Sinking Deeper

by Steve Vernon

  Which was about when one of the fishing boats burped and chuttered to life and started heading straight towards us. It might have been the same boat that had blown its horn at us on our first trip out. We were too far away to tell, and even though we knew all those fishermen by name, through the fog all their boats looked the same.

  About the only thing that we could be certain of was that he was definitely determined to give us chase.

  “Turn it hard, Roland,” Granddad Angus ordered. “Warren, you ease off.”

  Warren eased up on his pedal-paddling and I turned the pedal as hard as I could. The monster swung around slowly.

  “Pedal harder,” Dulsie said.

  All the while, the fishing boat kept getting closer. I expected that the captain was trying to figure just how much per pound a full-grown sea monster was going to net him, but I was determined not to let him catch us.

  Still, a pedal-paddling dory monster isn’t much of a match for a six-hundred-horsepower engine. We really didn’t stand much of a chance until Granddad Angus stepped into action. He woofed menacingly into the moose call.

  I couldn’t be certain, but I believe the fishing boat slowed down a little after that woof. Meanwhile, Warren and I kept on working the pedal-paddles, and Dulsie slipped the backup oars into their locks and began to row just as hard as she could. It helped a bit, but the boat kept getting closer.

  “Steer for the shallows,” Granddad Angus said. “Once we put those rocks behind us that fishing boat is bound to head for easier waters.”

  Granddad Angus had calculated correctly.

  Or else the fishing boat captain had reconsidered running his boat up against a sea monster.

  “Next time bring a bigger boat!” Dulsie called out playfully, once we were far enough around the harbour mouth to be out of sight.

  I was still scared. Nearly being caught didn’t help my worry at all.

  “What if they had caught us?” I asked.

  “They probably would have thrown us back,” Warren said. “Your grandfather would have made for some pretty tough cleaning.”

  Warren’s joke didn’t stop me from worrying. What if next time they sent out the Coast Guard? What if next time they had a navy destroyer waiting for us? What if we were shelled with cannon fire or depth charges?

  Suddenly, this whole idea didn’t seem half as fun.

  “This is Deeper Harbour,” Granddad Angus told me after I confided my fear. “The only depth charges we need to worry about are the ones that follow the church’s baked-bean and brown-bread supper.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  “We could try taking Fogopogo out at night,” Warren suggested. “We’d catch two fish with one hook that way. We’d be a whole lot more concealed and we wouldn’t have to worry about waiting for the fog to roll in.”

  That made sense to me but Granddad Angus thought differently.

  “The first three letters in Fogopogo tells it all, as far as I’m concerned. Fog is a part of the mystery of the story,” he said. “Besides, I need my sleep.”

  He was being funny but I knew that he was right. Keeping to foggy mornings meant that sooner or later people would clue in and start watching the harbour every morning a little fog rolled in. It made it easier to guarantee a built-in audience.

  Just so long as the four of us didn’t get caught.

  Chapter 20

  Fogopogo Makes the News

  So far, the whole plan was working.

  Everything was happening just exactly as I’d dreamed it would. Every time we took Fogopogo out into the harbour the story grew a little more. People began to spread rumours of their own. Even the people who hadn’t seen Fogopogo yet had begun to talk about the monster as if they’d actually seen it firsthand.

  “Fogopogo is bigger than Loch Ness.”

  “Fogopogo is bigger than Bigfoot.”

  “Fogopogo is bigger than King Kong standing on top of Godzilla’s grass-green eyebrows.”

  When we didn’t have fog, we still did our best to kept the pot stirred up.

  Granddad Angus made a recording of his best moose call, and I used my computer to make the noise sound like an entire flotilla of sea monsters. Dulsie started hiding in the woods around the town, playing Fogopogo’s roar through Dad’s electronic bullhorn, which he thought was still locked in the supply closet at the police station.

  “If we can keep people on their toes and guessing,” Granddad Angus said, “we can keep Fogopogo alive between sightings.”

  Warren was more than a little worried about somebody taking a shot in the general direction of Dulsie.

  “One shotgun blast in a lifetime is plenty for me,” Warren said.

  I guess I couldn’t really blame Warren for worrying like he did. I suppose that after having Dulsie’s mother die, Warren was bound to be worried about losing his daughter too.

  Dulsie thought the whole thing was a great big adventure. She began a series of today tattoos in the pattern of killer commando camouflage, only instead of the traditional green, yellow, and brown, Dulsie used nearly every colour imaginable and a few that hadn’t even been thought up yet.

  “Who do you think you are?” Warren asked her. “Rambo?”

  “She looks more like a rainbow to me,” Granddad Angus said.

  Rainbow or Rambo, we were all working hard to spread the word about Fogopogo.

  After our third sailing, Fogopogo and Deeper Harbour were mentioned in most of the larger newspapers in the country. Talk-show hosts and newscasters were arguing back and forth about whether the sea monster was real or a hoax.

