Mark and I remained friends all through high school and into college. In the summers we often took weekend fishing trips to Lake Champlain, hoping to catch a glimpse of Champ. We could only fish from shore, for Mark never learned to swim much and still was scared of boats, but it didn’t matter because he always found the best spots and never went away without a stringer-full of fish. On all these trips, there was no sign of the creature. But one time, during the summer of 1982, we met this guy who was obsessed with Champ.       This was just after Sandra Mansi’s famous photograph was made public (it looks like a plesiosaur, with its head turned back), and interest in the monster was at an all-time high. It was right around then that Port Henry declared their waters a safe haven for Champ, and the state legislatures of New York and Vermont passed resolutions to protect the creature. The guy was a member of the Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation group, and he became quite interested in Mark’s story of Baby Champ’s little visit to Lake George ten years before.      He showed us a documented report of some railroad workers who found weird footprints in the mud. They described the prints as long and flipper-like, running between the railroad tracks and Route 22 not far from Cold Spring. It seemed to them like something had crawled out of Lake Champlain and headed west. By the time they got a biologist over there the rain had ruined the prints, making them indistinguishable from a bear’s. But what got me was that this incident occurred in August, 1972—the same month Mark’s arm was slashed by that thrashing tail.       It was corroboration enough for Mark Morrison. He changed his major to paleontology, and in graduate school specialized in aquatic fossils. Of course, he never told his professors or colleagues of his secret obsession, his guilty pleasure. He would sneak off to give lectures at cryptozoology conferences . . . An excerpt from one of Mark's lectures There were so many sightings in the nineteenth century that P.T. Barnum, in 1873, offered a $50,000 bounty for the monster’s hide. Unfortunately, no physical evidence of the creature has ever been found. But all who have seen Champ describe a long neck, a vertically undulating body from twelve to fifty feet long, and a dark green color. . . .     Skeptics claim that nothing from the Mesozoic or any other epoch could have survived the glaciation upheaval that occurred only twelve thousand years ago where Lake Champlain lies now so serenely. So, skeptics say, if people are seeing something other than a slimy log, or a mirage caused by temperature inversion, or even a known fish magnified in the lens of wishful thinking, it might be a species still holding on from the ice-age Champlain Sea.     Let’s then for the moment concede that the plesiosaur theory must be discarded. Champ could still be Tanystropheus, or “Tany,” a bizarre extinct reptile with an absurdly long neck—longer than its body and tail together. While no fossils of Tanystropheus exist in the New World, its much smaller cousin, tanytrachelos, has been found in lake deposits in the Northeast. But it didn’t get big enough to be Champ.        Maybe this is my Baby Champ!  . . . and throughout his life while maintaining the skeptical persona of the scientist, he never gave up hope for another encounter with Champ. He became so obsessed with the damn thing he even overcame his fear of boats, though not without the help of a very expensive therapist. He wasted his money; he never saw the creature again.     Charlene was more in need of a therapist, in my view.  She was never able to come to the sane conclusion that whatever she saw was a natural not a supernatural beast. She became a fantasy writer—no surprise there!—and one of her short stories, while she sold it as fiction, was clearly her own bizarre interpretation of the thing that had attacked Mark’s bass that August afternoon.       Further evidence of her insanity: she eventually married my crazy cousin Phil.

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