This certainly won't be news to anyone with a serious interest in cryptozoology, but the average Californian (and particularly a friend of OCR) might be intrigued to learn that
the Loch Ness Monster washed ashore in Santa Cruz in 1925, and its skull remains there to this day. Or more accurately, some denizen of the Monterey Submarine Canyon (the frigid depths of which rival Loch Ness in its unfathomable mystery) had the misfortune to surface and die near what is now Natural Bridges State Beach. The cause of death is circumstantially assumed to have been mauling by sea lions; the body was discovered by one Charles Moore. 85 years later the taxonomic identity of this creature has yet to be conclusively pronounced. The official story is that the beast in question was a Baird's beaked whale, despite possessing an elongated neck, no teeth, no visible blowhole, and an anomalously short spine and tail. After his initial analysis of the corpse in 1925, the prominent and quite credible naturalist E. L. Wallace concluded it to be some kind of herbivorous plesiosaur.
The bulbous forehead and rubbery skin suggest a cetacean to me, but I've never seen a plesiosaur; have you? Mammalness and reptility aside, the bigger question for us is the connection between this Nessie and our own, who as you know also resides in Santa Cruz where she performs with Nessie & Her Beard and Gay Genius. Given the global scarcity of Nessies, the presence of two in the same town seems far beyond the domain of random coincidence. The least interesting possibility is that our Nessie (or whoever named her) is well-versed in local folklore and selected the nickname in tribute to Moore's beach monster, but the link may run much deeper than that. How old is Nessie? When did she arrive in Santa Cruz? I wouldn't be the first to suggest that our friend Nessie is an immortal shapeshifter. Could she be the offspring of Moore's monster? Or perhaps its mate? Is it not possible that the corpse Moore found was merely some kind of exoskeleton cast off by a being that still walks among us? If you run into Nessie you should ask her.
