A Scottish cultural commentator has run out of patience, and frankly, so have I.

I want to begin by saying that I have a great deal of sympathy for the researchers. I do. I own instruments I cannot fully explain, I take monthly readings at a decommissioned quarry in Windham County under conditions that would strike most people as unnecessary, and I have a filing cabinet with a locked drawer whose contents I consider nobody’s business but mine and, possibly, the previous owner’s estate. I understand the impulse toward documentation. What I am less sympathetic to — and what Fiona Drummond, cultural commentator and Inverness native, has been saying with increasing volume since Tuesday — is the belief that a creature which has existed, or not existed, or existed in a manner that does not map cleanly onto either category, for somewhere between sixty million and eighty years, is somehow obligated to surface on a schedule that accommodates your sonar equipment and your emotional needs.

Drummond, speaking to a small gathering of journalists near the southern shore of Loch Ness on Monday afternoon — an event attended by three witnesses whose accounts I have reviewed and found consistent in the ways that matter and divergent only in the ways that suggest they were actually there — made a statement that WTC’s editorial team initially flagged as too blunt for a news piece. I overruled this. The statement was: ‘You have brought hydrophones to someone’s home and you are upset that they have not come to the door.’ She then walked to her car. The car started on the first attempt. I note this because it is relevant to character.

Community Notice

You have brought hydrophones to someone’s home and you are upset that they have not come to the door.

— Fiona Drummond, Cultural Commentator, Inverness

On What We Mean When We Say We Want Answers

The three witnesses present — a retired cartographer from Edinburgh, a postgraduate student studying acoustic ecology, and a man who gave his name only as Derek and who brought his own sandwiches — all confirmed that Drummond’s remarks were preceded by approximately forty minutes of a research team explaining, with some enthusiasm, the sensitivity of their new scanning array. Derek, I am told, ate his sandwiches throughout. The cartographer took notes. The postgraduate student recorded the session on her phone and has asked that WTC not contact her further, a request I am honouring here publicly. What all three agreed on was this: at no point during the presentation did anyone ask what the loch itself might prefer. Drummond asked this. The research team did not have an answer prepared. Derek, according to the cartographer, nodded.

I have never been to Loch Ness. I want to be transparent about this. My schedule does not accommodate prolonged outdoor overnight situations, and the western — I will say only that my reasons for avoiding certain longitudes are my own and have not prevented me from writing accurately about subjects I have researched thoroughly. What I know about Loch Ness I know from the archive, from correspondence with three individuals I trust, from a monograph I rotate into my reference texts in autumn, and from twenty-two years of thinking carefully about what it means for something very old to exist in a place that humans have decided they have a right to understand on a deadline. My filing cabinet is locked. So, I suspect, is the loch.

It has been here longer than the concept of here. Give it some peace.

— Fiona Drummond, Cultural Commentator, Inverness — second statement, given to this reporter via email, unsolicited, at 11:47pm on Tuesday

Drummond’s second statement arrived in my inbox late Tuesday evening. I was at my correspondence desk. Ptolemy was on the filing cabinet, watching the doorway to the hall with the particular stillness he reserves for moments that do not require explanation. Mrs Ashworth had positioned herself on the arm of the chair in a manner I read as pointed. The Newcomer was elsewhere. I read the email twice and then I made a note that it should be included in this piece because it is, to my knowledge, the most accurate sentence that has been written about this subject in the last sixty years, and I have read most of what has been written about this subject in the last sixty years. Closure is not a thing the world owes you. This is true of most things. It is especially true of very old things in very cold water that have, by any reasonable measure, been managing perfectly well without your resolution.

WTC will continue to monitor developments at Loch Ness. We will not be sending anyone with sonar equipment. We will not be sending anyone with strong feelings about confirmation. We will be sending, when the time is appropriate and the scheduling allows, someone who knows how to sit with a thermos and a wool blanket and a great deal of patience, and who understands that the absence of an answer is itself a kind of information, if you know how to read it. I have not yet decided if that person will be me. I have a Tuesday at the archive I am not prepared to give up, and there is an instrument in my boot that needs calibrating before the end of the month. But I keep a bag in the back seat for a reason. The reason is that some things are worth being ready for, even when you cannot say exactly what you are ready for, or when, or whether you will know it when it comes.