Selected Readings
An Ode to Madison’s Lake Monster
Addie Hopes
This essay was published in the UW-Madison Edge Effects online journal on May 3, 2016.
Addie Hopes is a Literary Studies PhD student in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her current research focuses narratives of toxicity, extinction, and multispecies communities in contemporary American fiction. Her writing has also appeared in Blood Orange Review and Word Riot.
I was five years old the first time I heard my father tell his sea monster story. By now I have heard it a hundred times, and it never loses its thrill. If you ask him to, he’ll describe the scales on the creature’s arching neck and the serpentine intelligence in its eyes. He’ll explain the way its enormous face hovered for just a moment above him, watching, with a vividness that will set your heart racing. “Did he really see his serpent?” someone will always ask. I don’t know, and I never cared. When you come from a family of storytellers, you know that “facts” are not the only path to truth. You know that the stories we tell are their own way of knowing.
I admit that my father’s sea serpent changed my approach to swimming that summer. Our deep farm pond no longer seemed like a place nature had carved out for my cousins and me, a place obviously intended for us to play in, despite the annoying accidents of fish and itchy weeds along the edge. It seemed suddenly and strangely thick with weird kinds of life. The bullfrogs croaked out messages I couldn’t understand; turtles sized me up as they sun-bathed; the thin dark snakes slithered off with their own secret purposes; the algae that coated my shoulders after a swim felt newly alive. It was, in Sigmund Freud’s terms, uncanny: both familiar and entirely unfamiliar, both home and un-home. My backyard pond vibrated with mysterious riches that rivaled those of a dark, expansive sea. I had the unshakeable sensation that they, too, were watching me, and finding me as incomprehensible and unavoidable as I found them. That summer, my cousins and I still swam in the cool green water, but I never lost the shock, the delight, or the wonder of the realization that “our” pond was longer (and had never been) only ours.
I often think of my father’s monster and the ecological education his storytelling began. It planted in me a fascination with deep waters, and it introduced me to a terrible, beautiful paradox of human and nonhuman coexistence. We share a planetary house with crowds of human and nonhuman others; most of these others we’ll never know, none of them we’ll completely understand, and yet each of us is always intimately affecting every other. We’re entangled in what Timothy Morton evocatively calls the “mesh” of “strange strangers.” Such curiosities tend to send our human minds whirling; strangeness seems to cry out for explanation. After all, science and philosophy, Aristotle tells us, begin in wonder. If only we would allow ourselves to linger there