by David Rakoff
People are out in droves, enjoying a rare bit of sun. In a pedestrian mall I chance upon a small trailer devoted to protesting the use of poisons and inhumane traps against birds of prey. There is a table arrayed with leaflets and petitions. A man addresses the small crowd through a megaphone even though we are standing only a few feet away. Despite the amplification, the five very large birds of prey sit sleepy and unmoving on their wooden perches. There is desperation to the man’s plea for understanding on behalf of these animals, and one can immediately see why. It must be hard to drum up sympathy for the peregrine falcon with its talons, sharp beak, and bloodless, topaz stare. It briefly fixes its remorseless, murderous eyes upon me, and I am relieved to see that it is tethered to its log.
The bus is delayed a few minutes after we board, which allows all of us seated on the right side to look over at the next platform, where two skinny fourteen-year-olds kiss good-bye. The boy looks to be fishing his house keys out of the girl’s throat with his tongue. Her friend waits, watching them unembarrassed, eating a chocolate bar all the while. The snog takes a full two and a half minutes. Their heads part, a silver thread of saliva still briefly joining them together. The boy wipes it away with the back of his hand to polite applause on board.
My destination, Drumnadrochit, is a small town of seven hundred perched on the banks of Urquhart Bay. Drumnadrochit is Nessie Central, being home to no fewer than two museums devoted to the monster, the Official Loch Ness Exhibition Center, a.k.a. “Loch Ness 2000,” and the Original Loch Ness Monster Museum. They are approximately five hundred feet apart and both closed by the time I arrive in the gathering, drizzling dusk. My hotel—aptly described in the guidebooks as “hideous”—sits between them. It is a modern, boatlike structure with sad touches of gentility, like the frilly sheer curtains on the windows of my tiny room that only partially obscure my view of the Dumpsters out back.
I take a brief constitutional up and down the shuttered main drag of the town, in the appropriately Scottish gloaming. I am much relieved to find the Nessie Shop still open. Here in Drumnadrochit, too, I will have ample opportunity to buy a kilt, tam-o’-shanter, dish towel printed with a shortbread recipe, tartan rain gear, Nessie fridge magnet, giant pencil, squishy bookmark, Nessie-emblazoned golf balls, eraser, or pair of “Och, Aye” or “Wee Monster” socks. And just in case the twenty-foot walk from my hotel proves too arduous, I can pop into the Keeper’s Cottage gift shop just across the driveway, where, in addition to much of the above, I might also purchase a sack of chocolate Nessie “droppings.” Ditto haggis “droppings.” Candy shit from two completely implausible sources, the former fictional, the latter an inanimate foodstuff. Perhaps in reaction to all of this imaginary yet delectably edible feces, they also sell small sachets of potpourri, filled with local aromatics, attractively named “tiny lace smellies.”
Taking my supper in the hotel dining room at an ungodly early hour—makes for a nice long evening, as they say—I try to glean a demographic of the other diners. Certainly no one else is traveling alone, and no one else appears to be looking to fulfill their Pesach jones by coming here. Most everyone sounds British, and they look fairly normal, if not just a little bit vacation trashy: the palette a tad brighter, the hair just a mite bigger than usual. I sincerely hope the foursome at the next table is talking about a nature TV program, because if not, one of the men’s co-workers is an extremely accident-prone vacationer. She keeps on meeting up with huge reptiles and somehow always finds herself about to have her limbs snapped clean through by the extraordinary pressure in a crocodile’s jaws. She has had thirteen operations. Their food comes. “Oh, mine looks scrummy!” exclaims one of the wives.
I retire to the bar, only five feet from my table, where I can smoke and, this being the Highlands, drink some of the local single malt. The bartender pours me a scant, Biafran finger of amber liquid. It is stronger than any Scotch I have ever had. It savors of masculinity: a tongue-numbing combination of wood, leather, smoke, and age; like drinking the board of directors of Standard Oil. After just a few sips I am thoroughly warmed, and I abandon the thought of walking back out into the town, now that it is dark and raining quite heavily. I climb the hideous stairs to my hideous room. The sheets on my single bed have been boiled and starched countless times. Appropriately, they crackle like bleached matzo as I lie upon them.
Maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe it’s the time of man, or maybe it’s just the Scotch, but as I turn on the television, everything seems shot through with breathless anticipation, a fervent hope for the glorious arrival of some numinous presence. I watch a Nightline-style treatment of the resurrection story, reported as if it were late-breaking news with video remotes and on-camera correspondents. It is a valiant attempt at making religion hip and palatable for the information age: Jim, I’m standing here in the Old City at the grave only recently alleged to have been vacated by Jesus, the renegade rabbi known to his small band of followers as Christ the Savior. The camera pans down to the open grave and stays there. Coming up: the woman who claims she is this son of God’s mother, and, a virgin! Her story when we return. I never thought I would be nostalgic for Charlton Heston (a dangerous, horrible man who I sort of hope dies in a hail of gunfire one day), but it seems like a gross oversight that not one of the stations is broadcasting The Ten Commandments. Instead, changing the channel, I come upon a science-fiction movie where a veritable army of people waits motionless in the Nevada desert for Martian spaceships to arrive.
My thoughts drift outside my window, over the Dumpsters to the deep black water and the mythic creature under its rain-pebbled surface. Dropping off to sleep, I witness the evening’s final bit of sacrilege as the vindictive Martians graft Sarah Jessica Parker’s head onto a Chihuahua’s body.
A large plastic model of what the monster “may” look like turns in a slow circle in the pond outside the Loch Ness 2000 exhibit, housed in a beautiful old stone building. The beast resembles a rather elegant, long-necked brontosaurus (which, as any eleven-year-old dinosaur-mad dweeb can pedantically tell you, is now known as an apatosaurus). Waiting for the museum to open, I stand at the pond’s edge beside Lucy, a four-year-old with a blond bob, rosy cheeks, and bright blue eyes. She is a china doll in a dress of eyelet cotton and patent-leather shoes.
Before I can ask, “Where are your parents, little girl?” actually planning to say the words little girl, in my best benevolent, avuncular latter-day Fred MacMurray, Lucy screams, “Ah wona kehl the monstahr!” in a full-throated Glaswegian battle cry as she throws rock after rock. She has a surprisingly good arm for someone under three feet tall. The pebbles make a hollow ping as they ricochet off the animal. For now, it is just the two of us, and Drumnadrochit still seems a sleepy little Highland town, its vaunted tourist reputation as arguable as the monster itself. By eleven A.M. I will find the place overrun with families making their way across the asphalt between the four souvenir shops, their children’s faces smeared with melted Nessie droppings, arguing over who next will carry the green stuffed animal.
Loch Ness 2000 is a sound and light show of surprisingly high quality, leading from room to room, the first of which has underwater cave walls embedded with plaster saurian skulls. We are told of the legacy of continental drift, the movement of landmasses and the vast prehistoric continent of Pangea. The long, steep-sided, flat-bottomed gully that became Loch Ness—the largest volume of fresh water in Britain, big enough to immerse the world’s population three times over—was carved by a glacier.
All of the photographic evidence that exists is revealed to be either a shadow, bird, branch, boat’s wake, or outright hoax, a number of them perpetrated by one man, a professional charlatan. This is the very man who created the surgeon’s photograph. The eponymous physician was nothing more than a complicit stooge.
Apparently, all of this dubious evidence merely galvanized people to try to conclusively prove the existence of the monster. This quest, started just over thirty years ago, is spoken of as
a kind of countercultural be-in, an alternative to protesting Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia. “The youth of the sixties took a stand against conventional science!” (One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ laws of thermodynamics!)
Through room after room, everything is succinctly, scientifically, and convincingly debunked. The sonar scanning of the floor of the Loch reveals nothing, not even enough fish to sustain such an animal, let alone two. There is no monster here. End of story. LN2K is a thoroughly entertaining, beautifully produced buzz kill. Still, for all its skepticism, the exit doors lead me straight out into the Nessie Shop.
Merely leading spectators out to a gift shop is a Reykjavíkian study in restraint compared with the situation at the Original Loch Ness Monster Museum, just up the road, where the exhibit is actually inside the gift shop. The carpet is a very bright plaid, all the better to offset the ear-splittingly loud bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace” that plays over the sound system. The museum itself is an area of makeshift plywood walls, enclosing a narrow hallway of bulletin boards behind glass, and a small interior room: the tiny theater where the filmed presentation will take place.
