IS SHE PEPPERED?:

It came from the deep: Rumor has it that somewhere in Lake Tahoe's belly lurks a scaly creature named Tessie. (Ashley Powers, May 3, 2005, LA Times)

FROM THE DECK OF HIS CHARTER FISHING BOAT Big Mack II, Mickey Daniels pierces minnows baited with cat food onto hooks and plunges them 400 feet into the dark water of Lake Tahoe. It's 7:47 a.m. on a day when mist slices distant mountaintops and gray clouds swallow the sun.

Daniels, a 67-year-old former Placer County law enforcement officer with wind-chapped cheeks, knows every ripple of the lake he's fished since 1959. But aside from his reputation for landing mackinaws and 30-pound trout, he believes that something else, something larger and more ominous, dwells in Tahoe's depths.

Two decades ago, he rumbled his 43-foot boat a half-mile offshore and pointed toward the casinos in Nevada on the lake's south side.

"What's that?" a passenger suddenly yelled.

"It's not a wake from the boat," Daniels said, staring. The two peered into the water and watched a wave split into a huge V, as if an enormous head were clearing a path for an enormous tail. And then … nothing.

These days when Daniels paddles his rowboat out to Big Mack II and dawn blurs sky and shore into Monet-like smudges, he sometimes peers into the dark water, searching for what he saw on that morning long ago. It makes him nervous.

At 1,645 feet deep, Lake Tahoe ranks as the world's 10th deepest lake. Twenty-two miles long and 12 miles wide, it harbors many legends. But perhaps most persistent is the myth of a humped-backed, scaly serpentine the locals call Tessie.

"I keep looking," Daniels says. "In case there is something, I want to see it."

With scant evidence that such creatures exist, our forests and waterways still teem with man-made monsters, and Tessie is just that kind of beast — quick to spin off into popular culture, provide good copy for the Weekly World News and compel perfectly reasonable men, like Daniels, to believe she's out there, lurking.

If only Bernard Kettlewell were around, we'd even have her on film.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2005 7:02 AM