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Yankee Classic: The Champ Believer

by Tim Clark

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Credit: Yankee Magazine

Joseph Zarzynski is convinced that something "definitely larger than a fish" really lives in Lake Champlain.

A Gargoyle rises from the waters of Lake Champlain — a head with hornlike protuberances on the end of a long snakelike neck that merges smoothly into the huge, humped body of the beast, just visible beneath the roiled surface of the lake. Joseph Zarzynski has been waiting and planning and hoping for this moment for ten years, for the opportunity to prove the existence of the animal he calls Champ, Belua aquatica champlainiensis, a living fossil. Now it is right in front of him, and he doesn't have his camera. He turns to run to the cabin for the camera. He cannot move. He is suspended — between the camera and the creature, between science and myth, evidence and faith. He wakes up.

The lesson of the dream to Zarzynski, or Zarr as he signs his letters and is known to his friends, is never to be out of reach of a camera while in sight of Lake Champlain. He had one around his neck last summer when I drove up to the cabin in Vergennes, Vermont, that he and his wife of three months, Pat Meaney, rented. He kept it with him while we explored the rocky shore in front of the cabin and swam in the clean water of the lake, still cold in the last few days of July. He brought it with us in the car when we visited local people who claim to have seen the creature. It lay on the table on the front porch, overlooking the lake, while we ate our meals. We did not face each other while we ate. We watched the lake.

Zarr and Pat have grown comfortable with this man-woman-monster triangle. It may seem like odd behavior for newlyweds, but they are hardly strangers to one another. They met in 1974. Pat is the librarian at Saratoga Springs Junior High School, where Zarr teaches social studies. From time to time during the eight years they worked together before going out socially, Zarr asked Pat to look things up for him — historic sightings of strange beasts in Lake Champlain or Loch Ness in Scotland. "I figured he would never take an interest in me because he was so obsessed with Champ," she recalls.

"Sometimes I become a little too obsessive about Champ," Zarr admits, "but I think Pat understands that without this I'd be a . . . " he pauses, searching for the word: " . . . a crank."

Zarzynski, 35 years old, a skeletal six-foot-five vegetarian and marathon runner (he has run the 28.5-mile road that goes the length of Loch Ness and is contemplating an attempt at the 109-mile length of Champlain), has become the leading authority on, investigator of, and recently, defender and spokesman for the large aquatic animals that may or may not live in Lake Champlain. He is the author of Champ: Beyond the Legend (Bannister Publications, 1984), founder of The Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation, editor and publisher of Champ Channels, an irregular but entertaining newsletter detailing new sightings of Champ and such other lake monsters as Nessie in Scotland, Chessie in Chesapeake Bay, the skrimsl of Iceland, Shelly in Loch Sheldrake in New York, Ogopogo in Canada, and the mokele-mbembe in Africa.

In his book Zarzynski has cataloged more than 220 sightings of what he jokingly calls "USOs" (Unidentified Swimming Objects), dating back to a disputed reference to a 1609 encounter with the creature by Samuel de Champlain, for whom the lake is named. While some of the sightings are clearly whimsical ("About 50 feet long, flowing red mane, dinner-plate eyes, mooselike antlers, elephant ears"), a large majority seem to be describing the same sort of animal: a snakelike body 25 to 30 feet long with two or three humps showing above the waterline, black or dark brown, green or gray in color. The witnesses include sea captains, ministers, doctors, passengers aboard the Ticonderoga, a high school principal, a state trooper, and Walter Hard, the Vermont editor and historian who wrote that he and his wife "saw something out there that was definitely larger than any fish. It didn't fit the description of anything I'd seen or heard of before."