Chapter 22
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.