Dinosaur Lake

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  ***

  Ann opened her umbrella and dashed out to her battered jeep Eagle, splashing through mud puddles all the way. With a sigh of relief she slid into her front seat and closed the door on the cold rain.

  If you wanted to live in this part of Oregon, you had to have a rugged four-wheel drive. At least eight months out of the year the roads, especially the back ones, were a nightmare. They were covered with three feet of snow or ice, or were mired in mud, and often impassable. And for another two months, during the tail end of fall and the tail end of winter, it rained so much it was like an Asian monsoon. Summer was brief but sweet. The extreme weather was the only thing that Ann wasn’t crazy about.

  But her husband loved everything about Oregon. Snow or endless rain didn’t disturb him. He was just happy to be living out in the woods. Her mountain man.

  When she got to the newspaper, Zeke was busy at his computer. Try as she might, she rarely beat him in.

  “Don’t tell me you spent the night here?” She clucked as she shook out her umbrella, laid it in the closet, and hung her coat on a hanger.

  “Sure, you know me. I live here. I keep a fold-up cot in the closet. Why go home at all?” The older man retorted gruffly, his sharp gaze meeting hers for a moment. Hidden in his eyes was pleasure at her arrival.

  “Oh, by the way, Jeff’s not coming in today. Had to take one of his kids to the dentist, or something. Says he’ll finish his stories at home on his laptop and will email them in first thing tomorrow.”

  “So it’s just you and me today, huh, Zeke?” she said, not surprised. Jeff, a young reporter on his way up, as he liked to put it, wasn’t very dependable, kids or no kids. The Klamath Falls Journal for Jeff Spenser was one of those underpaid first steps on his road to the Pulitzer. He’d been with them six months, and Ann didn’t expect him to last another six. Few of the young reporters stayed long because the Journal couldn’t afford to pay good wages. Maybe that was one of the reasons Zeke valued Ann. She actually cared about the newspaper and didn’t want it to go under. Her caring had created a special bond between her and the old editor.

  “Not that it matters much lately,” Zeke stated. “If the circulation drops any more, we won’t need him. We won’t need anybody for anything ‘cause there won’t be a paper.”

  “Ah, Zeke, this paper’s not going to fold, not if you and I can help it. And if you’d listen to me and do a few more circulars for the stores around here to insert in the Journal, we’d made a bundle. And if we also did a shopper–”

  “If I told you once,” he cut her off gently, “I told you a hundred times, Ann Shore, that if I’d wanted to run a printing company, I would have bought one. This is a newspaper. We print the news, remember?”

  “A lot of small newspapers produce circulars and shoppers for extra revenue. It would bring in the money we need to stay afloat.” She’d also tried to get him to let her post the newspaper online, but he’d hear nothing about that. No way, he’d said. Newspapers were printed.

  “Not us. We’re a newspaper, we print the news. Period.”

  Ann gave up. They’d had the same discussion before, many times, but the elderly newspaper man was stubborn; set in his ways.

  Zeke grumbled under his breath and thumped the side of his computer with a loud whack. “Darn thing’s acting up again. We never should have thrown away those typewriters.”

  “Yeah, we should have stayed in the stone age, too.” Ann tilted her head. But Zeke was right about their computers. He’d bought them used, to save money, and they were forever acting up or breaking down. Zeke and Ann spent as much time lately babying them as they did writing and producing on them.

  Ann knew how shaky things were getting for the Journal. It wasn’t only that people these days didn’t seem to read as much, which was what Zeke said, and it wasn’t that they didn’t put out a damn fine product every week, either. According to Zeke, the Journal was the best written little newspaper in the state. No the newspaper’s problems were more insidious than low readership. It was the surrounding towns that were the problem. They were dying. People were packing up and moving away to larger cities searching for those ever elusive better living-wage-with-benefits jobs.

  Ann believed the scourge of the time wasn’t just unemployment, though the government wanted everyone to believe the numbers were down when they weren’t because so many people had basically given up ever finding a job and were no longer being counted, but also the prevalence and across the board acceptance of minimum wage no-benefit type jobs. No jobs and lower paying jobs were killing the middle class–if it wasn’t already dead. It was destroying America. There were many people desperate enough to take those awful jobs, but no one could live on minimum wage. Newspapers were a luxury, not a necessity.

  Ann knew all that. Her daughter worked one of those awful jobs. No medical coverage. No retirement. No time-on-the-job raises. Let a politician try to live on one of those salaries–fat chance–and maybe they’d finally up the minimum wage.

  She sighed inwardly. Government and the decline of the middle class were a few of her soapboxes. She’d done a series of articles on the subject last spring and had learned more about the subject than she’d wanted to.

