Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

by Josh Gates

  Don’t get me wrong. I may be an ex-pat by profession, but I’m also a proud American. Admiring the Constitution without treading on the ancestral English homeland of our founding fathers, however, seems folly. How can some of my countrymen be so afraid of the outside world when our very democracy was born on the faraway streets of Athens, and considering our great diaspora from the vast savannahs of Africa?

  Finally, yes, travel is a hell of a lot of fun. The Club Med ads are right. There’s little in our domestic routines that compares to swimming in Caribbean waters. Not to mention racing motorcycles through the back alleys of Vietnam, dining on a rooftop in Marrakech, or waking up under the canopy of the Amazon. By staying home, we’re missing a grand opportunity afforded to us by those glimmering silver birds in the sky. The “golden age” of travel is right now. Jetting is no longer just for the jet set; it’s for everyone. The truth is that travel changes us, irrevocably, and mostly for the better. It can nourish the best parts of ourselves like nothing else. Travel broadens our perspective, adds texture to our lives, and makes us more interesting at cocktail parties.

  So, please. I’m begging you. Go away. Often.

  20: Something in the Fog

  * * *

  Lagarfljot, Iceland, 2008

  * * *

  Every once in a while our overnight investigations on Destination Truth turn magical; under a canopy of stars, the serenity of nature reveals itself, and I’m convinced I have the best job in the world. This is not one of those times. This is the time when I almost freeze to death.

  Our tale unfolds within the fiberglass confines of a small boat caught in the dangerous embrace of fog. Through this translucent blanket of icy, arctic air, I finally see with my own eyes what others before me have seen. A monster.

  We’ve arrived on Iceland’s shores looking for adventure, something that this mysterious island is more than willing to provide. It is, quite simply, a geologic wonderland. A gurgling, steaming, hissing isle prone to mercurial weather and explosive disasters. Perpetually locked in a battle between the forces of fire and ice, this has long been a place of legends.

  To the Greeks it was “Ultima Thule,” a distant island beyond the borders of the known world. By the tenth century, Norse ships had navigated the treacherous Norwegian Sea and discovered what they called the “Land of Snow.” Once ashore, they discovered deafening waterfalls, volcanic peaks, and the largest ice cap in Europe. But Viking rule was as tempestuous as the land itself, and it would take another millennium before stability and eventual independence emerged. Today, the more than thousand-year-old city of Reykjavík has evolved from a primitive Norse settlement to a cosmopolitan capital. Known for pulsing nightlife, charming hotels, and posh thermal springs, it is a shockingly overpriced but unarguably worth-it destination.

  Outside the confines of the city, though, the rest of Iceland seems positively prehistoric. Our jeep doubles as a time machine and we leave the modern city, watching as chic bars and souvenir shops are replaced by soaring cliffs and misty waterfalls. Eventually, the road skirts along the behemoth Vatnajökull Glacier, an amoebic flow of ice that covers nearly 10 percent of the entire country. It’s instantly recognizable to fans of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, in which it effortlessly passed for the most remote corner of the Himalayas.

  Our crew is rounded out by Erin Ryder, or just “Ryder,” as she’s known on the show. Ryder has appeared in probably a third of all D.T. episodes, and though she sometimes startles easily on camera, she’s actually tough as nails and one hell of a copilot. She curses like a sailor, takes crap from nobody, and if you punched her in the abs you’d probably break your hand. My kind of girl.

  It takes more than a day for all of us to reach the edge of Lake Lagarfljót, which comes partially into view as we arrive at a small airport in the adjacent town of Egilsstaðir. We hop on board a Cessna and loft up over the forests to get a better look at the water. The lake is narrow, only about a mile and a half across. But what it lacks in width it makes up for in length. I peer in both directions from the aircraft cockpit but can’t make out either end of the more-than-thirty-mile-long basin.