After paying my admission, I and the two other customers, a father and his teenage son, study the display. All the pictures of the monster in the world—every single one of which is displayed here—still don’t account for many linear feet of wall space. For the rest, there are dull photos of the construction of canals and public water maintenance projects in the area, a section devoted to the midcentury attempt to achieve the on-water speed record on the Loch (apparently a rather famous event; the driver did not survive and his body was never found, although the twisted wreckage of the supersonic vehicle is shown). In yet another display case, I learn that Aleister Crowley, noted enthusiast of the black arts, maintained a house from 1900 to 1918 on the Loch in the hamlet of Boleskine. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin owns it now. In an uncharacteristic moment of skeptical sobriety, the museum allows as how this might not really speak to the water’s darker powers, since “most records when played backwards sound like a Satanic chant.”
In the display devoted to cryptozoology—that highly disputed field of study of strange, extinct, and mythic creatures—the Original Museum becomes a nineteenth-century Bowery arcade of curiosities, everything but the monstrous two-headed baby in brine. The wall text is carnival barker sensational, while the photos show unusual but by no means extraordinary animals: a Giant Squid, “the animal mythicized [sic] by the Scandinavians as the Kraken.” The Megamouth, the Coelocanth, the Spindlehorn, the Komodo dragon, “Champ,” the legendary monster of Lake Champlain in upstate New York. There is the famous picture of the Japanese Carcase, which I’ve seen before, a rotting partial skeleton found by a Japanese fishing boat in 1977. It really is huge and enough to make one truly believe in the continued existence of aquatic dinosaurs among us, except for the fact that it was found to contain elastin, a substance present only in sharks. The description of Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch and the Yeti, reads like a PSA for a persecuted minority. We are to think of them as a hapless giant race, now reduced to a tiny number owing to their lesser intelligence; a bony spur on the evolutionary continuum. “We must try to establish, and then ensure, their continued survival in a rapidly changing world.”
The museum desperately needs a proofreader; there are many typos, and the text describing the Bermuda Blob—a white starfish-shaped, coffee-table-size piece of undifferentiated biomass—just takes off somewhere else in the middle: “Some propose that they are the remains of giant octopuses In November 1746, he died of fever, aged thirty-seven and was buried on a riverbank in Siberia unknown to science.”
The elderly woman tending the cash register, and presumably running the projector, pokes her head in and tells us to make our way into the theater for the film presentation. What is this feeling of déjà vu? I wonder, as I sit in the tiny auditorium with its faded red velvet movie seats and general air of grime and threadbare opulence, watching a film that is nothing more than a projected videotape. It then hits me with nostalgic clarity: This could be a pre-Giuliani porn theater.
It’s not an inapt parallel, actually. Just as no one truly believes that Adonis-like park rangers come upon priapic campers in need of “help,” here too it’s more about amusement and going with the flow than actual fact. “It’s just a cracker of a story, that’s all,” said a local standing at the bar the previous night.
It’s all in the name of fun, except perhaps here at the Original, where the film tips its hand immediately with its title: We Believe in the Loch Ness Monster! The narration, like the display outside, is slightly hysterical, whether speaking of the Loch’s human history—“If these stones could talk, they would talk of the clang of metal sword upon shield, of blood spilt between clan and clan”—or its geological origins: “The rocks are quiet now, although echoes of that primeval rape still ring.” There is something almost touching about seeing all of the same old photographs, convincingly debunked at the other museum not fifteen minutes prior, being presented here as hard evidence. But the movie’s title notwithstanding, I don’t get the sense that the folks here really believe in the monster, either. No one I talked to working at the hotel or the many gift shops seems to think about the creature at all.
