A Lake Monster Tale

Something crawled out of the lake that mild August day.
It was Lake George, not Lake Champlain, and yet
Mark Morrison, who was fishing from shore when he encountered it, managed to convince himself that the creature must be one of Champ’s pups.

Champ, you may know, is Lake Champlain's
Loch Ness-type monster. [*]

Something came out of the lake. Fantastic beast? illusion? delusion?

Mark's sister Charlene decided it was a baby dragon.

Her notion made Mark's seem reasonable;
at least plesiosaurs (or whatever beast
long-thought extinct the lake monster
might be) existed once, and could still.
To my knowledge, no one
has ever found a dragon fossil.

Here’s the story; you tell me who’s crazy.

[roll mouse over monster, then click on it]

I. Little Champ

Every August in the early 1970s, my parents took me and my younger brother Robert to Lake George, in the Adirondack Mountains. They rented a cottage way up on the northeast side of the lake on Black Point Road, with my father’s war-buddy Rick Morrison and his family.

We only saw the Morrisons once or twice a year, since they lived in Boston. They had two kids we could hang out with, Mark and Charlene. We were all in our early teens. I thought it was strange to share a house with another family, especially one with a girl, but Robbie was in heaven. He was crazy about Charlene, which was pathetic to watch because she was only playing him to hook up with our cousin Phil, who would already be a sophomore in college, come September. His parents rented the cottage next door.
    Charlene had thick and wild red hair she usually stuffed inside a New York Yankee cap, with pony tail sticking out. Her bright green eyes made it easy to overlook the abundant freckles on her face. Phil’s dark Sicilian face was much handsomer than Rob’s—or mine for that matter—so we resented his presence on principle, although we hoped he would turn us on to pot, which we had never tried. He was one of those early-70s hippies with very long black hair and slitty red eyes; we could always tell when he was stoned although all the adults were clueless. Phil was spending a boring couple of weeks with his parents, and to entertain us all at night, in the absence of television, he often performed magic tricks he’d learned from Grandpa Nolano. Charlene of course would get all giggly and worshipful like a groupie, sitting shamelessly on the floor during his show right in front of him in a miniskirt and saying stupid stuff like “Oh wow, Phil, how did you do that?”
    Charlene’s brother Mark was the luckiest fisherman I ever knew, even as a kid he always got the most bites and strikes, and always caught the most fish. But he couldn’t swim and was afraid of boats, so he could only fish from shore. My father was planning a major fishing excursion on the lake, and the night before, sitting out in the backyard under the stars, I rubbed it in that Mark couldn’t come along because of his phobia. “You can’t get the big ones from shore, Mark. C’mon, it’s a big boat, wear a life-jacket.” I wanted to say, My dad thinks you’re a wuss, but feared the consequences.
    “I bet you any amount I can catch a bigger fish in my cove than you can in the lake.” He was referring to a great fishing spot not far from our cottage off Black Point Road, a cove nestled in the woods and accessible only by a short but winding trail from the backyard of the empty cottage up the hill. The property actually belonged to a friend of Mark’s father who was seriously ill with cancer of some sort, so the fishing spot had already become Mark’s cove. “Well, is it a bet?” he asked.
    “You bet it’s a bet. The big trout stay in the deep water this time of year.”
    “I’m not talking about trout,” he said. “I’m talking size, man. How much?”
    “Let’s do it this way: the loser has to be the one to ask Phil for a joint.”
    He laughed. “Sure. Beats flipping a coin.”
    “What you expecting to catch that’s bigger than a lake trout?”
    “Muskie, or pike. Or maybe a lunker largemouth like that one I caught last year. You remember that one, don’t ya?”
    “How could I forget it? You never shut up about the sucker.”
    “It wasn’t a sucker, it was a bass.”
    “I know, I know—as big as your ass.”
    Before he could pound me, Charlene appeared, out of the bushes, with Robbie following like a puppy. “Hey you guys,” she said, all excited, “Come see what Phil’s doing next door.”