  A dusty page on one of Iceland’s historic annals reads: “Year 1345: Hump seen rising out of the waters of Lake Lagarfljót.” Over the following centuries, more sightings of a serpentine, worm-like creature accumulated and were recorded. Eventually, belief in a nearly unpronounceable monster known as Lagarfljótsormur took hold. We’ve traveled to the lake to investigate the most recent sightings of the massive beast.

  Back on the ground, we spend the afternoon interviewing eyewitnesses and experts in the region. A lifelong resident and forest ranger vividly remembers seeing a long, black shape moving along the surface of the water. A woman recounts the day that she and her classmates spied the animal while on a field trip. A ferry captain who has navigated these waters for decades attests to several occasions when his vessel’s sophisticated onboard sonar system imaged something huge in the depths of the lake. To his amazement, the object even changed direction, moving against the prevailing current. All of the eyewitnesses put the animal at more than sixty feet long. A freshwater biologist informs us that the largest living fauna in these waters is a trout. Hardly the behemoth worm monster residents claim to have seen.

  We aggregate the sightings, identify the most prominent area, and mount a scuba-diving investigation. The enterprise is a mess from the start. Iceland’s frosty waters aren’t exactly a diver’s paradise, so the only dry suits we’re able to source are about three times too small for my producer Casey and me. It takes a bottle of baby powder and the combined effort of the entire crew to squeeze us into the Lilliputian neoprene outfits. By the time I pull my hood on, I feel as though my eyeballs are going to shoot out of my head.

  The surface is ice-cold, and conditions beneath the waves are worse. About ten feet down, the water turns to coffee-colored silt, and Casey and I lose sight of each other immediately. I clumsily descend as less and less light filters through the darkening water. Eventually, my faceplate shows only liquid blackness. In the murk, something moves by me. It could be an animal or perhaps just a piece of debris. I’m basically blind. The only chance I have of finding the creature down here is to be eaten by it. It also doesn’t help that our underwater communication system is crippled by the muddy conditions, unable to transmit our messages to the rest of the team onshore. It’s a dangerous waste of time. We ascend to the surface, where Casey and I paddle back to land, blue-lipped and shivering.

  We opt to refocus our efforts topside. Our base camp is established in the area where the majority of firsthand accounts have been reported. We park our Land Rover on the beach of an isolated cove to unload our gear. It’s getting colder, so we gather up some driftwood along the shore to fuel a fire. We’ve sourced two boats from locals that are, per our instructions, tied up along the cove’s simple dock: one small boat with an engine and an even smaller white rowboat.

  About an hour before sunset, I want to take a few of the team members on a scouting run in the motorboat to get a lay of the land. Our camera operator, Gabe, audio technician, Richie, and paramedic, Jarrod, all climb aboard while Ryder, Casey, and Erica stay onshore. I’m rushing, since it’s going to be nighttime soon, and I hate piloting boats in unfamiliar waters after dark. In my haste, I forget my compass and GPS unit in the Land Rover, an oversight I’ll be bitterly replaying in my mind later.

  Placing my foot on the motor, I yank the ripcord, and the engine fires up right away. On the distant opposing shore, I can discern several vertical cliffs interrupted by rolling fields and the occasional beach. Looking to my left and to my right, I see only more lake. It’s like an immense sliver of water, serpentine in its own right. We get about halfway to the other side, and I look back, narrowing my eyes in the failing light, trying to make out our Land Rover and tiny camp on the beach behind us. This is going to be a bitch after dark, I think to myself.

  I’m not sure when I first notice the wisps
of cloud tumbling down over the cliffs, but I do manage to misinterpret their significance entirely. To me, the thickening sky is a portent of rain. Nothing more. Just after eight p.m. I call Ryder.

  “Josh to base camp. Come in, base camp.”

  “Hey, Josh,” Ryder calls back on the radio. “Go ahead for base camp.”

  “Continuing my survey of the lake. Chop is picking up a little bit and so is the wind. Clouds are coming in, so make sure everything is secure to be dry over there,” I warn, looking up at the sky.

