a miniature model before he died.”
“Attention! attention!” Brandy interrupted, “we’re approaching Eileen Mhuireach, or Murdoch’s Island, sometimes called Cherry Island. This island, the only one on Loch Ness, is actually a manmade structure known as a crannog. It was built back in the sixteenth century as a fortified retreat. This particular crannog is made of a raft of oak logs and heavy rocks. The whole thing’s secured to the bottom using a series of wooden posts.”
The passengers hardly glanced at the man-made island, their attention still focused on me.
A stocky American rose from the far end of the bench, and I recognized his wrestler’s physique, which was covered in tattoos. “We met years ago, Dr. Wallace. Chris Oldham?”
“Yes. You were one of the assistant producers who worked on that NOVA special.”
“That’s right. ‘The Beast of Loch Ness’, the one that aired back in ‘99. Our show reunited researchers Charlie Wyckoff and Bob Rine. Anyway, if you recall, despite having access to modern sonar equipment and high-tech underwater cameras, nothing conclusive ever came out of our investigation.”
“Just like all the other investigations that preceded it.”
“Exactly. Now you began this little boat ride stating you felt certain something large inhabits this Loch—those were your very words. Coming from the only person ever to witness a living giant squid, well, let’s just say I take your claim rather seriously. Still, everything you’ve said since then flies in the face of that statement.”
A telltale purple spot winked at me in the corner of my right eye.
“You’ve eloquently told us everything the monster is not. How about telling us what you think the monster really is.”
Murmurs of agreement. The passengers pushed in closer to listen. “May
be I should clarify my earlier statement. It was just a personal belief, nothing more.”
“Based upon what body of evidence?”
Brandy stepped down from the wheelhouse. “That evidence’ll be explained fully on our return trip from Fort Augustus, right Dr. Wallace? As fer now, I’ll need ye all to gather your belongings as we’ll be docking in just a few minutes. A two-hour break’ll give ye plenty o’ time tae do a little sightseein’ an’ shoppin’. Fort Augustus is the largest village on Loch Ness, with many fine restaurants and shops. I recommend stopping at the Abbey, and ye’ll definitely want to see ...”
But Oldham refused to be put off by Brandy’s sales pitch. “Yes or no, Dr. Wallace, do you believe large, mysterious aquatic animals inhabit Loch Ness?”
The passengers waited.
Brandy returned to the wheelhouse, emphatically nodding yes.
I closed my eyes, the migraine teasing at my right eye, the ghosts of Loch Ness at my spine.
“It’s a simple question, Dr. Wallace. Yes or no?”
“No.”
Moans of disappointment.
“Then you lied to us earlier?”
“I didn’t lie. What I should’ve said, what I meant to say was there could be something large down there, but whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with the Nessie lore as we know it.”
“All right then, if you actually believe that, then why not investigate the Loch yourself? Whether you realize it or not, the Sargasso incident, combined with everything that’s happened to your father, has drawn huge interest from our sponsors. I’d say the timing couldn’t be more perfect for a well-financed investigation of Loch Ness, headed by Dr. Zachary Wallace himself.”
The passengers clapped enthusiastically.
“Is that what brought you on this boat, Mr. Oldham?”
His smile revealed his intentions. “Let’s just say, we try to deliver what our viewers want to see. The Werner Herzog movie was tongue- in-cheek, the public prefers something more scientific. Just say the word, Dr. Wallace, and I can have a film crew, research vessel, and sonar equipment at your disposal in less than a week.”