Lake Legonk has been renowned for tales of the mysterious creature (or creatures) lurking in its depths since the mid-1920s. Today, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first sighting of the unknown beast, the Legurk Laconic is pleased to bring the public the first known interview with it as part of our Local Legends series.
It’s a pleasure to meet a local legend. What’s your name?
It’s ccLLrCKC CC Davis, and it’s a pleasure to meet you as well – oh, but you can call me Mrs. Davis, I know the contraglottal gun-stops are a bit much on a mammalian throat. No sense asking after any Mr. Davis, though, not since the expedition of ’73. You know, I can’t remember the last visitor I got out here. Maybe Ms. Murdoch? Yes, that nice young Ms. Murdoch, before she ran for mayor. That was…’89, I think? Yes, ’89. I remember because she campaigned on fixing the stoplights and that didn’t happen until ’93, and oh my everyone was upset about that. “Let her be!” I said. “She’s working on it!” Well, I didn’t say that, because I didn’t have visitors, but that’s just how it is when you’re a mysterious creature living in a lake, isn’t it? Oh, and what’s your name?
Why did you decide to become a local legend?
Well, as with so many young people, I did it by mistake while trying to make my parents upset. ‘Go into the family business!’ my father said; but no, I didn’t like fishing. ‘Find a nice young man and settle down!’ my mother said; but no, I was too young to be tied down by calves. ‘Come to antarctica with me to explore the eldenreefs!’ my sister said; but no, I preferred milder winters and a sun that spent at least half-a-day above the horizon year-round. So I spurned them all and wandered the Atlantic until my money ran low, then I checked the papers for low rents and came out here to Lake Legonk and set myself up in an abandoned car around the lake’s midpoint – I believe it was one of the first cars in the area; the first car crash too. ‘Budgie’ Meggs, the great anti-prohibitionist. They said he drove it into Legonk in defiance when they blocked the road off ahead, but personally I think he was just blind drunk and couldn’t steer worth a damn. Always a bad idea to sample the product, you know. I never touched the stuff myself, still haven’t – oh, the young people loved me, and then they loved stories about majestic-12, and then they loved to talk about the nines and elevens, and then chemical trailways, and nowadays lordy lou I simply can’t keep up. Personally I think they should’ve stuck to telling stories about mystery creatures, but I’m scarcely an unbiased audience, am I, dear? But I’ve never believed a word of it. Don’t bite a story someone’s dangling in front of you just because it’s shiny and tells you you’re cleverer than everyone else, you hear me? You’re a reporter, you’d better know what I’m talking about or we’ve all not got the hope the good lord gave a clam.
How did you become a local legend?
You know, when I first came to Lake Legonk it was a little bit of a backwater (oh, the pun is unintended, please don’t put that in the paper!). See, once the War had ended the little Graw Factory had to stop making shells and go back to canning fish, and the demand simply wasn’t the same. Half the town was unemployed, half the town upped sticks and left, and half the town wasn’t in a very good mood about it. So I thought, well, ccLLrCKC CC CtrlcK, I bet what these people really need right now – really really truly need, above all else, what they’re lying awake in bed at night aching for, tears leaking from their eyes and dampening their pajamas – is silly stories about a big odd beasty living in their drinking water. No, no, don’t laugh – it’s true! Nothing distracts from everything like nothing does, and what’s more of a nothing than a mysterious creature? It’s a big-fish-tale that the whole town can share, and unlike a real fish, you’ll never have to clean it or gut it or debone it or cook it or scrape it into the trash can because your finicky husband doesn’t appreciate pickled eel heads. Silly little jaws on you primates, too small and slender to crunch through a nice chewy skull – oh, but I shouldn’t bother you with old wives’ arguments, should I? Nice young person with your fancy little recording computer, I’ll bet the girls are lining up at your door and all the fussing I’m talking about is whole months away in your future, isn’t it? I tell you, once I started up my act, it didn’t take long for the handsome sort to beat a path (pardon: ROW a path) to my door. They say power’s an aphrodisiac – pish posh, it’s peanuts to fame, and I was the most famous thing in town. “Mah, I’m dating the girl from the postcards” they said of me – hah! A few hard lessons I had to learn then, with strict grades: whimsy isn’t infatuation; infatuation isn’t love; and love’s a finicky blossom that needs plenty of flipper grease to keep it watered or it shrivels and dies on you and never comes back. Still, I don’t think I truly regret a thing; who I am now, I am because of mistakes I’ve made, and what would I be if I’d never made them? Smaller and plainer and safer and duller than dishwater, I’d wager.
What did you enjoy the most about being a local legend?
