I love to swim, as I’m sure you already know. I might even be encouraged to brag that I am an avid swimmer—if ‘avid’ could be stretched to include swimming just twice a week and taking a Saturday morning aquafit class. Although we live on the edge of the Pacific Ocean (or at least on the edge of The Strait of Georgia, which then connects with other Straits to eventually empty into the Pacific Ocean), I feel that I should admit that I am too uncomfortable, squeamish even, to swim in the bays or waterways of Nature. I am a confirmed cement-pool-swimmer. (I have enjoyed many an inflatable pool in my day as well.) I openly admire those who can and do swim ‘out in the wild’, as we cement-pool-swimmers refer to it, but that doesn’t mean that I want to, or even could, do the same myself.
This has always been a dichotomy of mine that has bounced around in my noggin for years but that I have always been able to attribute to being a princess about swimming in cold water or to not wanting to have to check my towel for spiders before drying off. However, in confronting the thought today, it suddenly struck me that I dislike the thought of swimming in open water because I believed everything that I have ever been told about sea monsters.
My logical Adult Brain understands the reasonable and scientific explanations for the sightings of Loch Ness’ Nessy or Lake Okanagan’s Ogopogo and, to a degree, my deep seeded mistrust acknowledges a sense of relief at those reasonable and scientific explanations. But stuff me into my bathing suit and toss me off the beach into the water in any spot in the world, and the hair on the back of my neck (the hair on my neck???) will start to stand up, and every small movement or sensation in the water will convince me that I am about to be yanked away from my loved ones by a sea creature that I will be powerless to defend against.
Sailors have always had their convictions about the legitimacy of sea serpents and many of their early sightings documented what had been witnessed—often along with some lovely drawings and watercolour portraits. Many of these sea creatures had several heads, tentacles, scales, and all were enormous when compared to the fish and mammals these mariners were used to seeing. Several of the creatures were said to have breathed fire. Make of that what you will.
Societies dating from the Bronze age forward, have all had their own versions of sea serpents or water monsters written into the stories that were used to pass history from one generation to the next.
The rumor is that Thor (mythological god of thunder) was killed by the poison of a huge sea monster that he had just killed.
Leviathan was the name of a sea serpent from early Jewish history and who was written into the Old Testament.
Strabo, an early Greek geographer, chronicled an eye-witness account of the corpse of a great sea creature that had washed up on a Mediterranean shore some time in the 90s BC. It was described as being 30m long and its jaws were so large that a man on horseback could fit inside.
Why would that have been tried? I wouldn’t have tried that, even knowing it was dead!
There have been stories from some terrible encounters out at sea, as well as of hapless children playing in the shallow waters of a beach, all victims eaten by some huge beast that refused to swim benignly away when poked at or shot at or when their meal had just been jerked away by a fisherman, but nothing has ever truly been proven. At least nothing has been proven beyond a doubt. There is always a doubter.
The majority of the sea serpent stories that I have forced myself to read (with a mixture of fascination and horror), all tend to have a few things in common. They seem to happen while other perilous features are coinciding, such as stormy weather, or on a night that was exceptionally cold and dark, or just before an earthquake or tsunami struck. So that’s good to know and to plan around. Most reported legendary sea creatures also seem to lift themselves out of the water to ‘stand’ as high as whatever happens to be close at hand that can serve as a measure, and then let out a great holler as they proceed to do their devilish work while thrashing about as much as possible in the process.
Gulp.
As I have noted, most of the sightings of these sorts of creatures, from antiquity to our modern times, have been explained away by science. Some of those explanations even go as far as to burden us with graphic details about large and rarely seen placid dwellers of the deepest oceans, as well as descriptions of how the corpses of deceased whales and other large water beings disintegrate over time which may then produce hitherto undescribed physical forms. Not maybe the most comforting information to have to store in our brains but credible explanations all the same.
I realize that my fear of perhaps meeting a fate such as those who were the unfortunate victims of long-ago sea monster encounters, is somewhat unlikely, but with my fragile grasp of science, coupled with my robust creativity, it seems to be a better idea for me to just admire our planet’s many natural waterways from the comfort (and safety) of its shores. And to leave my love of swimming to the clear water of a cement bottomed, pleasantly tiled pool.
Each of you can make your own decisions.
