Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter (26 page)

To date, the largest snake in the world is a reticulated python. A hefty specimen can measure more than twenty-five feet in length. (The largest one ever recorded was just under thirty-three feet long.) The New York Zoological Society has a standing offer of $50,000 for a live snake thirty feet in length or greater. So far, there have been no takers. Then again, how the hell would you get that thing through LaGuardia?

19: Travel Will Save You

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a travel agency with a sign on the door that reads “Please go away. Often.” More than just a catchy motto, this seems to me a rare piece of honest-to-God truth in advertising. A snarky suggestion that perhaps it would be best if you just left. It’s a slogan I wholeheartedly support. Any of us can overstay our welcome in our own country, like a too-drunk groomsman at a wedding.

A scant 25 percent of U.S. citizens have a passport. That means that most Americans haven’t seen the world’s great monuments firsthand or known the blissful anonymity of strolling exotic city streets. Most people have no idea what hummus is
supposed
to taste like or felt the ego-busting helplessness of not being able to read a single sign in a Chinese bus station. They haven’t left the country.

There are, of course, many reasons for this. Not everyone can afford to travel, and those who can don’t always have the time. In general, employees in the United States are granted less vacation time than citizens of almost any other Western country. Many Americans simply opt to travel domestically out of necessity. To say nothing of the fact that America truly is a diverse travel destination in its own right. But there is, I suspect, something more dangerous at work here.

The 75 percent of Americans who don’t travel abroad have any number of other excuses why. Some are scared to travel. One of the great American prejudices to reblossom in the last decade is the belief that many people in the world would love to kill us. It’s rubbish, of course. There are all of about four places where you’re likely to get your head blown off, and it’s not as though you’re going to accidentally wander into any of them. Nobody unwittingly plans a honeymoon to Tora Bora or finds their flight to Cincinnati suddenly rerouted through Sierra Leone. If there’s one common chord that any career traveler can strike, it’s this: people are pretty lovely. From Tacoma to Timbuktu. In fact, the more exotic, impoverished, and generally unseemly the location, the more hospitable the residents tend to be. And our commonalities are many. Beyond customs and norms and wildly variant beliefs, we all generally laugh, cry, and make our way along the dusty road of life in pretty much the same way.

To those who eschew travel because of how “horrible” it is to fly, I reserve my greatest ire. Bunch of babies. When did we get so collectively myopic about the miracle of aviation? Has flying become a little less plush over the last couple decades? Sure. So what? You’re still getting slingshot over the globe at half the speed of sound. People pine for a “golden age” of aviation when planes had spacious legroom, drapes on the windows, and a size-zero stewardess slicing up a pot roast in the galley. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but those old Pan Am Clippers from vintage posters we romanticize used to fall out of the sky quite a bit. It’s all too common to overhear someone complaining about how “long” the flight is from New York to Los Angeles. Had any of us been born just a few hundred years earlier, a trip to California would have consisted of a six-month ride in a bumpyass covered wagon. Business class could be defined as not being scalped by Indians or dying from dysentery.

It was only 105 years ago, on a windy stretch of beach in North Carolina, that Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the first powered aircraft: the fragile-looking
Wright Flyer I
. The plane, which flew for a meager twelve seconds, fundamentally changed the world. It’s impossible to know the extent to which the brothers envisioned the evolution of their invention, but I can only assume they never dreamed of Richard Branson. Among many other things, the advent of flight and the eventual age of the jumbo jet have turned the world into a much smaller place. With the unveiling of Boeing’s long-haul 777, any two cities on earth can now hypothetically be connected by a single flight. That we’ve taken this interconnectedness for granted is nothing short of a sin. So stop complaining, drink your Bloody Mary, and enjoy the free DirecTV.

We are in dire need of a public relations campaign for travel. I’m not talking about splashy commercials for Carnival Cruises or full-page magazine ads for Sandals resorts; we’ve got plenty of those, thank you very much. Nearly the entire vacation industry is hell-bent on the notion that travel is a purely escapist enterprise—that the sole purpose of leaving one’s country is to drink daiquiris and plummet down a waterslide with a big, dumb grin. Why isn’t there a marketing campaign that extols the innate virtues of wandering?

The real hindrance is that we’ve forgotten how to travel—or, more important, we’ve ceased to remember that it’s good for us. In Europe, aristocratic youth were once encouraged to undertake the “Grand Tour,” a rite of passage that involved hopscotching across the continent, experiencing the legacy of the Renaissance and the influences of the Classical world. Hundreds of years later, the cultural tradition endures in much more bohemian packaging. It’s called a “gap year.” Tens of thousands of backpackers take a year off before or after college to expose themselves to foreign cultures. More than an extended vacation, gap years are considered a critical part of any well-rounded student’s résumé. In America, most people would probably guess that a gap year is an annual jeans sale at the mall.

The experience of leaving one’s homeland can be psychologically profound. Travel illuminates a strange dichotomy of scale. When we stand in the shadows of empire, before solemn, ancient temples, we feel the enormity of human history wash over us and are humbled by its magnitude. But, paradoxically, the world is also revealed to us as strangely small and universal. It is impossible to watch that old familiar moon rise up over Hong Kong Harbor and not be struck dumb by the idea that the same soft light is shining down on Burbank, California. To think that when we look west over the misty cliffs of Moher in Ireland, someone on a beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is looking back. In an instant, we can observe the world expand and contract in one seemingly contradictory motion.

To that dangerously expanding group of xenophobic Americans who seems content cleaving only to the familiar embrace of the United States, I contend that you will, on some level, forever feel unfulfilled. Seeing the world is a prerequisite to understanding one’s place in it. After all, nearly every corner of this country is rife with invitations that beckon us back to foreign shores. Look around. We’re illuminated by the torchlight of a giant Roman goddess in New York Harbor. Our currency is adorned with arcane pyramids, and half the days of the week are named after Viking gods. We are derivative, the star-spangled orphans of a hundred civilizations before us. And, like all orphans, we should yearn to understand from whence we came.

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.