A month or so before leaving for my trip, I read a newspaper article about another university-sponsored expedition to track down and study the Loch Ness Monster; just a few days before I left the U.S., I read another article, this one about a Wiccan priest who had cast a spell over the Loch Ness Monster to prevent it from being detected. When I heard about that, I thought, Smart witch… very clever marketing ploy. I couldn’t help but wonder if the same University had set it up; if they didn’t locate the Monster, then the witch could claim it was because of his spell, and an entire new layer of New Age mystique would be cast over the Loch.

Now, the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster was apparently in the year A.D. 863. St. Columba, one of the saints to visit and attempt to convert Scotland, was confronted with a monstrous creature while rowing across the Loch. Upon seeing the creature, he dashed to the bow of his row boat and showed it his cross, crying out, "Get thee to thy depths, and never shalt thou harm a living man!"

And since then, of course, Nessie never has.

Yesterday I decided to go on a day-long sightseeing tour of the Scottish highlands which would include a cruise on Loch Ness. Since I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology and monsters and the like since I’ve been a young boy, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a bit of Nessie hunting myself.

The drive from Edinburgh to Fort Augustine, from where the cruise boat that we took, The Royal Scot, launched, took something like four hours. The bus driver, Jock, was knowledgeable about Scottish history and geography and made sure to point out all of the historic landmarks that we passed by and related stories about everything that we saw. Some of the stories were bits of history and some were personal anecdotes, but all were amusing and interesting.

The Highlands of Scotland, of course, are gorgeous. As we drove through tiny villages and small towns, passing castles and fortifications that have stood for centuries, and monuments to various heroes and villains from Scottish history, I chatted with the other people on the bus, and daydreamed about emigrating to the United Kingdom or to Ireland. I listened to Jock and learned that the Roman name for Scotland was Caledonia, which means, "The Wooded Land". Though you wouldn’t know it to look at it now, Scotland, land of open fields and wide meadows, was once entirely covered by forests. But over the past few hundred years, through the deforesting actions of ranchers and farmers and other groups of people, the forests of Scotland have been drastically reduced to cover only about two per cent of its former size. The Forestry Commission owns most of what little forested land remains in Scotland, and a good deal of that is put aside for lumber interests.

"The deforestation of Caledonia," said Jock, "is probably the greatest man-made ecological disaster in history."

The Scots, like the Irish, take their environment very seriously. Most of the Scots I’ve encountered have been ardent environmentalists (this was true of many of the Irish that I encountered as well). Perhaps, with the thousands of years of history that this society has (as opposed to the paltry five hundred years or so that post-Columbian history in the US has), they’re simply more aware of their environment and their landscape.

Again like the Irish, the Scots that I’ve met take their history very seriously as well, but there’s a certain sense of humor that surrounds it as well. The movie Braveheart, starring "that Great Scotsman, Mel Gibson" (as one historian that I met put it), is well loved in this country, despite its great technical and historical flaws. William Wallace, for example, being a lowlander and not a highlander, would not have worn a kilt; however, he was, of course, depicted as wearing a kilt in the movie, since that is probably how most Americans would view a Scottish hero: kilt-wearing and bloodthirsty. Plus, William Wallace would never have had an affair with the princess as depicted in Braveheart; or, if he had, he would have been quite a pederast, since this same princess was only about three months old at the time that William Wallace died. But in spite of these errors (plus the fact that Mel Gibson, who stands at about 5’8", would not nearly have been large enough to play the 6’4" William Wallace) most of the Scots I’ve spoken to, even the history buffs, love the film.

On the way to Loch Ness, we passed the William Wallace memorial as Stirling Castle, which was held by William Wallace. I did not, unfortunately, have a chance to explore the castle; we only passed it on the way to Loch Ness, our ultimate destination.

On the road, we also went through "Rob Roy Country". Jock advised us to take everything we’d learned about Rob Roy from the Liam Neeson film of that name and dump it all as pure fiction. Very little is actually known about Rob Roy except that he was a cattle rustler and outlaw who died in a duel at the age of 73. The film Rob Roy was based on a novel called Rogue Highlander, by William DeFoe (and not Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, as I had originally thought). It should not have tried to pass itself off as history, according to Jock.