The locals’ widespread pragmatism is odder than it sounds. It’s not like in Iceland, where the enchanted spots are so terribly unenchanting and the stories of people from another dimension able to inhabit solid rock so intrinsically farfetched. There have been some actual sightings here—albeit of sturgeons, otters, and large branches, but legitimately confusing facsimiles—and, given the imposing darkness and murk of the huge Loch, which fairly broadcasts mystery and concealment, I expected an entire battalion of the faithful. At the very least some of those Stonehenge-y, Wiccan, animist, pagan/ druidical crazies eating vegetarian, playing zithers, and giving each other STDs after worshiping the dawn on the rocky shore. But there are none. Not surprisingly, the main believer does turn out to be someone with an intimate and ongoing relationship with the Loch. Alex Campbell, the water bailiff—a job whose very title would have me hallucinating just to pass the time—boasts eighteen sightings in the film.
I emerge into the gift shop, as seems to be the curatorial practice in Drumnadrochit. (Truthfully, it’s the curatorial practice almost everywhere. One can scarcely walk five steps in the Metropolitan in New York without running into some makeshift kiosk hawking Monet coasters, Diego Rivera scarves, and those fucking Raphael cherubs!) I dispatch a number of pennies into one of those machines that flattens them into oval tokens incised with an image of Nessie. I adore these contraptions. I love the modesty of the objects they produce, the muscle of the heavy metal rollers, the whining creak of the gears as the stalwart copper is rendered liquid soft and ductile. I could stay at the penny machine all day, but there is more to see, or so I think. I follow a Japanese family out into the brilliant sunshine.
The Nessie Hunter, a small boat that fits about ten of us, is being guided over the waters of the Loch by the same man who drove us in the minivan down to the dock. The tour, even though an hour long, doesn’t even begin to cover a significant portion of the Loch given its twenty-plus-mile length. The day is perfect and blue and, in a further nod to The Ten Commandments, the sky positively biblical with Maxfield Parrish clouds. The green felt hills to the west are dotted with sheep, while the piney banks to the east are cast in shadow. The land falls almost vertically into the water to a depth of several hundred feet.
We begin the ride a bit shy and with one last shred of credulity, wondering, almost hoping for the boat to be overturned as the waters roil and part like the Red Sea in the cutting wake of the beast’s ridged and shining slate back. Out here on the Loch is the only time we feel that whatever creature might live here could be anything other than a cartoon Cecil, that cheerful, anthropomorphized playmate.
The thought lasts only moments, though. Even the chattering five-year-old boy has
stopped scanning the surface. By the time the driver cuts the engine, we float peaceably, looking up at the steeply wooded slopes, taking each other’s pictures. We could be in northern Ontario for all the lack of supernatural menace. Tourists wave at us as they clamber up and down the ruined turrets of the medieval castle that looms above us. We idle back into Urquhart Bay and clamber back into the van.
The driver points out the small webcam perched atop the chimney pot of a small cottage. It takes regular pictures of the water and broadcasts them over the Internet, twenty-four hours a day. He stops the vehicle, and we get out. Perhaps it’s the central absence at the Loch, the materiality of the lack here, that makes us so still and quiet, but not one of us waves at the camera. We stand, unmoving, looking at an immobile camera recording an unchanging body of water.
It is a mystery to the Canadian backpacker and myself why we are almost unable to breathe as we sit on the low stone wall at the bus stop. We are outdoors, after all, a gentle breeze blows through the green bowl of Drumnadrochit’s sun-washed glen, and still the air is thick and noxious with the stench of decay. The plague of the murdered firstborn meted out while I was cruising the Loch, perhaps? Finally I turn around and see the suburban tract-home-size pile of sheep droppings—not the chocolate kind, unfortunately—in the field behind us. O, for a tiny lace smelly!
My initial plan had been to be in Drumnadrochit for two nights, exploring the town and getting to the bottom of the bitter disputes between believer and infidel. I had no indication from either the guidebooks or my first view of the town, situated at the base of these verdant hills with its two exhibitions, that it would be so, well, entertainment bereft. But, having seen both museums, walked the town from stem to sternum not twice, but thrice—and enduring the increasingly suspicious stares of the man in the small cottage with the even smaller garden that still manages to hold a profusion of plaster of Paris gnomes, a small iron cannon, and a four-foot-tall bronze David—and already returned from my cruise, I am dismayed to find that it is only one in the afternoon on Day the First of a proposed three-day stay.