by Dom Joly
Dom (Monster-Hunter)
It was just as we started our descent into Vancouver that I realized I’d left my beloved Leica camera at home. This wasn’t the greatest start to my first monster-hunting trip. Now if I did actually see Ogopogo I was going to have to draw the bastard.
The stewardess offered me a glass of Dasani. It appeared nobody had yet told the North Americans that we ran this bottled water out of the country when it was revealed that the contents were simply filtered tap water.
I had to go through Canadian Immigration before catching a little turbo-prop plane to Kelowna. A smiling, friendly official looked at my passport and asked me my reasons for coming to Canada. I couldn’t help myself.
‘I’m here to look for Ogopogo,’ I said, smiling back a little too hard and aware that I might look a bit unstable.
The official’s friendly smile disappeared and was replaced with a world-weary version.
‘Best of luck with that, eh? Now, what is your real reason for visiting Canada?’ She had a hint of steeliness about her.
I smiled again. ‘I’m here to look for Ogopogo . . .’ There was quite a long pause as she sized me up, wondering whether to call security for a cavity search. Then she seemed to remember that she was Canadian and not American.
‘And is that for business or pleasure?’
I thought hard for a second and then replied truthfully.
‘It’s purely for pleasure, ma’am.’
She stamped my passport and waved me through. I was in. I was in a foreign country hunting monsters. This was turning out to be rather Tintin-esque. Unlike Tintin, however, I have a family – not a loose, shady cabal of homoerotic acquaintances plus a white dog.
Vancouver’s internal departure lounge didn’t have a seafood bar so I had to change my pre-flight order to a doughnut. This made me nervous. The twin-prop was, like most twin-props, rather unsettling to the passenger. On normal planes you can’t really see where the power’s coming from. On a twin prop, like in a helicopter, you spend your whole time staring at the rotors imagining what would happen if they suddenly stopped turning.
An hour into the flight and I got my first view of Lake Okanagan. It’s an ominous-looking thing: a long, dark stretch of water, dwarfed on both sides by steeply rising earth – a physical reminder of the immense glacial forces that once shaped it.
The first time I’d seen this lake was on Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Here Clarke had investigated the innumerable sightings of a ‘creature’ in the lake. These sightings went way back into the nineteenth century among settlers. The beast was supposed to be not unlike the Loch Ness Monster – there were reports of ‘humps’, long black shapes in the water and stories of a dinosaur-type creature. There were also several intriguing snippets of footage and a multitude of blurred photographs. There was definitely something in this lake that was attracting attention. Legend had it that whatever it was lived in a cave under a place called Rattlesnake Island in the middle of the lake. I decided that this would have to be my first destination.
I picked up my car from Budget. Unlike her UK counterparts, the woman behind the desk was friendly, apparently well-travelled and very helpful. I’m banned from most major car-rental outlets in Central London because I constantly get into altercations with the staff. In the UK the car-rental business seems to be designed to test just how determined you are to rent said vehicles: they’ll do anything they can to prevent you leaving in a rental car. In North America it’s always a joy; they even seem slightly apologetic that you actually have to pay for marching straight out into their car park and driving off in any car with the keys in the ignition.
I’d decided to stay at the south of the lake and work my way up the valley, ending up in the main town of Kelowna. My first bed for the night was in Summerland. I wondered what Summerland was going to be like in October. Not that summery, I imagined. The busy holiday season was long over and the weather was starting to get pretty cold. There was zero boat traffic on the lake, not a single vessel. As I drove south along the lakeshore I realized that I genuinely didn’t have the first clue as to how to monster-hunt. I kept half an eye on the water hoping that maybe I’d get a sighting of Ogopogo immediately but I was intensely aware that this was very unlikely.
I turned on the local talk-radio station – always the best way to get under the skin of a community when in North America. The big news story of the day was about a man who had repelled an intruder to his trailer by using a screwdriver and ‘bear spray’. I wondered what was in bear spray. It definitely sounded like something a monster-hunter should have in his backpack.
