Ode to a Lake Monster

mythical creatures and our desire for a higher power

By: Katherine becking

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2025 issue, Connection. Read the full print release here.

I drop my feet off the edge of the boat and grin as the cold lake water pulls back on them. Above me, a triangular white sail slices through the clear sky, propelling us toward the distant Adirondack Mountains, hazy but looming larger as we traverse Lake Champlain. Behind me, my parents’ chatter is muffled by the breeze while my cousins lounge on top of the ship’s bow. My sister, who sits next to me on the edge of the boat, points at a disturbance in the water a few hundred feet away.

“Must be Champ!” the ship’s captain exclaims from behind the wheel. “Do you guys know the story?”

My family takes the bait, leaning in to listen as he tells us that some people in Burlington believe a giant prehistoric monster lurks in these waters. The beast’s name is “Champ” after his lacustrine home. The captain whips out a three-ring binder containing “evidence” for Champ’s existence and passes it around. I flip through the predictable collection of grainy photographs and dubious eyewitness accounts.

Mythical lake monsters are nothing new. The Scottish Loch Ness Monster, “Nessie,” is the most well-known example, but there are many others. When my family lived in Virginia, my sister and I used to build sand sculptures of “Chessie,” the monster that allegedly lives in the Chesapeake Bay. These creatures are usually depicted as cartoonish dinosaurs, and often become symbols of regional identity for the surrounding communities. In Burlington, Champ is the area baseball team’s mascot, and my family passed by a car wash emblazoned with the monster’s likeness.

Most adults do not actually believe in the existence of these lake monsters. And clearly, many local businesses perpetuate these stories to captivate tourists, as my family experienced on our boat tour. Yet there is something appealing about the concept, otherwise it wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. Why do these lake monster stories persist in our skeptical modern era?

One potential reason is that we want to imagine a life that spans beyond our human limitations. The Romantic era poet John Keats expressed this desire in his “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the poem, Keats listens to a nightingale singing and feels a strange sadness, as he is painfully aware of his own finitude in contrast with the seemingly “immortal” nature of the bird and its song. [1] He wishes he could “leave the world unseen” to “fade away into the forest dim” with the bird. [2] Keats is briefly drawn into the nightingale’s ecstasy through the power of poetry, but eventually the feeling escapes him and he returns to his “sole self” disappointed. [3]

C.S. Lewis writes about this longing to “mingle with the splendors we see” in The Weight of Glory. [4] He argues that, when struck by the transcendent beauty of nature, we have a desire not just to witness it, but to connect deeply with it. As Keats discovers in his poem, merely being in the natural world and appreciating it is not enough to satisfy this craving. Lewis argues this is why we invent mythical beings like elves and fairies: “we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.” [5] No matter how hard we try, we cannot be part of Lake Champlain’s glory, so instead we imagine Champ swimming in its waters to vicariously participate in the lake’s beauty with him.

Another appeal of the lake monster phenomenon is its inherent mystery. In Lake Champlain, the story goes that some giant aquatic dinosaur from millions of years ago somehow avoided extinction and survived in the lake up until the present day, subsisting on smaller creatures and evading human detection. If you really think about it, especially while gazing down into the water from a dinky sailboat, this idea is unsettling. Many people experience fear when thinking about the ocean (known as thalassophobia) because of how vast and unexplored it is. Personally, I am terrified of the empty expanse of outer space (astrophobia). Combine this common fear of really big things with the sense of awe many people feel around very old things, and the ancient behemoth in the lake instills a deep reverence (megalohydrothalassophobia).

The fact that this beast flies under the radar of human observation further increases our respect for him. We can’t study and classify him like we do to other animals. He doesn’t fit into our taxonomic system. We can’t even prove that he exists. This implies that, on some level, he is more intelligent than we are as a species. Humanity has subjugated the world to our rule, harnessing the useful qualities of some animals for our own use and pushing others out of the way to make room for our civilizations. But Champ is beyond our comprehension and control.