  Molly decided that the news articles should be preserved in the town archives, which, so far, consisted of a closet full of shoeboxes crammed full of clippings and old photos. She gave Fogopogo his very own shoebox and photocopied every article about him and posted it up on a bulletin board that Warren nailed to the side of his boat shed for just that purpose.

  Every morning that I wasn’t out in the monster I checked on the latest news clippings.

  SEA MONSTER SPOTTED OUTSIDE OF SLEEPY FISHING VILLAGE

  That paper had a fuzzy picture of Fogopogo in it that showed just enough monster to get people to read the story.

  IS FOGOPOGO REAL?

  That story was written by someone who wanted very badly to prove that there are no sea monsters, and he compared Fogopogo to a UFO. The writer had decided that the entire phenomenon was nothing more than a case of shared delusions.

  Personally, I think he just wanted to use the word “phenomenon.”

  My favourite article had to be the clipping from a British paranormal magazine with a headline that read “fogopogo—fiend of the atlantic.” It described Fogopogo as blood-curdling and dangerous.

  Wow.

  I felt like a mad scientist.

  I had helped build a monster.

  A fiend.

  Cool.

  Chapter 21

  Sitting Still and Setting World Speed Records

  “The whole town is out there,” I said.

  We were into our third week of taking Fogopogo out and I don’t believe I had ever seen so much of Deeper Harbour gathered together at any one time. They were all there, by the dozens and hundreds. I could see the purple minivan and the glint of a telescope and I hoped that the bit of morning mist we’d counted on was enough to disguise the fact we were but a moose-hide-clad dory.

  Granddad Angus woofed out the grandfather of all turnip farts, through the birchbark moose call. It sounded horrible from inside the moose hide, but roaring and echoing through the mist and the waves, it must have sounded pretty impressive. I heard folks cheering and one woman screamed, the way you might scream at a tightrope act in the circus.

  I could see the people on shore clearly now. They were clustered around the wharf and I could see t
hem pointing. We were far enough out that none of the onlookers could get a clear look at us and the morning mist made things even eerier.

  Or at least I hoped so.

  Again, I saw the glint of a telescope or maybe binoculars. A part of me wanted to crouch down, even though I knew that the sea monster safely hid anybody in the dory.

  I peeked through my peephole and I could see the big stretch of grey rock that hooked out around the harbour.

  “Keep working those grinders,” Granddad Angus warned me.

  “I’m turning them as hard as I can,” I told him. “I just don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  “Seems that way, doesn’t it?” Granddad Angus said.

  “What do you mean, ‘seems that way’?” I asked. “It is that way. This is really hard.”

  Granddad Angus just shook his head.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “At any given time the Earth is rotating upon its axis at nearly 1,700 kilometres an hour,” Warren said. “At the same time, the planet is orbiting around the sun at the speed of 108,000 kilometres per hour.”

  I blinked.

  Warren had definitely out-stranged himself.

  “So what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “He means you’re setting world speed records just sitting still,” Dulsie explained.

  Which still didn’t make much sense to me.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “What he means,” Granddad Angus said, “is that it is impossible to sit still for very long, at least as long as you’re sitting upon this planet. Life has a strong current that will pull you forward into ever deeper water no matter how hard you try to stay in one place.”

  “How’d you ever get to be so smart?” I said.

  “Never try and debate astrophysics with a dory man,” Granddad Angus said.

  “Or a stamp collector,” Warren added.

  “Or a punk-goth-freakazoid,” Dulsie chimed in.

  “Is that a fact?” I asked.

  “I said so, didn’t I?” Granddad Angus asked.

  I looked over at my Granddad Angus, sitting there in the belly of that homemade sea monster, his face lit up and mottled by the sunlight leaking through the shot-up moose hide. He was smiling softly and just for that moment I had the feeling that my entire life was orbiting gently about that smile.

  “It’s really going to work, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Did you ever think it wouldn’t?” Granddad Angus answered.

  Chapter 22

  Deeper Harbour Avalanche

  Have you ever built a snowman? Do you know how it is when you start rolling it from a little snowball up into a great big snow-boulder? Do you know that part when it gets so heavy that you really have to work each step and lean hard and it just keeps getting heavier and you just keep rolling because some little voice inside you keeps whispering, Just a little bigger?

  We were way past that snowball-rolling point.

  We were into avalanche and abominable snowman country.

  Now everyone was really paying attention to Deeper Harbour. Two Maritime news shows came to town and the monster-hunters were interviewed by three different radio stations. A bunch of reporters tried to interview Dad, but they stopped calling after he used a few words I never thought I’d hear being uttered over the police station telephone.

  And we had received our first tour bus.

  It brought twelve tourists, all told, who wandered through the streets and ate at Nora’s Diner. Postcards were bought and pictures taken before they funnelled back onto the bus and made their way out of town.

  “This sea monster is great for business,” I heard my mom say.

  Yes!

  If Mom thinks there’s hope for Deeper Harbour then maybe she won’t be so quick to uproot us.