I kept driving and put the Kermode/Mayo movie podcast on. This has been my constant companion on so many road trips, my little slice of normality in weird surroundings. A wind had picked up and the lake was choppy and rather mean-looking. Okanagan reminded me a lot of Loch Ness. It’s on roughly the same latitude and is the same sort of shape, although a lot bigger. If I’m honest, lakes have always creeped me out a bit. There’s something rather ominous about their stillness and murky depths. I don’t like swimming in them.
In Summerland I checked into my hotel, a rather posh beach resort that was totally deserted. Summer had indeed left Summerland, seemingly taking all the inhabitants with it.
This was the limbo season – after the summer hordes but before the ski season started in nearby resorts like Big White. I wandered the empty Shining-like corridors until I got to my room. This was satisfyingly huge. As the only resident in the hotel I’d been given a suite overlooking the lake. Just below my balcony, on the lakeshore, was a hot tub. Now this was my kind of monster-hunting. I was tired from the long day travelling and slipped off my smeggy clothes and hopped into the tub. I lay back and sighed. This was the life, lounging in a hot tub while keeping half an eye on the lake for monster action . . .
I must have dozed off because I awoke with someone shaking me and shouting, ‘Sir! Sir, are you OK?’
It was a security guard, probably freaked out enough to see a guest let alone a naked one passed out in the hot tub. Or maybe he just thought I was a trespasser. I tried to look authoritative but I’d been dribbling down my face and the whole thing was not a good look. I retreated to my room with as much dignity as I could muster and fell asleep. I slept like a log and woke up twelve hours later feeling a whole lot better about things. The weather had turned and it was a beautiful autumn day. I spent a cursory ten minutes staring out at the water looking for monsters until hunger took over.
I drove into Summerland proper but there wasn’t anything there so I headed down to Penticton, a larger town right at the southern end of the lake. This too was like a ghost town. My spirits dropped. I rather hoped that Ogopogo hadn’t also left the area for the winter.
I wandered the empty streets before opting for a place called Fibonacci on Main Street where the coffee smelt good. It tasted good as well: I had a monster latte as I surfed the Net for information about Ogopogo and Penticton. There’d been a famous sighting here back in 1941. A bunch of kids swimming off the beach saw a huge, thirty-foot-long object that looked like a snake. It was swimming just beyond the wooden-log buoys about fifty feet offshore. They all ran to get an adult but the thing was gone when they got back.
I rang the local Ogopogo expert, Arlene Gaal. She’d been on the original Arthur C. Clarke programme and had written a couple of books on Ogopogo so I hoped that she could maybe point out areas of the lake where there had been more sightings than elsewhere. I had a quick chat with her and we agreed to meet on Saturday, the day after tomorrow, at her home in Kelowna.
With no plans for the day, I decided to explore Penticton. This took about five minutes. It was like the beginning of 28 Days Later.
I wandered down to the beach where the kids had seen Ogopogo. A man in blue overalls was at the top of a ladder, putting a fresh coat of vivid-orange paint on an enormous metal peach. The peach was about twenty feet tall and looked quite cool. The Okanagan Valley has a ver
y curious weather system. The areas to the north end of the valley get more rain and record far colder temperatures than the areas to the south, which are almost desert-like. For years the area’s main agricultural business was fruit production – hence the big metal peach. Recently, however, locals have realized that the climate’s perfect for wine production and this has become a boom industry, superseding the fruit business.
On the shore was a sign warning bathers of potential hazards: ‘Check depth. Check weather forecast. Don’t trust inflatable devices . . .’ and, my personal favourite: ‘Learn to swim.’
There was no mention of Ogopogo danger. Indeed, so far I hadn’t come across much mention of the creature anywhere. I think I’d expected the whole area to be teeming with Ogopogo stuff and paraphernalia. I’d thought it would be the big thing around there, like Nessie is at Loch Ness. Okanagans, however, appeared to be pretty uninterested in their local monster.
