In 586 AD St. Colomba first wrote about a creature living in Loch Ness. Today, some 1,500 years later, people still come to this lake, where the peat obscures the flat bottom and “things” larger than regular fish still roam the depths. People come to glimpse the monster, but the view is what took my breath away. All thoughts of Nessie disappeared as I looked out at the ruins of Urquhart castle and the beautiful mountains.
I was brought back to thinking about the “monster” when our skipper shouted, “Look! There you can see something bobbing in the water.” He said to me quietly that in reality all people usually see is the wake from the boat, but if you just look quickly, people sometimes imagine that they see a head bobbing up out of the water.
I asked the skipper if he believes in the Loch Ness Monster. Right off he said that definitely “monster” is not the right word because Nessie certainly hasn’t attacked or eaten anyone in recorded history. But… he does believe that there are certainly things in the Loch that no one knows are there. But at the moment the technology does not exist which would allow us to see into the very deepest darkest parts of the Loch.
The predicament is then that you can’t prove that Nessie does not exist. That allows the consumer merchandising industry to go crazy. The shops- oh the shops! - chock full of Nessie merchandise. Green Nessies for the boys, pink Nessies for the girls. All different shapes and sizes, key chains, piggy banks, and more, even little pins of Nessie. Nessie has become a celebrity, caricatured for the world to see. The stuffed animals are not frightening; they are not even realistic in the slightest. Instead, Nessie is portrayed as something from a Disney film. The most amusing thing about it was that I wanted one. The big fuzzy Nessies were so hard to resist. I wanted to give in to the pull and the hype. I too wanted to take Nessie home with me.
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