Cayuga Monster
by
Michael DeGroat, 1999
I was diving in Cayuga Lake a couple years ago. The boat was anchored in fairly deep water. When I went off the bow I turned towards the middle of the lake and the really deep water and headed down. I wasn’t planning to go to the bottom, I just wanted an hour of solitude in that black space where the lake is a few hundred feet deep.
The lake is clear now, thanks to the Zebra mussels. I love those little guys. They turned to be a natural solution to the mess humans and their cows had made. By 1990 the visibility in Cayuga was down to about three feet. The green slime they call Elephant Snot covered everything on the bottom. If you were lucky enough to actually see fish they were usually in poor condition. The plants were dull and lifeless. I think it was the effect of over fertilization.
The Finger Lakes are surrounded by dairy farms, so manure and chemical fertilizers run off into the lakes all the time. I encourage everybody I know to encourage everybody they know not to buy dairy products from New York only wine. My hope is that all the cows could then move to Wisconsin where they belong and the Finger Lakes would fill with vineyards. The real beauty of this scheme is that all the flies could also move to Wisconsin, where ninety percent of the world’s flies already live. Wisconsin would never even notice the difference. Never go there, it takes a few states to get all the flies back out of your car.
Now the
visibility is better than it was in the sixties.
It’s a good thirty feet or more near the surface and in the deep water
it’s much more. The fish and
plants are thriving. Diving in the
shallow water in the north end of Cayuga is like diving in an aquarium, lot’s
of colorful plants and fish.
On this dive though the goal was to not see anything.
An hour in that black weightless place can be so soothing.
Swimming slowly down I passed first thermocline and the cool water of the
layer below tickled its way through my wetsuit.
It was a delicious feeling. All
the tension in me ebbed out as the darkness surrounded me.
My breathing slowed, I’d found the groove.
Exhaling and not kicking, then not breathing made me float slowly down.
I reached the second thermocline this way.
My hands went through and its chill crept up my arms and into my suit.
Since I wasn’t wearing a hood, it was a shock when my head went
through. It was far too cold to go
any deeper without a hood. I poked
my head back into the warmer layer above and began to cruise along the plane of
the thermocline.
In
this clear dark water it was impossible to actually see the thermocline, but it
was easy enough to feel. In some
lakes tiny critters cloud the waters and in those lakes you can see it, since
the critters don’t live in the colder layer.
You can line your eyes right up with the plane and see it undulate gently
around you where you’ve disturbed it then it stretches out in all directions
as far as you can see. You can look
at it from below where it becomes an upside-down lake.
One time I dove in small murky lake with some other people and we all
passed down through into a lower layer where the water was crystal clear.
Though some trick of the light we could only see the colored objects we
wore. The black wetsuits we all
wore were invisible. We looked like
those disembodied hands that used to be on the Kaptain Kangaroo show.
Our faces and hands didn’t look like they were connected to anything.
It was a little disconcerting, but fascinating.
I
like running along the plane of the thermocline.
It’s such a mysterious and perfect thing.
No one has ever explained to me why water behaves that way and I’m too
lazy to look it up. It seems like
the layers would exchange heat and it would all end up the same temperature, but
it doesn’t. The definition of the
plane is so precise that if you put
your finger through it you can feel the line as it passes along the skin of your
finger, like reaching into another dimension.
At least a half hour passed as I cruised that level, I was feeling pretty
mellow. I was the only thing there
was to see and that was just fine. The
deep water below was black like space and full of mystery.
The slow churn of my fins and the sound of long slow draughts of air and
then the hollow gurgling sound of the exhale, were a rhythm, a kind of
meditation. So, when I saw
something approaching me in the distance, startled
doesn’t begin to describe how it felt.
It was really coming fast and it was coming in a straight line directly
at me. My mind quickly pondered the
likelihood of that in three dimensional space and decided that the odds were
definitely against it. I stopped
moving, stopped breathing and felt myself slowly began to descend through the
thermocline. A gulp of air stopped
my descent and then I just froze and watched it come.
Trying to get out of its way was pointless, it was big and fast and there
was no time.
It was huge. Its size was
impossible to calculate. It was
both above and below the thermocline. Like me it was running the plane of the
thermocline. So, it was only a two
dimensional thing after all. That
didn’t make me feel much better, it was about crash into me or eat me or
something. It had to be a
hallucination. In low visibility
water it’s easy to hallucinate, but in water this clear it had never happened
to me before. Blinking and shaking
my head seemed to have no effect on its progress and it became clear that thing
was a real thing, a living thing. It was like a comic book monster in a dream,
impossibly big. Was it a creature
like the one alleged to be in Lake Champlain?
That lake always felt like it had secrets, in the shadowy distance just
beyond view, big things seemed to whisper by.
Cayuga had always seemed like a pretty tame lake.
It was now bigger than a house and my last thought before it reached me
was that even things in the ocean aren’t this big.
Complete and utter terror held me motionless, my body rigid bracing for
the impact.
It engulfed me and for a moment I couldn’t comprehend that there was
nothing but the sensation of a mild current.
Then it was all around me. It
was a huge school of small shiny fish all about six inches long.
They were like a golden liquid flowing around me, quite oblivious to my
presence. To my eyes which were now
well adjusted to the blackness they looked living gems, bright almost
fluorescing. I spun round and round
as they flowed by and heard myself laughing into my regulator.
Sheer terror had given way to total elation.
They just kept coming. The
whole school was the size of a small train.
Near the end of train it occurred to me that big fish might follow a
school this size, big muskies maybe. As
the last of them flicked by, I studied the black space behind them and nothing
came out of it. I spun around to
see them departing and watched until the entire mass shrank to small dot and
then to nothing but black, like the power going off on a picture tube.
For a minute or so I hung there my head just above the thermocline,
looking at the place where they disappeared and thinking maybe they would turn
all at once like a flock of birds and come back.
It wasn’t likely though, it seemed that they had traveled a perfect
straight line the whole time. They
wouldn’t be back.
I looked down at the black depths one last time and then looked up and
began my slow ascent watching the bubbles that now traveled with me like a
school of little shiny fish. As you
rise there is a point where the sun winks into view and you can see its rays
dance though the chop of the water on the surface.
I looked for it, because I wanted to see beauty once more on that day.
It’s funny how when you discover real treasure, it’s when you least
expect it. It’s like a gift from
an old friend that comes and finds its way to you.
Revised: December 24, 2005 .