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It is often claimed that persons who report encounters with cryptozoological creatures “just want attention.” It’s an odd claim – while such people certainly do get attention, it is very rarely of a sort that rational people would desire. Take Doug Wilhide, the subject of a front-page story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on June 2nd, 2000. The previous day, that same paper had published a letter he’d written them, claiming to have seen an alligator in Lake of the Isles, a scenic body of water in Minneapolis’ Uptown area. Now, this was an unusual claim, to be sure. But it probably didn’t automatically deserve the headline, “Is the ‘alligator in Isles’ story a croc?” Or the Peter Pan references contained within the article. And there certainly wasn’t any reason to tell us that Wilhide’s daughter and fellow alligator-spotter, Anduin (whose name, in these multicultural times, gave pause to nobody), was named after a river in Lord of the Rings. Unless we were meant to think, “Jeez! Only weirdoes read Lord of the Rings!” Which we most likely were, in those pre-Peter Jackson days.

Trouble was, his story wasn’t really all that incredible.

For one thing, Wilhide’s letter had been remarkably clear and levelheaded. The sighting was described with precision: “Three of us saw it. From our canoe…it submerged…then it came up again, maybe 10 feet from us…about three feet long, with a thin head, a round flat body and a long tail that looked as if it had spikes on it.” He had considered the possibilities, judging it to be the wrong shape for a muskrat or fish, and too mobile for a log. It was clearly not some hysterical, ludicrous rant.

For another thing, such a creature in Lake of the Isles would hardly have been the first strange animal to crop up in Minnesota. Hell, it wouldn’t have been the first in recent memory. In 1998, a 6’3”, 105-pound Lake Sturgeon had washed up on the shore of Minneapolis’ Lake Harriet; an animal that you’d think somebody would have noticed during its estimated 80 years of life. And a large, black feline (identified by the media as, variously, a leopard or a puma – though pumas do not come in black) had been both sighted and photographed in the area of Hugo, Minnesota the previous August.

Finally, a potential back-story for a lake alligator was easy enough to visualize. Here goes: Somebody buys a baby crocodilian at a pet store (I’d seen them available in the area recently); it grows from a big-eyed, chirping lizard to a huge, toothy, armored reptile; the owner, not having foreseen this, dumps it in a lake. Simple enough, and hardly the most unbelievable story ever told.

Given this overall alligator plausibility, then, it is with great regret that I must report that I believe there was not an alligator in Lake of the Isles.

Figuring that a bit of alligator-spotting would be a marvelous way to relax, I went on down to the lake at about 4 o’clock on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. I took a bench by the southeast corner of the lake – the general area of Wilhide’s sighting – and proceeded to watch the lake with a pair of old binoculars, not really expecting to find anything. Imagine my surprise, then, when about 90 minutes into my outing, I saw a pointed head, nose in the air, heading steadily toward shore. It would submerge occasionally, but quickly reappear, heading in a very straight line. When it appeared to have reached the shore, a few hundred feet away, I wasted no time in running to meet it. And, clearly visible beneath the shoreline water, there was the fleeing form of an absolutely colossal – 2 1/2 feet long if it was an inch – snapping turtle. A monstrous creature, with a large, triangular head, a round, flat body, and a long, spiky tail. It conformed in every particular to Wilhide’s description. And really, there was no shame in mistaking the thing for an alligator, if the viewer lacked the benefit of a shallow-water sighting such as I’d had.

Now, assuming that Lake of the Isles was not frothing with primordial, reptilian monsters – a lost world overlooked by white explorers until the year 2000 – there was one reasonable conclusion to draw: that Wilhide’s sighting had occurred precisely as he claimed it had, and that he had simply, and understandably, misinterpreted it. This was a possibility that the paper had not entertained; either there was an alligator in the lake, or Wilhide was a mouth-foaming lunatic.

In any case, I had set out, and through a combination of research, perseverance, and good luck, I had solved the Lake of the Isles Mystery. There could have been a book about me for intermediate readers! In the sequel I could unravel the enigma of Witch’s Cove. I was proud of myself to a degree quite out of proportion with the fact that I’d seen a turtle.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 7:26 am and is filed under The Kessen Run. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.