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Ogopogo, a short story

Fourth in a series of short stories, anticipating Whistler's Writers Fest

Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. And Whistler, it seems, is the place to come if you want to write deliberately. The fifth Whistler Writers Festival, Sept. 14-17, is a hyper-literate jam-packed long-weekend for readers, writers, closeted scribblers and anyone looking for a fresh perspective. From manuscript workshops and daily seminars to evening readings with Canada’s best authors, the festival has something for everyone.

Here, in Pique’s special Word Made Flesh, four local writers come out of their closets. The series is a prelude to Writers in the Flesh, three incredible readings at Millennium Place, featuring the Chair of the Council of Canadians, Maude Barlow ( Too Close For Comfort: Canada’s Future Within Fortress North America; Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Wate r) on Thursday, Sept. 14 at 8 p.m., Joseph Boyden ( Three Day Road) on Friday, Sept. 15, 8 p.m., and Eden Robinson (Blood Sports) Saturday, Sept. 16 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. Or buy the trifecta for $25. Book tickets to the events at www.theviciouscircle.ca , or contact Stella Harvey at 604-932-4518 or stella25@telus.net

 

 

Ogopogo

 

By Gregory Mark Schroeder

What some call the cousin of the Loch Ness Monster I saw from the shore of Okanagan Lake the summer of my sixteenth year. I was working for a carpenter named Guido, a taut plug of muscle and emotion, building a house no more than one hundred feet from the beach.

In those years, you might not see a cloud for six weeks and the temperature would climb over a hundred degrees every day. We wore cut-offs, steel-toed work boots and leather pouches that we stripped off at lunch time to run into the water and wash off the sawdust that clung to our sweat.

Okanagan Lake is deep, more than fifteen hundred feet in places, and long too, ninety miles in the shape of a ragged “S” that stretches from Vernon to Penticton, with Kelowna and the floating bridge in the middle. When they built the bridge and the divers were attaching the cables that anchored the hollow sections of concrete on top to the solid blocks of concrete that steadied it from two hundred feet below, sturgeon, sometimes eight feet long, would mingle with the men, but they were docile giants. Occasionally, when the span that lifted to let boats and barges through was raised, a car would not stop and for seven days we would wait. Then the bodies would float to the surface. Always seven days. The lake gave up its secrets in its own time. Okanagan Lake is the home of the Ogopogo.

There is a statue of the beast at the north-east corner of city park, where Bernard Avenue bends into Abbott Street, a vertically undulating sea-serpent with turquoise curls rising and falling from a sculpted head that looks like the noggin of a Great Dane with scales overlaid and a cartoon grin parged on. That is the statue we tied Carol Rice to on graduation night and then called the police to say that someone was bound to the Ogopogo and screaming nonsense.

The real Ogopogo was not green. Nor was it a joke to people who had lived there for long. My brother-in-law’s father, an old man already when my brother-in-law was conceived, was the first white child born in Kelowna, and his mother was half native. They knew about the Ogopogo.

There were pictures from time to time, never very good on account of being taken from so far away as to be grainy, or from so close as to cause the photographer to shake. Still, every summer or two the Daily Courier would print a picture with an editor’s circle around the relevant smudge.

Once, while water-skiing with the Hansen boys, we found an inner tube in the middle of the lake, halfway to Rattlesnake Island, with a flag on top and a rope beneath. It wasn’t one of those diver’s flags so we started pulling on the rope and kept pulling and pulling until after three hundred feet of braided yellow line we pulled up a treble hook a foot long with a whole chicken skewered on its tines. I guess someone thought Ogopogo would not only find the needle in a haystack but would impale itself on the proverbial point for the flavour of a bone-in chicken. I have never heard of anyone who has searched for the Ogopogo and found it. Its discovery has only ever been inadvertent.

Guido and I were working on the sub-floor of the house on the shore and there were no walls up yet, no clouds nor wind, and not a ripple in the lake. Guido saw it first. Three black humps gliding through the water, each about six feet long with six feet between the end of one hump and the beginning of the next. The distance between them did not change, even when, after one hundred yards of moving in one direction, the humps turned and went the opposite way. Each wake folded into the one before it with a precision that seemed unlikely of three sturgeons in a synchronized pod. After swimming half as far back as it had come from the first point, the creature thrashed — and disappeared.

Whenever I tell this story I get a certain look from the listener. People tilt their heads back, as if to indicate the increasing distance between their minds and the words coming from my mouth. Their eyebrows go up while their eyelids go slightly down, and their jaw drops just enough to relinquish the “uh-huh” that comes with acknowledgment but without acceptance.

It is the same response that an alcoholic gets from a person who has never touched a bottle or that someone struggling with emotional illness gets from one who has never known a moment’s depression. But in these cases we are often told just what to do, what they would do. But we are not them, and they are not us. We know something others can not.

We all have an Ogopogo.

 

Greg Schroeder has inspired audiences totaling over 300,000 on five continents with stories that help people find their place, and the way ahead in life . Greg was raised in the Okanagan Valley and his encounters with people ranging from cab drivers in Bombay to the widows of Rwanda have distilled themselves into stories of intensity and compassion. Greg has been interviewed for radio and television and has written and co-produced a show for CBC Radio. After two decades of caring for people as a minister, Greg now devotes his time to writing and his business, Integro Insights, which helps people bring together the strands of life through personal coaching, consulting and conferences. Greg has three great, grown children, rides a Honda VFR 750 and plays the violin.