Skip to main content

Champ




Leave it to Don Wildman to seamlessly weave history and fantasy together in the form of Champ, the lake monster, that presumably still resides in Lake Champlain.  Even Jeremy Wade got curious and took his search for "river monsters" to the shores of the Vermont lake.  Turns out he was more interested in reports of sea lampreys attacking humans the same way they attack fish, by boring a hole through the skin and sucking out the blood.  Wildman didn't reference his cable channel pal in his segment.  Instead, he made his connection to the man who discovered the long lake that straddles the New York-Vermont border -- Samuel de Champlain.

Wildman uses a photograph taken by Sandra Mansi in 1977 as his starting point to tell us about Champ.   Mansi's photograph really doesn't say much.  In Wildman's recreation of the event, bubbles first appear on the lake surface, not far away from where her two kids are playing in the water, before a long trunk-like shape emerges from the depths of the lake.  My first reaction was that a large tree branch popped to the surface, but that would be too prosaic.

Rather, we get a short discursion into Plesiosaurs, which existed over 65 million years ago, and that maybe a few might still be swimming around in Loch Ness and Lake Champlain.  Even the museum curator was dubious of such a possibility, as it would take quite a pod of these creatures to have survived to still be producing offspring, and the sightings wouldn't be so rare.  But, this doesn't deter our man Don, who offers us artists' recreations of the 20-foot long prehistoric monster that would have been quite a menacing beast of prey in its day.  I'm sure it would have long ago left its mark on the many people that frequent the Lake Champlain region if it had miraculously survived the great dinosaur extinctions.

Champ, however, has been made into a friendly mythic creature, with local celebrations held in his (or her) honor.  The early local natives had their own name for the beast, which they called Tatoskok, that might have influenced Champlain's fervid imagination.  Such a creature would have a voracious appetite and some used it to explain the reason for the depletion in smaller lake fish over the years.  As it turns out, the sea lamprey is the real culprit, which this NYTimes article noted in 1985, and Wade further demonstrated on River Monsters.  But, it is hard to let go of those myths, especially when they draw tourists to your lake shores.  I suppose that is why Wildman's Monumental Mysteries is on the Travel Channel.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!