  Nora had to bring in a second cook for the diner. She started to sell Fogopogo dogs. She took foot-long wieners, dipped them in homemade cornbread batter, and deep-fried them. She served them up with ketchup, mustard, or a green chili salsa that she claimed was hot enough to peel paint.

  Which it was.

  Meanwhile, Molly revived the town newspaper, a three-page bulletin stapled together that she called the Deeper Harbour Digest, and sold it at the drugstore for fifty cents apiece. She announced that there would be a contest and a prize given to whomever managed to get a clear photo of Fogopogo.

  Warren set up a souvenir shop in his boat shed. He started selling Fogopogo t-shirts and hats and stuffed sea monsters, all of which sold pretty well. He also made some homemade lemonade and sold it by the glass and scooped ice cream into cones, until Dad told him that he would need a permit to sell food. That put an end to the ice cream and lemonade business.

  Dulsie had the best idea of all though.

  She came up with the idea of a sea-serpent egg.

  She asked Warren to drive to Yarmouth to buy a pickled ostrich egg from an ostrich farmer and then she painted the egg with food colouring.

  Warren displayed the egg in a second-hand aquarium he bought at a yard sale along with a bag full of plastic dinosaurs that he had kept from when Dulsie was a little girl. I thought it was neat how Dulsie had played with toy dinosaurs, but she swore that she had never seen them before in her life.

  As a finishing touch Warren had Dulsie paint a sign that read, “FOGOPOGO EGG???”

  “I put the three question marks on the sign so that it wouldn’t exactly be a lie,” Warren explained. “You see, I’m not really claiming that the egg is a sea monster egg. I’m just asking a question, is all.”

  I thought that Warren was drawing an awfully thin line to stand behind, but since I was the one who had first come up with the whole idea of making a sea monster, I certainly couldn’t call him dishonest for trying to attract a little more attention. Besides, he was so excited to have finally found a way to make a little money from the old boat shed.

  “He had started selling my grandpa’s old boat-building tools as antiques,” Dulsie explained. “We were that short of money.”

  I was just glad to have accidentally done something that helped Dulsie.

  I still wasn’t ready to call her my girlfriend, mind you.

  For now I was happy enough just calling her my friend.

  Dad wasn’t nearly as excited about all the new people that the Fogopogo sightings had brought to town. He’d had to start issuing speeding tickets and had arrested a couple of drunk drivers.

  “If this keeps up I might actually have to hire a whole police force,” he said.

  He especially wasn’t happy with the litter from all those people, and I couldn’t blame him. There were coffee cups and hamburger wrappers and doughnut bags drifting amongst the rocks and salt grass of the harbour.

  “I’d call this place a pigsty,” Dad said. “Except that would mean I’d have to apologize to pigs all over the world.”

  Personally, I thought that Dad was just being a bit too much of a party-pooper. Couldn’t he see how good all this was for our little town?

  I wanted to try and explain to him how this whole scheme was going to bring tourism back to Deeper Harbour. That way Mom wouldn’t have to leave and take me to Ottawa and I could stay here with him.

  And we could all live happily ever after.

  Everybody else I talked to seemed awfully excited about all of the business that Fogopogo was bringing to Deeper Harbour. It seemed like the whole town wanted a piece of our little sea monster.

  So it was only a matter of time before somebody got the bright idea to hold a Fogopogo Festival.

  Chapter 23

  The Chickens Win Again

  Maritimers are always ready for a party.

  They will declare a festival over nearly anything you can imagine.

  There’s an annual pumpkin
regatta Windsor, Nova Scotia, where people paddle pumpkin-boats across Lake Pezaquid, and in Wolfville, they stage a rubber duck race every spring. Every summer, there is a bathtub race in Marion Bridge, Nova Scotia. In New Brunswick, there’s even a festival for fiddleheads, those chewy little ferns that Granddad Angus swears are as tasty as all get out.

  So why not have a Fogopogo Festival?

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “The town council has finally got it right. Now there is no way on earth that Mom can say Deeper Harbour is dying.”

  The four of us stood there in Warren’s boat shed—Granddad Angus, Warren, Dulsie, and I.

  “It’s time we called an end to this,” Granddad Angus said. “It is getting way too risky.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?” Warren asked. “Do you figure they’re going to send in the Canadian Navy?”

  “We haven’t finished what we started,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” Dulsie agreed. “There’s still a lot more that needs doing.”

  Granddad Angus shook his head like a tired old bull.

  “We’re in the papers,” he said. “And we’re on the national news. Tourists are hearing about us. Now we’ve got this Fogopogo Festival happening. What else do we need to do?”

  We all started arguing at once but Granddad Angus wasn’t hearing any of it.

  “It’s too risky,” Granddad Angus said. “I never really dreamed it would go as far as it has.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  Here, all along I had been scared and worried and looking towards my granddad to keep my courage afloat. This was absolutely the first time that Granddad Angus had shown the least bit of doubt.

  “But it’s perfect,” I repeated. “Everybody will be there. They’ll all have cameras, and there will be reporters and film crews, and booths selling popcorn and candy and balloons.”