  Where she was distressed about the job situation, Zeke was worried about medical insurance and would rattle on to anyone who’d listen that the government ought to give everyone access to affordable universal health coverage and prescription drugs. “I know friends who spend most of their retirement check on doctors and medications and have to eat macaroni and cheese the rest of the month. And there are so many people without coverage who need it desperately. Kids included. It’s a shame that in the richest country in the world, so many live in poverty because health care costs so much. Ridiculous.” His soapbox topic.

  Zeke, preoccupied with his story, had returned to his computer. Since his wife Ethel’s death the winter before he’d become more of a workaholic than ever as he fought to hang on to the failing newspaper. He worked harder than most men Ann thought, and he was way past retirement age. “Can’t live on social security anyway,” he’d complain. “Only a mouse could. A skinny mouse.” Another soapbox theme.

  The newspaper and his wife had been Zeke’s life; now it was only the paper. They’d had two children, Sherry and Tony. Sherry died when a child and Tony lived in Los Angeles with his wife and son, Jimmy, and was a senior reporter on the Los Angeles Tribune. Zeke liked to show Tony’s latest articles to Ann for her opinion. Three years ago Tony won a Pulitzer for a story about street gangs. Zeke was proud of his son, though he didn’t see much of him, and missed him terribly. But he’d be the last one to whine to Tony about his being too far away. Zeke believed everyone had to live their own lives. Children weren’t put on the earth to keep their parents company forever.

  How sad it must be, Ann thought, to have a child and grandchild one hardly ever saw. Zeke was a lonely man.

  For a while the two worked in comfortable silence, except for the clicking sounds of Zeke’s keyboard. Ann was formatting the weekly ads and bemoaning the fact one of their best client’s had canceled his weekly half-page. Things were bad enough without that. Ads were their main revenue.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Zeke announced a bit later as if it’d just popped into his head. “I got a mighty queer call already this morning, Ann.”

  He ran an age-spotted hand through his white hair, chuckling, and twisted around to look at her through his thick-lensed glasses. “Mighty queer.” His eyes, magnified, were a sharp piercing blue. She noticed his slacks were a little threadbare and his button-down tan sweater over a white shirt was frayed at the cuffs.

  “Queerer than usual?” Ann asked. The newspaper received odd calls every week; some on the level, some not.

  Zeke liked the ones where people spotted criminals they’d seen on America’s Most Wanted. He often alerted the police to check them out.

  Ann was partial to the ones where little blue aliens visited or had abducted the
callers.

  Zeke sometimes ran the stranger stories if he could, tongue-in-cheek, as a joke, as if they were real news. Their readers loved them. It was a small town, people knew each other and most had a sense of humor.

  At her desk in the back, Ann sipped a cup of coffee, and done with the ads, cleared her work area off a little; the rain a lulling presence beyond the cozy room. She liked things neat and usually ended up straightening up Zeke’s and Jeff’s messes as well.

  She was working on a last minute article about the recent earthquakes for the next edition. All she had left to do was check her facts, a little polish, and it’d be ready to go. Outside, the rain reminded her of the story she truly wanted, but had to wait to get.

  In the meantime Zeke continued his story. “Ya, this guy’s tale was a doozy. And right in your backyard, Ann. He runs one of those tour boats out from Wizard Island and claims there’s a creature, a water leviathan of some kind, in the lake. Can you imagine? We now have our own Loch Ness monster in Crater Lake. Ha! An American Loch Ness monster!”

  Ann’s hands froze over the keyboard. Her mind went to those bones Henry had spoken of up on the crater’s rim. Could there be some connection? Henry believed the bones had once been prehistoric dinosaurs, but they’d lived millions of years ago. Dead now. Just bones now. The weird thing was, this call might be something they’d expect to get later, once the fossil bed was public knowledge, but not now. No one else knew about the bones. Or did they?

  Henry had also said the paleontologist from John Day suspected the lava rivers under the lake were flowing again, which was why the lake’s temperature was rising. The terrain beneath the volcanic lake was rearranging, shifting and regurgitating ancient rock and dirt. What other repercussions were those changes bringing? What else was the volcano regurgitating?

  Certainly not monsters.

  Nah. Of course the call was a crank, or an old man’s flight of fancy.

  “Did the caller sound drunk?” she asked. “Or just mentally unbalanced?”

  “No. I’ve known the guy for years. He keeps his boat in one of those boat houses on Wizard Island and docks it for the tourists at Cleetwood Cove. He always was a little eccentric, and as independent as all get-out. But as far as I know, he’s neither a boozer nor a nut. You know the type?”