I spent a futile five minutes staring at the lake hoping that Ogopogo would show up. I then wandered along the shoreline past a gargantuan old steamboat, beached like a dead whale. Before the arrival of the bridge that now spans the lake at Kelowna, vessels like these were incredibly popular with both day-trippers and locals as a means to get round the lake. In 1926, seven years before the first recorded Nessie sightings (archival records of Ogopogo sightings go back to 1872) the British Columbian government announced the commencement of a ferry service between Kelowna and Westbank. They also declared that the vessel would be equipped with ‘devices designed to repel attacks from Ogopogo’.
I checked the beached steamship for signs of any such devices but could see none. I imagined some guy perched on the prow of the ship atop a terrifying harpoon scanning the dirty grey waters for monsters. I walked round a corner and finally came across my first sighting of Ogopogo – sadly this was only in the form of a badly painted depiction on a sign advertising the Ogopogo Motel.
I wandered into the reception only to be accosted by a large lady at least as scary as the legendary beast itself. She looked at me suspiciously and asked me what I wanted. Slightly caught off-guard and embarrassed, I didn’t identify myself as one of the world’s foremost monster-hunters. Instead, I found myself telling her that I needed a room.
‘A room?’ she barked in surprise, as though I’d just asked her to bare her breasts.
‘How long for?’
My pointless web of deceit started to unravel. ‘A week – I’m in town for a . . . convention.’
She looked at me suspiciously. ‘A convention? What convention? There ain’t no convention in town.’
I replied that it was the ‘ZGB Inc.’ convention, hoping to confuse her with the initials.
‘Well, why aren’t you staying at the Convention Centre, then?’
Clearly you had to be very much on the ball if you wanted a room at the Ogopogo Motel. I imagined that guests were as frequent as sightings of the creature itself.
I wanted to leave, just run out of the door screaming, but instead I continued my fantasy.
‘Because I’m a . . . recovering addict and can’t be near a casino or . . . I go mental.’
She looked at me funny. There was a long silence. Finally she announced that the motel was ‘completely full’ as all the ‘orchard workers’ were there. I felt like a relieved blond trucker who’d just been turned away from the Bates Motel because there was no room.
I walked quickly back to the safety of my car. The weather had turned and ominous black clouds hung low over the lake. I drove to Summerland in driving rain.
It was eleven in the morning when I got back into my lakeside suite. The rain had stopped and the lake was flat calm, like a mirror. It was seven in the evening back home in the UK so I thought I’d Skype them. By means of the kind of modern technology that Tintin would never have been able to enjoy even if he’d had a family I was soon looking at my sitting room back in the Cotswolds. Stacey started telling me a long story about something that happened to the kids at school but I wasn’t listening. My attention had been drawn to some weird movement in the lake about 100 yards away from my window. Two shapes, like twin heads, were making very fast figure-of-eight motions in the water.
‘Are you listening?’ said Stacey, but I ignored her and jumped up, grabbed my iPhone and rushed to the window to start filming. In the background Stacey was still talking to me but couldn’t see where I’d gone. With my iPhone rolling I shouted at the laptop to tell them what was going on. I backed away from the window a touch and turned the computer round so that they could see what I was seeing. The zoom on the iPhone wasn’t great but I could see close enough to know that whatever was making the disturbance was not a bird. It looked like a pair of three-foot bumps sticking out of the water and whatever it was was thrashing about, as though feeding or chasing something. I couldn’t quite believe it and Stacey was sure that I was joking. Below my suite, to the left of the hot tub, was a dock that stuck out very near to the disturbance. I shouted to Stacey that I was going to run down to the end to try to get some closer footage. By the time I’d got there, though, whatever it was had disappeared. But it had disappeared underwater: nothing flew up or swam away in sight.
This genuinely was a puzzling moment. As I walked back along the dock I spotted the same security man who’d found me asleep in the hot tub the day before. He’d obviously seen me screaming and running down the dock and probably assumed that I was about to do weird naked shit again. As I walked past him he nodded at me hesitantly.
‘Everything OK, sir?’ he asked, keeping a safe distance.
I told him about what I’d seen and showed him the iPhone footage. He looked at it for quite a while and then asked to see it again.
