CAN AN UNREAL CREATURE BE REAL? This question is on my mind—and on my skin, too, shivering across my thighs and belly, tingling over my shoulders and scalp—as I wade into the black midnight waters of Lake Champlain, alone and buckass naked, intending to breaststroke south for the next thirty minutes. I’m twitchy, nervous in my nerve endings, but drowning isn’t the issue. Conditions are perfect, calm and warm, and after years of mini adventures like this one, I trust my stamina and skill.

Nope, it’s nothing so reassuringly straightforward as sinking that has me spooked. It’s Champ, the famous monster of my home watershed, the apocryphal monster I quit believing in at approximately age eight, the nonexistent monster that any second now may lick my ankle, graze my calf with a slimy flipper, or just glide silently past, immense and eerie, a liquid shadow in the liquid dark. North America’s answer to Nessie—that’s the issue. The issue that isn’t an issue, of course.

I swim slowly and steadily away from the cobble beach and my pile of clothes, steer left at the mouth of the cove, and feel the abyss—stroke by stroke, breath by breath—opening outward, opening inward, opening around and through my tiny buoyant body. The lake is two hundred feet deep here, the cliffs of the Vermont shore plunging vertically and vertiginously below the surface, and a mile west, in the direction of New York, the bottom officially bottoms out at twice that depth.

Twice that depth? I shudder. I’ve spoken with scuba divers who drop into the murky trench for fun, descend the walls of ancient rock, catch fleeting glimpses of flickering mysteries in the back-and-forth sweep of their flashlights. One guy described the experience with technical terminology specific to his bizarre hobby: Effed up. Effing wild. Probably the wildest effing spot in the whole effing Northeast. We were sitting on the cobble beach at dusk. He was chaining cigarettes, covered in purple goose bumps, grinning.

If Champ resides anywhere—if Champ hides anywhere, curled snout to tail, asleep but simultaneously alert to snooping cryptozoologists and the like—it’s in this redoubt, this extreme of the bathymetric map. Champ who is apocryphal, I mean. Champ who sort of resembles a plesiosaur and sort of resembles a serpent and sort of resembles a sturgeon and sort of resembles a wriggling blob and obviously isn’t spiraling up from the infinite inky emptiness at this very moment, this precise moment, preparing to bite my buttock, maybe nibble my manhood.

Feel the abyss—stroke by stroke, breath by breath—opening outward, opening inward, opening around and through my tiny buoyant body.

To be clear: I’m not trying to bait the monster, nor do I think the monster would find my manhood especially enticing even if I were trying to bait it, nor do I think there is an actual corporeal monster to bait. Furthermore, I’m not seeking the giddy thrill of an adrenaline rush, the elation of fear. I never watch horror movies. I assiduously avoid ghost stories. I refuse the hospitality of creaky Victorian mansions. Truly, I hate the heebie-jeebies.

But my hatred, oh, it’s in direct conflict with arguably the greatest love of my life: these 6.8 trillion gallons gathered between the Green Mountains and Adirondacks, these 580 miles of crinkled coastline, these rugged cliffs and freaky depths. Lake Champlain isn’t merely an intricate, elaborate, eternally fascinating place to explore. It’s the place that taught me to explore, that taught me the world is explorable, forever exceeding our understanding, fathomed yet ultimately unfathomable.

As a kid, I snorkeled and kayaked and rode bucking foam noodles amid whitecaps and stinging rain. As a young man, I voyaged far and wide, then farther and wider, once traversing the length of the lake over the course of a month on a wooden raft the size of a double mattress. That trip was exhilarating, a revelation, and it inspired me to boogie board the length of the lake a couple summers later, solo and unsupported, my meager camping supplies—thermal undies, hammock, salami, instant coffee, iodine, Bic lighter—stuffed in a rubber bag and lashed to the “bow.”

The point is that despite my intense aversion to being scared, I remain passionately committed to engaging, as intimately as possible, the many facets of this many-faceted water body. Champ is one of those facets. Or perhaps I should say the reality of the unreal is one of those facets, the strange way that a fictitious monster can and does swim laps inside my skull and chest, enriching and complicating my relationship with the lake, charging it with uncertainty and enigmatic energy, granting it—

What just touched my elbow?!

Duckweed. Good old familiar duckweed. Sweet companionable duckweed. Whew.

Half an hour has passed—half an hour of wavelets tickling my chin, slurping and plopping and muttering in my ears, warping the reflected stars. At last the time has arrived to stop, U-turn, head back to the cobble beach, the firm dry land where firm dry rationality reigns supreme. But before I go, a final thing must be done, a thing that since earliest childhood I’ve dreaded and relished in equal measure. Call it a culminating gesture. Call it an obeisance.

I inhale sharply, rear up, and dive down, kicking hard, pulling myself into the blackness. Five feet, eight feet, twelve feet. My temples pounding. My lungs compressing. My blind eyes open, searching for a face that both is and isn’t there.