This lack of knowledge is what preserves the mystique. If Champ were a real animal, and we knew more about him, he would likely occupy a similar place in our collective consciousness to that of a whale—another large underwater creature. Captain Ahab of Moby Dick  aside, people rarely obsess over whales. But as it is, Champ is not just an animal, he’s a demigod. Maybe he can time travel! Maybe he can read our minds. Maybe he possesses arcane wisdom about the origin of the earth. Was he born when the Appalachian Mountains were young and proud, his tail growing longer as they grew older and crumbled? Did he ever see a Pterodactyl flock soar toward the setting sun? Did he listen to the early humans sing to the beat of their paddles as the first canoes slid across the lake’s surface? We wish there was such a being—one who knew more about the world than we do, who was there at the beginning, who could tell us how to live.

Furthermore, we are drawn to these monster stories because they represent a sort of “good wildness”—danger and power without evil. People don’t view Champ as an enemy. No one wants to hunt and kill him. Instead, people are excited to spot Champ, simply to see him. He is formidable due to his size and feral nature, but there is no sense that he would vindictively hurt us. Like C.S. Lewis’ fictional lion Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, Champ “isn’t safe,” but “he’s good.” [6]

I can’t help but notice that Champ shares several characteristics with the Christian God. Champ is unpredictable but benign, while God is both powerful and all-loving. Both beings are inscrutable and ancient. Champ could have been around when Pangea formed, while God was there even earlier, laying the foundations of the world. Perhaps our enthusiasm for lake monsters reveals our innate desire for God. We don’t actually want the responsibility of being the rulers of the world. We wish there was something, Someone above us, far bigger and more wonderful than we could imagine.

The concept of lake monsters can also be helpful in understanding how we should feel about God’s omnipotence. Christians and non-Christians alike tend to balk at the concept of “fear of the Lord,” which appears often in the Old Testament. If God really is Love, then why should we be afraid of Him? Doesn’t a fear of God imply that He is cruel or hates us? In the Bible, the Hebrew word used for fear of the Lord (“yirah”) means both fear and “reverential awe of His majesty and holiness.” [7] In this sense, I think the way we fear lake monsters reflects on a smaller scale the way we should fear God. When I picture a leviathan-esquebeast lurking in the depths of Lake Champlain, I feel wonder, reverence, and a fear that is more attractive than repulsive. I do love Champ. I just recognize my vulnerability in view of his sharp teeth and muscular jaws. 

So, too, our search for a deeper connection with nature points to our longing for heaven. God gave us this desire to be united with beauty because in the world to come He will fulfill that desire. The book of Revelation describes resurrected believers living in a new earth, where we will eat from the tree of life and drink from the river of living water. It promises that believers will “see [the Lord’s] face, and his name will be on their foreheads…They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.” [8] Lewis writes that we will put on “the greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.” [9]

As our boat speeds back toward Burlington across the expanse of Lake Champlain, I think again about the Champ-themed carwash my family passed. The logo, a bright green dinosaur playfully squirting water out of his mouth, somewhat detracts from the monster’s archaic allure. We as Christians do the same thing to God sometimes. Corny Jesus memes and Bible-themed amusement parks can diminish the mystery of our faith. It’s so easy to lose sight of God’s vastness—to shrink Him down so He can fit comfortably in our minds.

We pull through the weather-worn timber piers into the harbor, and my aunt asks the captain whether he believes in Champ. He pauses for a minute, sitting back with one hand on the wheel. “I don’t think you can have this job and not believe in Champ,” he says. “Everyone who’s been on the lake this often has seen something.”

Sources

[1] Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th Edition., D:969–71. New York: Norton, 2024. Line 61.

[2] Keats, lines 19, 20.

[3] Keats, line 72.

[4] Lewis, C.S. “The Weight of Glory.” In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 1–15. 1949. Reprint, Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1966. Page 13.

[5] Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 13.

[6] Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 1950. Reprint, Scholastic Inc., 1995. Page 80.

[7] Bible Hub. “Strong’s Hebrew: 3374. (Yirah).” https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3374.htm.

[8] Revelation 22:4-5 (ESV)

[9] Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 13.