When it finished he looked at me seriously and said, ‘Looks like you’ve just had your first sighting of Ogopogo . . .’ He had no idea that I was the world’s most famous monster-hunter or that I was looking for the very creature he was now saying I’d captured on film. I couldn’t believe it. Had I really got a bona fide sighting, on film, of a monster on my very first full day of monster-hunting? Surely it couldn’t be that easy? I walked back to my room and immediately posted the footage on my Facebook page. I’d just told everyone that I was off on this trip and now I was posting a sighting. Nobody was going to believe me but I swear this is exactly what happened.
Rather adrenalized by events, I drove up to Kelowna to find the main bookstore and buy Arlene Gaal’s book In Search of Ogopogo. I wanted to do a bit of flattery research before meeting her. As I looked for it in the store I couldn’t get my Ogopogo sighting out of my mind. I’d set off to find a monster and had an ‘encounter’ on my very first day. I was slightly buzzing but also worried that nobody would believe me. I wondered if this was what happened to other people who spotted things in the water but were worried about public ridicule.
I found the book with some difficulty and the woman behind the counter seemed surprised to be selling it. I kept the news of my sighting to myself. It was now very sunny again. I had never been anywhere where the weather changed so rapidly. I headed for the waterside park to read on a bench. There, to my delight, I spotted a statue of Ogopogo. It was green and white with humps rising in and out of the concrete ending in a slightly dopey-looking horned head with a big red tongue flapping around. It rather reminded me of Puff the Magic Dragon. I sat on a bench right beside it and started reading the book in between watching Japanese tourists drape themselves all over Puff for hour-long photo sessions. I so admire the Japanese race’s dedication to having their photos taken while striking curious fictional ‘gangsta-san’ poses. They will think nothing of taking more than 500 photographs of a woman in an oversized sun visor giving the camera the peace sign while gurning. It must have been the sheer amount of holiday footage needing to be developed in Japan that turned their inventors towards thinking about a digital camera.
I found the Gaal book quite a difficult read. She was not the most gifted of writers and it became more of a long list
of sightings. A great part of the text seemed to comprise the numbers of TV crews she’d worked with. After a while I became a little bored and nodded off on the sun-drenched bench.
On Friday I got up at the crack of dawn as I was still on UK time. I headed off into Penticton again. I wasn’t quite sure how this was possible but, if anything, it was even more deserted. Back at Fibonacci I had the strongest coffee of my life so far. I’d sent an email to a man who’d promised that he could rent me a boat even though the season was over. We’d arranged to meet behind the waterfront casino at half past nine. The weather had turned again and it was unbelievably cold and very overcast. The lake looked choppy and rather foreboding.
I hadn’t really brought any warm boating clothes with me. I looked around but there was only one clothes shop open, and that was in the foyer of the casino. I was surprised that the place was already open. It turned out to be the busiest place in Penticton, with about seven sad-looking individuals sitting lifelessly in front of one-arm bandits robotically feeding the voracious machine with quarters. If there is anything more depressing than a casino at nine in the morning then I haven’t yet come across it.
I bought the only warm thing available: a short-sleeved fleece with the words ‘Canadian Lover Man’ embossed in big red letters on the back. I was sartorially mortified but had very little choice. Even the shop assistant looked at me in a weird way.
‘It’s getting cold . . .’ I said to her almost apologetically.
‘Yeah . . . But not that cold . . .’ I sensed her thoughts.
My boat guy was all sensibly wrapped up against the cold. He didn’t say anything about my outfit but you could feel a touch of slight tension once he’d spotted it. Fortunately, because of my regular summer vacationing in Ontario, I have a Canadian Pleasure-Craft Licence; this seemed to relax him a touch. We started going over what I needed to know about the boat and he asked me where I was intending to go. I told him that I was headed north, towards Peachland. I didn’t mention Rattlesnake Island. I’d been told that locals were rather superstitious about the place and didn’t like people going there. This guy didn’t seem to be concerned about anything but payment.