Two years had passed since I’d nearly died in the jowls of one monster. Though I seriously doubted anything larger than a slug occupied Vostok’s waters, we would be entering an unexplored subglacial lake one hundred and forty miles longer and thirty miles wider than Loch Ness, energized by the same geothermal vents that had induced life on our planet 3.8 billion years ago.

Who knew what was down there?

A sane person would have walked away from this potential train wreck. Yet as much as I dreaded the trip, the scientist in me couldn’t wait to explore Vostok.

The more I researched it, the more I realized the lake was a gift to science and scientists throughout the world. To be among the first three humans to venture into its untarnished waters would cement my reputation forever.

Named after the Russian outpost established in East Antarctica in December of 1957, Lake Vostok was first theorized by a Soviet scientist named Peter Kropotkin, who made an aerial observation of an island of flat ice sandwiched around mountainous drifts. Two years later another Russian, Andrey Kapitsa, used seismic soundings to measure the thickness of the ice sheet around Vostok Station and hypothesized the existence of a subglacial lake. Still, few believed the lake could be liquid until the 1970s, when British scientists performing airborne ice-penetrating radar surveys of the plateau declared the unusual readings indicated the presence of liquid freshwater in Vostok’s vast basin. In 1991, a remote-sensing specialist from the United States directed the ERS-1 satellite’s high-frequency array at Vostok, confirming the British surveys.

More of a subterranean cavern than a lake, Vostok was divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The northern basin plunged thirteen thousand feet; the southern basin reached twice that depth. The ridge itself was situated in seven hundred feet of water and, as incredible as it seemed, harbored an island.

The weeks of summer flew by. To my father’s credit, his “monster mania” had resurrected tourism in the Great Glen for at least one more season, turning a potential economic disaster into a windfall. In fact, more tourists visited Loch Ness that summer than any other location in all of the United Kingdom or Europe.

But the “Hero of the Highlands” never apologized to me for his deeds or for the potential dangers associated with my upcoming deployment. And when the day finally came to say goodbye, I refused to see him.

For the hundredth time that summer, I read my infant son his favorite book as I rocked him to sleep in his stroller by the ruins of Urquhart Castle. “In a great green room, tucked away in bed, is a little bunny. Goodnight room, goodnight moon… .”