A bit awkward to answer this one, because I know what I should say and I know what the truth is. I SHOULD say ‘the people’ all right and proper, because I did meet so so so MANY of them and a lot of them were just lovely, like Dr. Dermlet; and the Papes who ran the eat-and-shop down by Orchid Bay; and little Bixie Besquet who I pushed back to shore after she waded out too deep without water wings – I was godmother to her firstborn, you know? Charles? He died back in… after the turn of the millennium, surely. A little young, I thought. A real shame. But anyways I can’t say ‘the people’ because what I loved most of all was the THRILL. The sheer rush of it all, a cocktail made from 90-proof Getting Away With It and a red-hot twist of All Eyes Are On Me topped with a little meaty olive of How Can I Top This Next? It went straight to my head and blew the top right off, I tell you. And I always could top it next time! I could! There was a solid thirty-year stretch where I couldn’t help but improve – at first I was doing the old could’ve-been-a-branch trick, where I tugged old dead trees along just above the surface on rough-water days, and when that got folks buzzing I started startling moose into crossing the lake in the hazy twilight, always the cows, without the antlers see; and then after that I met Dr. Dermlet. Oh, that dentist was the devil himself! He caught me coming up for my bimonthly breath and he introduced himself bold as anything and asked if I’d ever thought of setting up photos, and when I told him showing the truth’d ruin the mystique he laughed straight in my face and said ‘honey, a photo only shows the truth if you want it to: I can lie to a camera’s face like it was my old teacher.’ And oh he did! We rigged up a model of my head made of wood and plaster and I put it on top of my ACTUAL head and puttered along just beneath the surface and he took pictures until my neck hurt so badly I thought it would pop right off like a cork, then we sent the finest of those photos off to the papers and…. Well. That was when the tourist trade took off, and it didn’t die down for the next half-century. I was the economy of Legurk after that, more or less – a weekend didn’t go by when I wasn’t shooing a school of fish by a radar camera or leaving snapped and chewed driftwood all over the beaches or playing long notes on my bassoon at the wee hours of the morning, and the public ate it all up with a shovel, never mind their spoons. Dear old Dr. Dermlet. He left town in a hurry back in ’49, I think… after two of his wives met each other by chance at the grocery store and started up a conversation on their husband’s fussiness about how he liked his salmon baked, then realized things weren’t adding up. A scoundrel in every way! I wonder what happened to him, sometimes.
What was the most difficult thing about being a local legend?
The hangover. The longer the rise, the loftier the peak, the more dreary and endless the fall – you’ll be sick to your stomach long before you reach the ground, and once you do, oh my God does it ache. And the worst part is that you lose the fear of it after you’ve spent enough time up there – little dips and eddies happen all the time. So what if there’s a lull in cruise excursions this year? It’s happened before. So what if one of your eyewitness accounts gets nudged off front page by royal family gossip? It’s happened before. So what if you get in another argument with your husband over how much money he’s spending on clothing and he takes a few days to come out of his snit and never quite says I’m sorry? It’s happened before. And it has! It did! But lines are made out of lots of little dots all arranged just so, and you can’t tell what angle they’re leading you until you’re already hellbent on the downslope. I do think the tipping point was the expedition of ’73, though. That went so very poorly, and though I do regret it every night I refuse, I absolutely cannot condone admitting partial fault in any of it. It was Mr. Davis’s idea (he and his fool friend-of-his-brother’s), not mine, and I followed the instructions of the wretched bathyscaphist to the very crossed t and dotted i, and what happened? No more cameras, no more press team, no more bathyscaphe, and no more husband. If they hadn’t sued me first I would’ve sued them – imagine, blaming me for bumping the hull in the wrong place – me! The location was specially marked and plotted! Me! Saying I didn’t know my own strength, as if I hadn’t pulled and snapped half-a-thousand 12-pound-test fishing lines over the years without once hauling a gawker overboard! I tell you, it was a real struggle not to swear in court, and they were damned well lucky my mother raised a gentlewoman who took the first half of that word seriously. Wretched, nasty little snivelling scrapmongers, if you’ll pardon me saying so. I expect my fame would’ve shrunk even faster if I’d tried to keep myself in public after that, they put me in so bad a mood; everyone wants to hear about a mysterious creature in the lake, but nobody wants to have one slap your canoe tit-over-tail because she’s in a foul mood due to litigious weasels. As it was I let myself moulder, I ate a lot of bottom-feeding fish, and after a decade or two of sulking…well. I think the quiet had grown on me. There were a few skeptical investigations of the lakebed I played along with, but I’m content to let the people play as they please by now.
As a local legend, there anything you would like the readers to know?
Don’t marry your agent.
Thank you for your time
And thank you for yours. Just, one little thing, if possible – would you. Could you take a photo of me? Just give the lens of your camera a smear, and – I don’t have any vaseline, but you can use your thumbprint for that. Just one blurry photo? Please?
ccLLrCKC CC Davis is the creature of Lake Legonk and a Local Legend of Legurk. To read other articles in our Local Legends series and fund its continued growth, please subscribe to our parent news organization.