I was surfing past the Discovery Channel the other day when I noticed some familiar scenery.  It looked just like a lake we saw on the road between Bo and Bergen in Norway.  I paused at the channel and read the program summary.  The show was a documentary about Selma, a sea serpent thought to live in Lake Seljordsvatnet in Seljord, Norway.  There were the usual accounts of locals who had seen the monster with their own eyes.  It reminded me of the time I saw a monster in a lake.

In the summer of 1964 I was twelve years old and experiencing my first trip to a foreign country.  Every summer, my parents, Aunt Anita and Unca Gail (I was enamored of Donald Duck back then, hence the “Unca”), and cousins Don and Sally used to spend a week at a fishing camp in Minnesota.  This year my parents decided to splurge and go to a camp in Canada.  My younger brother Jim was parked with my Aunt and Uncle.  Mom, Dad, cousin Don, and I headed north to a back-woodsy place called Penney’s Timberlane Lodge on Lac Suel in Ontario.

Being in a foreign country was an unsettling experience.  It was almost like home, but there were differences.  The candy bars were strange and they weren’t celebrating the 4th of July for some reason.

But the fishing!

The lake was huge, over 150 miles long, far larger than any I’d ever been on.  It took hours to get to some of our fishing spots.  And the fish!  At the little lake we usually went to in Minnesota, catching a Northern Pike was a major event and Walleye were unheard of.  At Lake Suel it seemed as though every time you dropped a hook in the water the Northern and Walleye were waiting to strike.  I didn’t like fish unless it was Mrs. Paul’s and served with lots of tartar sauce, but that summer I discovered how good Walleye could taste.  We caught far more than we could eat and froze a lot to take home.

The camp seemed primitive and remote compared to the Midwest.  In Iowa you were never more than a few miles away from some little town with a store and no matter how deep in the woods you went, you were never more than a 20 minute walk to a farmhouse.  Here, there were trees and then more trees.  Once we got to the camp I felt like we were cut off from the world.  All of the food we brought with us was preserved.  Until then, I didn’t realize potatoes or bacon could be put in cans.  The cabin was made of rough-cut logs and the kitchen area was like something out of the Wild West.

Fishing was my Dad’s thing, not mine.  I was always more interested in comic books, science fiction, and military stuff.  My cousin Don was (and still is) an avid fisherman and hunter, but I was just there because my parents were, although the fishing was so good it was easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm.

But even though I was enjoying the fishing, I was most assuredly not a morning person and my Dad and Don liked to be out on the lake at an hour when I was usually still snug in bed.  They would drag me out in the boat with them and I would spend the first hour or so huddled in my jacket, trying to stay warm and wishing I was still in the sack. One morning we were going through the usual routine, Dad and Don with their lines in the water and me wishing I was someplace warm and cozy.  And then I saw something I’ll never forget.

The water was smooth as glass and it was completely quiet, not a breath of air moving.   I was staring over the side of the boat when, without warning, fifteen or twenty feet directly in front of me, a half-dozen gigantic tentacles thrust up from the depths, loomed over the boat for a few moments, and then withdrew under the water.  I was petrified.  My brain was operating on overdrive but my body seemed paralyzed.  What I was looking at should have been impossible, something out of a horror film or a fairytale.  But it was real and it was happening to me.

I froze for what felt like a long time but couldn’t have been more than a second or two.  I was experiencing what special effects people call “bullet time” in the movies.  You know, the scene where everything slows down to the point where you can observe a bullet in flight or the protagonist flying through the air to kick an opponent in the head.  These exaggerations are intended to represent a real phenomenon, the feeling of time distortion that sometimes accompanies stressful events, the “my whole life flashed before my eyes” cliché.  Some speculate that the sensation may be triggered when our brains are trying to process a lot of information faster than usual, causing perceived time to subjectively slow down.  I’ve experienced it once since then, when an oncoming car on a two-lane road went out of control and slid sideways toward Nan and me at 50 miles an hour.  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.  To the right was a steep drop off and to the left was oncoming traffic.  I had no choice but to remain in our lane, slam on the brakes, and hope we’d be moving slowly enough to survive the impact.  We did.  Our car didn’t.  Always wear seatbelts.

As I sat there, stunned, the tentacles emerged again, just a few feet this time.  I became aware that what I was seeing were the limbs of a submerged tree bobbing on the surface.  Our boat was in the midst of a drowned forest and our anchor or one of our fishing lines had disturbed a tree that had been precariously attached to the lake bed.  If it had come up directly under us it could have been a much more uncomfortable experience, possibly capsizing the boat or punching a hole in the bottom.

I don’t even remember how my Dad or my cousin Don reacted to the experience, if they shrugged it off, or just said, “Huh, that was weird,” or perhaps didn’t even notice it.  It didn’t make much noise and was over in seconds.  If they’d been looking in the opposite  direction they wouldn’t have even been aware of it.

But, for a second or two, I saw a monster.

- Poppa