I have never lived in a lake, nor called the fertile hills of Scotland my home. I have never raised my slender serpentine neck from amidst the chilled depths of a hundred fathoms only to be gawked at by the random tourists that are my central foes. And for those reasons, and perhaps those alone, the concept of Nessie will always remain a mystery to me.
I live in the US. An overdeveloped, overhypyped nation where alligators, crocodiles, and the occasional bloated sea cow, the manatee, are about as close as I’ll ever meander to a water beasts that could even try on the moniker of freshwater folklore. And sure, gators are big and mean and can crush things in their massive, tooth lined slaughter beaks, but they’re a far cry from a prehistoric pleiosaur perusing the depths of a Scottish loch some odd thousand miles away.
Scotland is home to a gaggle of professional bad#sses, from William Wallace, the blue bodied liberator, to Sean Connery, patron saint of Bond-hood, to the lesser known Warbler Sloth that makes its home in the hollowed out Romanian ruins just south of Edinburgh. To that note I tip my hat, or lift my kilt if you will, to the sheer bravado that encompasses this highland country. But famous though it is for its testosterone fueled conquests, there is one slimy beast from the depths that seems to always garner more attention than any famed biped of lore. And her name is Nessie.
How a giant pre-historic lake leviathan, one who has never actually graced this planet with a palpable shred of evidence suggesting her actual existence, came to be perhaps the most famous monster in all of creation is a mystery to me. Perhaps it stems from the fact that Scotland in an of itself is cool. Or that lakes are deep and cold and that sometimes we as humans tend to fabricate stories about things that are big and can swim and tend to frighten us.
Countless sightings of the beast have been documented, from photos snapped by drunken oarsmen, to nearly capsized boats, to devoured poodles with teeth the size of a bowie knife lodged in their still quivering corpses, Nessie, or what we think is Nessie, seems to leave her indelible mark in plain view from time to time.
But allow herself to be truly discovered she will not. And so, much like the dung tiger, the ring-eared lemur gnat, and the yellow scarf dingo of Malaysia, the actual proof of Nessie’s existence remains as fleeting as the riddle of the Sphinx. Lost in time. Embedded in layers of liquids so deep that no amount of sonar will ever detect the truth of her phantasmical whereabouts.
I for one, like most lads standing safely with two feet on dry land, wish there was a Nessie. A sea serpent so magnificient and ferocious at the same time, that the mere sight of her would send shivers down the spine of the bravest Braveheart from Glasgow to Aberdeen. But until then I’ll keep Mel Gibson on speed dial, and I’ll make sure Sean Connery doesn’t get too far away; because if I can’t find a giant water whale to whet my appetite, I may need one of them to satisfy my craving for a good dose of Scottish machismo.