  “We’ll do some prep work, and you guys take care,” she says.

  “Copy that. No sign of a worm monster yet, but it’s cold as hell out here.”

  While Ryder makes preparations for a rainstorm that will never arrive, I continue down the spine of the lake. As long as we have a little light, I don’t want to abandon our efforts. Shortly after, my engine quits. A quick check of gas canisters and fuel line reveal nothing amiss. I let it sit for a minute and then start her back up, dismissing a vague instinct to take the boat ashore.

  By nine p.m. it’s dark. Casey calls in on the radio to tell me that a mist is beginning to shroud some of the outlying infrared cameras that he’s monitoring at camp. As we speak over the walkie, one by one his cameras turn white. I can see what he sees. From the center of the lake, both shores are rapidly fading from view, cloaked behind fingers of fog.

  Ten p.m. The temperature has dropped precipitously since the sun went down, and our onboard thermometer reads only 22 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve throttled back to a crawl, since I can hardly see where I’m going. The opposing banks have vanished. The thermal imager is able to make them out, but only slightly. The water is now dead calm, and the air is eerily silent. Jarrod comments that we should make sure to remember which side of the lake we started on, at which point everyone in the boat silently points in a different direction. It’s funny, really. We all have a good laugh about it, although I’m starting to feel uneasy.

  The mercury is dropping by the minute, and none of us is prepared for an entire night out here. We aren’t wearing enough layers and only have a few spare tapes and batteries for our cameras. Clearly it’s time to regroup with the rest of our team. Not able to reach a consensus on which shore is ours, we work out a sensible plan: take the boat to one of the shores, visually mark a point on land, and then run the boat up and down the banks for a half mile in each direction. If we don’t find the camp, we’ll return to the marked position and pilot the boat across the lake to repeat the process on the other side.

  We steer into the nothingness. It’s a disorienting experience. If it weren’t for the water splashing off the sides of the boat, I’d swear we were stationary. Then the opaque fog in front of us suddenly goes dark, like someone has pulled a curtain down over the world. It takes me a moment to realize that the blackness I see is a massive cliff face rising up nearly one hundred feet and stretching out in either direction. I drop us into reverse and throw my hand down on the throttle, backing off from the encroaching wall. Turning the boat 90 degrees, I begin to follow the land. Since the cliff is featureless, we decide to carry on until we can find a natural marker. The wall passes by silently and eventually disintegrates into a cove. I idle the boat. In front of us, an empty beach and a listing white rowboat that sits half submerged at a broken dock. I shiver. The cove looks exactly like our base camp, and the rowboat is identical to the one we left onshore. It’s an uncomfortable coincidence.

  With the cove as a marker, we steam along the shore in both directions. I radio Casey and tell him to point the Land Rover toward the water and turn the high beams on. He does. We see nothing. I ask Casey and Ryder to yell, and we listen intently. A faint echo of their voices ekes out of the mist and reverberates off the cliffs. They don’t sound close by, and we assume that we’re on the wrong side of the lake. We make every effort to set a direct course across, and I motor away from land. With over a mile and a half of blankness, the crossing seems to take forever. When we reach the center of the lake, a quiet seriousness sets in amongst the crew. I drive as straight as I can, looking back at our boat wake to make sure it doesn’t bend. Finally, Jarrod calls out, “Slow down! Land!”

  I coax the engine back into neutral and stand up to look over the bow. What I see makes my stomach sink like a rock. We’ve arrived in an empty cove. A white, partially sunken rowboat creaks in the still night air. “How . . .” someone starts, and then trails off.

  I’ve read about this phenomenon, of course. I just never thought I’d be caught in an example of it. Without a fixed point, traveling in a straight line is all but impossible. The tiniest errors in navigational judgment cause massive drift in direction. Without a star or the moon to guide us, we’ve come full circle. As I run my gloved hand over my head, I feel brittle icicles in my hair. We’re starting to freeze. It’s just before midnight. The thermometer reads 18 degrees.