  Oh, Ann knew the type. They spent their lives doing what they pleased and worked when they wanted. Self-employed and obstinate, they were drifters and dreamers. Oregon was full of them. The park was full of them.

  She got up, moseyed over and stood looking down over her boss’s shoulder as he worked. “Well, what else did he say?”

  “Not much. He sounded embarrassed to be calling. I had to pull most of the story out of him, like a bad tooth, after the initial confession. He sounded scared and claimed the creature butted his boat, as it was getting dark, the evening before. Rammed it hard enough to rattle him and the vessel. And you know how big those tour boats are.”

  “Yeah.” They were big; held up to sixty people. “Was anyone with him?” Collaboration was the first thing a good reporter checked on.

  “Nope. Claims he was alone. He’d emptied his last tour group of the day at Cleetwood Dock and was heading back to Wizard Island to put the boat away. He swore he wouldn’t have said anything, but he thinks the creature is a menace and not only to him, but for everyone on the lake.”

  “We going to do a story on it?” Ann’s thin face was battling a grin. She was too pragmatic a person to believe in boogey men and lake monsters.

  “Well, it might be what we need. A good oh-my-god-there’s-a-creature-in-the-lake story might stir up some commotion around here, might help bring up the paper’s numbers.”

  “Oh, give me a break.” Ann laughed. “It might also help bring all the crazies from miles away to camp out in the park day and night waiting for the thing to reappear, too. Like Loch Ness. Only here it’ll be worse because Americans don’t respect privacy as much as the Scots.”

  A slight scowl touched her face. Like her husband, she adored the park the way it was, uncluttered and unpeopled most of the time anyway, thank you. Henry would hate to see his peaceful retreat invaded by hordes of wild-eyed monster hunters. He was fretting enough over the fossil find. Now, monster sightings? He’d have a conniption fit.

  “I thought I’d send you out to talk to the guy,” Zeke finished.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Well, you live in the park. Wouldn’t be too far out of your way.”

  “You don’t think it’ll create a panic among the park’s inhabitants? Reporting about some combative creature lurking in the lake?”

  “No, not if we don’t play it too seriously. It might turn into an interesting piece if we do it right. Whimsical like.”

  “It might.” Her voice held no sarcasm. It would make a good story. People ate that kind of stuff up. “Okay. I’ll go talk to the guy. What’s his name?”

  “Sam Cutler. He captains a tour boat called the Sea Bird. In the mornings you can find him docked at Cleetwood Cove waiting for his passengers. The boat has a flying bird painted on the side. Can’t miss it.”

  “I know the one. I’ve seen it on the lake before.”

  “Good. Try to talk to him sometime in the next couple days and we’ll see if we can plug it in the next edition. We’re going to be lean on material anyway. We’ll need the filler.” Then Zeke tacked on: “Hey, you’re a fairly good artist, too, as I recollect. So why don’t you try to make a drawing from his description of the thing?”

  Ann snickered under her breath, shaking her head. Her drawings were a town joke. She could draw, but no one could say she was the next Rembrandt, not by a long shot. But Zeke thought her sketches had character. Kinda like those things Grandma Moses used to do. Yeah. Kinda cute and primitive. They made Zeke chuckle. But most of the townies made fun of them.

  “The things I do for you and this rag,” Ann groaned with a small smile, pretending he was forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do. When in truth, she got a kick out of seeing her doddles in the paper. When she’d worked in New York, her editor would have died before allowing her drawings to accompany her stories. New York was too cosmopolitan for that. Klamath Falls wasn’t.

  “Okay. I’ll try to recreate the mysterious creature of the lake. No promises, though. I’ll get photos of Wizard Island and Captain Cutler on his boat, too. Does he know a reporter’s coming out?”

  “That’s the problem.” Zeke threw his hands up. “As soon as I mentioned I’d send someone out to take pictures and get more details, he hung up on me. I’m afraid he’s sorry he called. He might be a tough sell.”

  “So he might not talk to me?”

  “Oh, but I have considerable faith in your powers of persuasion, Ann. You’ll get the story, no sweat. You’re a hell of a reporter.”

  “Flattery, flattery,” she said, “will get you everything.”

  Digging into one of his pockets, Zeke retrieved a tattered brown wallet, slid out a twenty that looked as old as he was and handed it to her with a flourish.

  “Offer him this. It’ll help. If I know Sam, it’ll loosen his tongue quick enough. Money is his life.”

  Ann took the twenty and tucked it into her purse. Things must be truly bad if Zeke was willing to pay for a story. He never did. But she didn’t say a word, merely went back to work.

  Soon she’d forgotten about Captain Cutler and the creature in the lake. She had stories to write and ads to sell and was too busy to spend time thinking about mythical monsters.