That summer, swimming: out to Horseshoe Island, around it; we followed the curve of Nicolet Bay and further south, through all the dark boats moored offshore of Fish Creek. Pirate Island, Adventure Island, Little Strawberry. My body has never been able to go further than it could, that summer. The flat black water, the moonlight, the waves and weather, the edges of storms. Below, around, invisible: the smallmouth bass, the perch, the carp and catfish and bullhead, the trout, the whitefish. The sturgeon hovering even deeper, perhaps, straight out of the Pleistocene with their shovel noses, their smooth skin, not a bone in their body, all cartilage, and their bodies longer than mine, stretched out as I was, swimming across the surface above them, swimming with Mrs. Abel.
North, past Little Sister and Sister Bay, then the Sister Islands. We swam distances through the darkness while everyone onshore slept in their houses. The two of us swam and the lakebed rose and fell beneath us, the currents and stars all around us. She swam ahead, and I tried to keep up, and I did not wish to be left behind.
Part of my pleasure of swimming in open water, especially at night, is that it makes me afraid. It frightens me. The unknown depths beneath me, the black current and all its dwellers, its undiscovered creatures. Swimming, I envisioned serpents, and I wondered about the St. Lawrence Seaway, whether a whale might slip through, might evolve to breathe fresh water.
Just the other day, I was walking through the playroom, where my daughters have various hammocks and trapezes suspended by chains. My eight-year-old, Ida, was sitting on a small, round trampoline, reading a book I’d never seen before, The Mysterious Monsters of Loch Ness.
“I think it actually lives there,” she said. “There is proof, but there’s not much of it. The problem is that there’s more people that don’t believe than people that do. And this book is old, so they’ve probably found out more since then.”
When my older daughter went upstairs to play with her sister, I picked up the book: here in these pages, the old, familiar photos, the hypotheses (the Loch Ness Monster could either be descendants of the Plesiosaurs or else they must be some totally unknown creature) and appeals to reason (“In the twenties a scientist said he had seen a carcass of a recently dead Coelacanth and received scorn very similar to that placed upon Nessie witnesses”) and the propositions: “The more you study the Loch and the case for its animals being real, the more real they seem. This seems to be true of most phenomena that are eventually understood, whereas the further you investigate a myth, the less real it becomes.”
I have always had an affinity with ghosts, lingering from the past as they do, unfinished with what they left behind. That said, the three mysteries that obsessed me throughout my childhood were UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. I believed; I wanted to believe; I lay awake, trembling at the possibilities, taut with fear and excitement. I collected magazines with titles like UFOs: No Hoax and Cryptozoology, clipped out photographs and articles, kept them all in file folders, to display and convince. One reason I preferred the Loch Ness Monster was because it lived in Scotland and was safely bounded by water, unable to burst into my life, into my nighttime bedroom, as aliens or Bigfoot might.
Once, in fourth grade, I gave a presentation on these topics. A smart classmate, Jennifer Durham, sharply questioned my assertion that an organism as large as a dinosaur could survive by eating nothing but the skin of its teeth. I found my source and quoted the scientist: “If the creature has been able to survive, it is only by the skin of its teeth.”
That was an early lesson for me in the dangers of language, of reading metaphors literally and not recognizing figuration. This is a practice, a tendency that continues to trouble me.