  We make another attempt. The cove recedes, and the fog happily takes us back in. When we do find land again, it’s in the form of another anonymous cliff. We turn and run parallel, only to be returned to the same damned place. There are a few frightening images that cling to the back of my mind from my years of travel, and the sight of this lonely beach and derelict rowboat is one of them. It feels like a trick. A sickening piece of witchcraft. Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

  After three failed attempts we decide to go ashore in the cove. We raise the engine and beach the boat. While the crew struggles up a steep hill, I secure the boat anchor on land. Part of me expects the boat to vanish altogether as soon as I turn around. We walk for a while. At the crest of the hill we’re greeted by a bleak landscape. No road. No welcoming chimney smoke from a farm, no telephone poles. Nothing. Just fog and field. After all, this is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. I look down at my feet in despair. “Back to the boat, guys.”

  In the middle of the lake, it occurs to me that even though we heard Casey and Ryder earlier, I have no idea how long it took for their voices to reach us. We cut our engine, and I ask them to call out again. This time with their walkie on. “HELLO!” I hear them yell through my radio. I immediately begin counting. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . .” Nothing. “. . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . eleven . . . twel—” Suddenly a faint “HELLOOOO!” I realize now that the steep walls are acting like sounding boards, carrying their words along. They could be anywhere on either shore. With only a quarter of a tank of gas left and the temperature now hovering at 11 degrees, we can’t afford to be in the middle of the lake any longer. I decide to take the boat to one of the shores and just drive along it until we run out of fuel (at which point I suppose we’ll begin a new life as half-frozen Icelandic gypsies).

  The point of this story isn’t about the fog, though. It isn’t about the boat in the fog. It isn’t even about the freezing people in the boat or the despair that overtook us. It’s about the water and what we see. By two thirty a.m. we’re out of ideas and running low on patience. And then we see it. Everyone sees it at the exact same moment. A shape. A long, dark, sinewy thing gliding across the glassy water behind our boat. Everyone stands up to look. It makes no noise, nor does it fully breach the surface. But it’s there. Like a silent submarine. A V-shaped wake spreads out and laps against our hull. The boat rocks back and forth above the disturbance. And then it’s gone. Silence. Glassy water. Fog.

  The sighting takes a second to sink in but then hits like a kick to the ribs. Everyone onboard is suddenly talking, the cold banished by fierce debate over what we just saw. I start running the boat in circles, looking down into the black water for any signs of movement. Our walkies are dying, but I raise Casey long enough to excitedly tell him to get out in the rowboat with Ryder and activate the sonar equipment. I also advise him not to lose sight of land.

  Despite our best efforts and another few hours of drifting over the area of the sighting, nothing else emerges. It’s
gone. The fog lifts at five a.m., revealing all the puzzle pieces of the lake that I’d been trying to fit together in the dark. The cliffs and coves and fields interlock once more, and I can see that while we’ve drifted farther from camp than I imagined, it won’t take long to get back. We head for our small cove, smiling at the sight of a working dock and a rowboat floating safely on the water. By the time we tie up, we’ve been on the water for more than nine hours. Our fuel reserves are nearly depleted, and our ice-caked thermometer reads 8 degrees.

  Everyone heads back to the lodge to get warm and eat a much-needed meal. We replay the night over and over, joking about getting lost and blaming one another for having a terrible sense of direction. We feverishly compare descriptions of the mystery creature in Lake Lagarfljót. But beneath the jokes and merry conversation, there’s discomfort. The truth is, we were scared out in that boat and perhaps luckier than we deserved. But mostly there’s an unspoken fear that we can’t and never will understand our sighting. In the end, we are merely another entry. One of hundreds added to the yellowing pages of a historical log.

  “Year 2008. Americans see something in the fog.”

  CASE FILE: MARINE MONSTERS