The Adam's Lake Sandler

The Sandler of Adams Lake

 

Every deep lake has a story about a creature from the depths. Loch Ness has the long neck lurking in the peat-dark water. Okanagan Lake has the Ogopogo though the Syilx knew that presence as n̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ (prounounced n-ha-ha-it-koo) long before a music-hall song of the 1920s handed it a sillier name, and some argue, that was a poor trade. Lake Champlain has Champ, who has been protected by legislative resolution in both Vermont and New York since the early eighties, on the sensible grounds that you never really know.
And who could forget the Shuswap Lake Shuswaggi, reported since 1904 and described, depending on who is telling it, as a giant eel, a swimming bear, or fifty feet of something that had no business being there.

Adams Lake has the Sandler. However, our legend is different from every one of those: nobody has ever had to go looking for him. He comes to you. He finds your feet in the shallows and politely introduces himself by nibbling on your toes. As far as anyone can tell, the Sandler is the only lake monster on the continent with a documented interest in making friends.

 

About Adam’s Lake

 

Adam’s Lake runs sixty-three kilometres north from the Shuswap Highlands into the Monashees, narrow the whole way, hemmed in by mountains and almost entirely undeveloped along its shores. It averages nearly three hundred metres deep and drops to four hundred and fifty-seven at its lowest point, which makes it the second-deepest lake in British Columbia and, by average depth, one of the deepest lakes in the world. Since the lake is so deep, the cold down there never really lets up. Light gives out long before the bottom does. The Upper Adams River pours in at the north end. The Lower Adams River runs out the south end toward Shuswap Lake, carrying the sockeye home every fall by the million, with an extra special event every four years called the Salute to the Sockeye hosted by the Adam’s Lake Indian Band.

 

How he came by the name

The Sandler went a long while without one. The early accounts don't call him anything in particular. He's "the creature off the sandbar," or "that big fish down at the beach," or, in one gloriously unimpressed letter to a Chase paper in the twenties, "the lake's soft-headed resident."

The name that stuck came from the kids, the way the good ones usually do. Two explanations compete, and neither camp has ever given an inch.

The first is simply geographic. Of all the water available to him, all sixty-three kilometres of it, four hundred and fifty metres deep in places, cold and dark and entirely his, he spends his summers in the two feet of it that happens to have sand on the bottom. He is a creature of the sandbar. He goes where the sand is, therefore, the Sandler.

The second is a question of character. There was a word that got around this lake for a certain sort of person: the one who's friendlier than he is careful, who says hello to everybody at the boat launch including the dog, who's the last to catch a joke and the loudest to laugh once he does. A Sandler. Harmless, delighted, and forever slightly in the way. Anyone who has been nibbled will tell you the fit is exact.

There was one attempt to improve on it. A brochure in the mid-eighties tried out "the Adams Lake Serpent" which is a fine name for something that drowns horses and a ridiculous name for something that wants to meet your feet. Okanagan tourism officials once traded a sacred name for a dance-hall tune and got a monster out of it. Ours went the other direction and got laughed off the lake inside a season. He was the Sandler before the brochure and he was the Sandler after, and that is the whole of the naming dispute.

The earliest account anybody wrote down comes from the summer of 1911, from a homesteader's wife standing knee-deep off a sandbar near the lake's south end, wringing out a bedsheet. She reported a tickle at her ankle gone before she could look down, and, in the moment after, a wide pale shape slid back toward the drop-off with what she described as an relaxed sort of politeness. She reported being greeted rather than attacked. A distinction which has held for a hundred and fifteen years and it is the single most consistent feature of the record.

 

The first nibble on record

 

The stories accumulate the way these stories do. A church picnic in 1954 produced eleven children and one entirely composed grandmother who all described the same thing within the same ten minutes: a nibble, a bump, a broad spotted back turning over in the deeper blue water beyond the sandbar. In 1978 a man from Chase got a photograph on an Instamatic, and in the way of all lake monster photographs he lost the negative in a move three years later. What survives is a print showing a pale curved smudge that is either a fin, a dock bumper, or a thumb – who’s to say. In 1996 a fisheries crew running sonar picked up a return near the bottom that they logged as a thermocline artifact and never mentioned again. However, the man driving the boat has been telling a different version at the Anglemont marina ever since.

 

What the skeptics say

 

They say minnows, they say a school of small fish will crowd around still ankles in warm shallow water and mouth at anything that looks like food, and that the sensation is exactly what everyone reports light, ticklish, over in a second. They point out that Adams holds no sturgeon, and that a bull trout in a metre of water can look like a great deal more than it is. They note that on a flat calm evening a temperature inversion over cold water will stretch a floating log into something with a neck. They note, fairly, that the Sandler has never been photographed by anybody who kept the negative. The only thing they can’t explain is that Minnows don't have manners, the Sandler does.

 

What he does the rest of the year

 

The consensus is that he spends most of his life in the deep, where the water stays cold and the light gives out. A spotted back, a wide flat grin, fins that seem to arrive slightly after he's decided to use them. If you've seen Destiny the whale shark from Finding Dory, you have the general shape of him: big, nearsighted, and better-natured than anything that lives in the dark has any right to be.

People who claim to know say he keeps a routine down there. Slow laps. A particular rock he bumps into most mornings. Not because he can't see it, but because that's simply how he says good morning to the rock. And the bubbles that come up over the deep water on still afternoons, the ones a limnologist would tell you are dissolved gas: those are generally agreed, locally, to be laughing.

Then the water warms and the beaches fill up and he can't help himself. Up he comes.

 

The etiquette

 

Every lake with a legend has a custom attached to it. Travellers crossing Okanagan Lake once carried something to drop into the water off Squally Point in exchange for safe passage. The Shuswap solution was mostly to stay in the boat.

Ours costs nothing.

If you're standing in the shallows at Adams and you feel that small nibble-nibble at your feet, don't jump, don't shriek, don't go crashing for shore. Look down, smile, and wiggle your toes.

That's the whole tradition. A returned wiggle means the two of you are square, and around here it's held that the Sandler's friends get the good lake days: water that's warm the first time in, stones that skip five, watermelon that somehow stayed cold all afternoon.

 

No proof, no problem

 

There is no legislation protecting the Sandler. There is no statue, no bounty, no expedition, no documentary crew, and no plan for any of it.

He has something better than proof. He has a hundred years of people standing in the shallows with their feet in the sand, waiting to be said hello to and every August, a fresh crop of kids who go home swearing that something down there wanted to be their friend.

Somewhere out past the drop-off, a big spotted doofus is doing a slow celebration loop.

Give the toes a wiggle. Make his day.

 

A note on this storytelling: the Sandler is our own invention. Modern lakeside folklore, made up for the fun of it, dates and witnesses included. Adam’s Lake sits in Secwépemc territory, and no part of this story is drawn from or intended to represent Secwépemc oral tradition.