The landscape changes several times on the road from Edinburgh to Loch Ness. Once you get past Edinburgh Airport, the land becomes green and lush and beautiful. A ways further along, it becomes brown with heather (at this time of year, at least — in the summer, the heather turns purple). Later on it becomes mountainous and forested, which is how it is around Loch Ness.

Loch Ness is a huge lake ("Lake is the English word for ‘Loch’", Jock informed me), some twenty-four miles long, though narrow enough so that even at the widest point you can see from one bank to the other. It is the fourth in a series of three lakes connected by the Caledonian Canal, built in the late part of the last century and improved around the first world war. The monster — whatever it is — has been spotted in the Loch many times throughout history, with sightings that date back to 863 (as I mention above), some that go to 1200, and many from this century. As the tour bus pulled up to the quay at Fort Augustine, I looked out over the waters, feeling overwhelmed that after nearly thirty years of wondering about the Loch Ness Monster and seeing pictures of the Loch and imagining things about it, I was really here, looking out over the water. I stared intently looking for the monster, but I could see nothing unusual around the crowds of people and the boats and the shops that surrounded the quay.

After a few minutes, we all climbed aboard the cruise boat, The Royal Scotsman, and sailed out onto the lake.

"This boat," Jock explained to us, "has two features which are essential for monster hunting: first, it has a sonar which will show the depth of the lake and any large creatures that happen to be swimming below; and second, it has a bar."

So we sailed out. The course of our little boat took us about halfway up one bank of the loch, then across and back down the other bank. The captain, whose name I didn’t catch, turned out to be an older fellow who had spent his life studying the Loch Ness Monster. He had once worked for a marine research company and had compiled a great deal of information about the creature — the "animal", he called it. But then he learned that the company he’d been working for was planning on using the information to capture and kill the animal, so he resigned and copyrighted all of his research, making it unusable to the company. Since then he’s been working on the Loch, tracking the animal, and studying it.

Being the inquisitive person that I am, and being someone who hates the silence that inevitably follows when someone asks for questions, I asked, "What is the monster, exactly?"

The captain then told us that the creature — the animal — was in fact a rare species of creature, a warm-blooded mammal shaped something like a pleisosaur, with an elongated neck and tail and flippers. These animals, he said, propel themselves through the water using magnetism, in much the same way that certain deep-sea creatures use electricity as defense. In Loch Ness, he said, there are something like five hundred of these creatures, and there are other specimens throughout the world in various locations.

I couldn’t help but feel that having a scientific explanation for the Loch Ness Monster like this kind of took away the mystique of the creature. All my life I’d been hearing about this creature, and imagining some sort of alien monster living under the surface of this peaceful lake; now I hear that the monster is just another animal.

"Have you ever seen the monster in the flesh?" I asked.

The captain chuckled a bit nervously. "Can I pass on that question?"

I grinned. "Nope, I want to know."

"Well then," he said, "Not directly myself, no. But I was guiding a cruise just such as this when one of the passengers saw something that might have been the creature."

The captain went on to tell us how local legend had grown up around the creature over the centuries. According to local folklore, if you see the creature and then talk about it, you’re inviting "demonic things" to happen to you. Which is why reliable stories about the Loch Ness Monster are rare to this very day; the locals still believe that. And, of course, when they do talk about it, they don’t call it a monster or even "the creature". They refer to Nessie as an animal like any other.

I stopped myself from asking the obvious questions; like, if his research relied primarily on sonar readings and local legend, how was he able to determine its respiratory methods, or how could he determine that there were nearly five hundred of these animals living in the Loch. There are times when you just don’t want to ask questions like that; if someone has spent their lives studying a mystery, there is no point in asking the sensible questions.

The cruise boat returned to the quay and we piled out and headed back to the bus, which drove us the rest of the length of the Loch and then back down to Edinburgh via Inverness. Jock shared much more history and folklore and natural history of Scotland with us, and played us some great traditional Scottish music. We met a bagpiper who stood on the banks of Loch Ness all day and played his music. We daydreamed, we gazed, we chatted lightly with each other.
Along the rest of the twenty-four mile trip past the Loch, I stared out the window, woolgathering, and keeping an eye out for the Nessie through the trees. I saw no sign of it; but, then, the Loch is a deep place, nearly six hundred feet deep in its deepest spots, and there are many hidden places and underwater caves. The surface of the Loch was calm on that day, but sometimes a calm surface is a poor indication of the mysteries that can lie beneath.