Chapter 6

Sea Monster Seeds

Mom sat at the kitchen table like a stack of unavoidable homework.

“You ought to eat,” she told me.

I peanut-butter-and-jammed some bread, because I did not want to wait for the toast to pop. Mom said a few more things. I nodded back a few times, like I was really listening, yawning between every nod until Mom finally told me that I’d better go to my bedroom and have a nap—which was exactly what I’d planned.

Only I wasn’t going to sleep.

I sat on my bed and leaned back with my laptop balanced on my legs, enjoying the perfect groove I’d worn into the mattress over the years. I wondered if I could multiply the years since cribdom and subtract the nights I’d spent out in my tent in the summer and the few times I’d visited our Uncle Wilfred’s place to figure out just how much time I’d spent right here—but who in their right mind wants to do math this early in the morning?

I wondered if I would be allowed to take my bed to Ottawa with me.

How much stuff could I bring?

Would I need to get used to sleeping in a brand-new bed?

It didn’t matter. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself. None of that mattered now that I had a plan.

I started out by searching “sea monster” on Google, which brought me about 14,600,000 hits, which wasn’t quite a kajillion but close enough. This was going to be harder than I’d thought. So I tried “Canadian sea monster,” which narrowed my hunt down to 250,000 results.

I spent an hour rooting my way through the deep heaps of sea monster information I’d discovered. It turned out that Canada was home to an awful lot of monsters: Ogopogo and the Cadborosaurus in British Columbia; another Ogopogo in Alberta; something called Agopogo in Saskatchewan; a Manipogo in Manitoba; Champ in Lake Champlain, Quebec; and Igopogo in Lake Simcoe, Ontario. Further east in New Brunswick was Gougou in Chaleur Bay and Old Ned in Lake Utopia; Okiepogo in O’Keefe Lake, Prince Edward Island; and Cressie in Newfoundland. There were sea monster sightings all around Nova Scotia, including lake lizards in Cranberry Lake and Lake Ainslie, and even monsters spotted right in the middle of Halifax Harbour.

It seemed as if the waters out there were as thick as chowder when it came to sea monsters.

I started taking notes.

Sure, I know that sounds way too much like homework, but I’d decided that I was going to be organized about this. So I made a list of the common elements of every sea monster sighting I’d found.

note.jpg

I decided to send an email to every sea monster organization and scientific expert I could find to let them know that something huge was happening in Deeper Harbour. Sooner or later, if I talked to enough people, somebody would listen. There’d be stories in the newspaper and on TV. The Deeper Harbour sea monster would get everyone talking.

If there were a sea monster in Deeper Harbour the tourists would come back. Once the tourists came back, the money would come back. Stores would open up and this town would have a real future. Maybe there would be television specials and maybe even an action movie and Mom would say something like, “Hey, why did I ever think we needed to move to Ottawa when there is so much happening right here in Deeper Harbour?”

Yeah, right.

It sounded good in the way that ideas a fourteen-year-old’s plan-making muscles come up with can, but who was I kidding? No one would listen to a kid like me.

Still, I had to do something and this was better than doing nothing at all.

It was like planting seeds in a garden. You never know which one will grow.

I added “organizations” to my search and started getting the kind of results I was looking for. I made a list of email addresses for the organizations I found.

I set up an anonymous email address.

I drafted a letter.

I’m telling you, I was organized.

And then I decided exactly who I wanted to email first. It came to me like a thunderbolt to Frankenstein’s lightning-attracting neck bolts. I needed to notify the single greatest Canadian scientist that ever lived.

I found his email address on his website.

This would be perfect.

All right, I never said I was any kind of a writer. But I thought I’d hit the necessary details. I thought the phrase, “I believe in you” was a pretty good guilt-trip mechanism, and believe you me, nobody understands guilt trips like the fourteen-year-old child of divorcing parents.

I added the GPS coordinates for Deeper Harbour, a map, and a picture of a fishing boat from a Nova Scotia tourism website, then sent my message off. My next step was to send a copy of the email to every monster-hunting organization I had found.

My figuring was pretty simple. If I sent twenty emails to twenty organizations, and they forwarded my email to twenty people, sooner or later my email would have reached every single potential tourist in Canada.

Sending the emails was easy once I fell into a routine, just cut and paste and send, over and over. I wondered if I could get a job doing this sort of thing. Kind of like a publicist for sea serpents and wood beasts across the country.

I wondered if Bigfoot had ever thought of hiring a personal public relations consultant.

I sent a few more messages before erasing the history on my computer just in case Mom got into one of her snooping moods. I closed the laptop and I decided that after being up for most of the night throwing cabers and sinking dories, a half-hour nap would do me just fine.

Three hours later, I was still snoring softly with drool running down my chin when my first reply came winging back to me.