things move around

Still in Calgary, land of a thousand shades of brown. I had my hair cut today by an entertaining Filipino woman. She was from a southerly area of the Phillippines called Leyte, but at first I thought she was telling me her name was Leta, short for Letitia. In fact I think that was her name - it’s possible that she was named after the region where she was born, like the punk guitarist America Vespucci or the economist Simon Bolivia, or even semi-legendary Scottish fitballer and bon vivant Alan Brazil. Note that Alan Brazil has a blog, although be warned, it wasn’t worth the google.

Soon the conversation took a turn for the paranormal. Leta told me that last summer she had visited the beautiful Lake Okanagan in the interior of British Columbia. This is a region replete with valleys and bluffs, semi-arid in parts but fertile and with microclimates, suited to the cultivation of peaches and grapes. As she weighed up my ridiculously uneven sideburns, she confided in me that she was out on a boat on the lake one early evening, the sun bursting apart like a ripe pumpkin on the Western shore, when she became aware of something in the water, just out of oar’s reach. I asked her how big it was and she said it was bigger than a person, probably bigger than two. It moved quickly and sinuously (not the word Leta used) through the water, away from her boat and off out of sight into a dark part of the lake, leaving a wake behind it.

It was only later that evening, when she told her host about what had happened, that she learned of the creature Ogopogo, the lake-monster of Okanagan known first as N’ha-a-itk to countless generations of the local Indians, and then to the white settlers who tried to photograph it with the kind of primitive apparatus which is probably all the rage among modern photographers for its halo effect. She asked me if I believed her. I told her I did, and that in my opinion Ogopogo and other lake monsters (she was amazed to hear of Nessie) were creatures from alternate realities temporarily transported into ours via dimensional portals, and that this explained the continued frustration of all attempts to capture such a beast.

Leta’s own theory was that the creature was “half a person, half a fish”. I got the impression that this was based on some folktale from her homeland. She said that she missed Leyte, with its sandy beaches and fresh seafood and humidity, and all her brothers and cousins there. They all thought she must be loaded, living in Calgary, and that she probably didn’t have to lift a finger to make her money, and that she definitely had servants. Apparently even her cousin in Manila, who owns a gas station, believes this.