THE SOUGHT REPTILE

a paean to the local news

I’ve lived in central Massachusetts now for about a year, and I love it. I don’t miss New York, though I hope Mamdani wins and runs the bums out of town (by which I mean Andrew Cuomo and the New York Times). Since arriving, one of my major indulgences has been the local paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which I receive in literal paper form delivered to my door every day. The Telegram & Gazette is, in a word, cute. The regular daily consists of an all-purpose section and a sports section; Thursdays have coupons, Fridays have a magazine, and Sundays have comics, business, arts, and classifieds, just like a real old-fashioned newspaper. The paper is owned by Gannett, the media conglomerate that also owns USA Today, so that’s where most of the articles are sourced, although the Telegram & Gazette also has a small staff covering items of local interest, such as Worcester city politics, criminal investigations, and events around town.

They also run true stories about dragons.

Let me explain. On July 22, 2025, the single greatest headline, caption, and subhead combo in newspaper history appeared in the Telegram & Gazette. It has never been equalled. It cannot be equalled. We will not see its like again.¹

Many writers will go their entire lives without a phrase as perfect as “the sought reptile.” I’m obsessed. It’s my “cellar door.” I’ve been saying “the sought reptile” constantly since this story dropped. I haven’t stopped thinking about the sought reptile for an hour since he escaped. Because a 5-foot long water monitor, cousin to a komodo dragon, is enormous. Think about yourself: how tall are you? Most of you are probably around five or six feet tall. This creature is as big as you are. This is a reptile that MUST be sought. And Mike Elfland wrote about it…sure. There’s a dragon on the loose, and Mike “Elfland” happened to be the first reporter on the case. We can see his game.

In the days that followed, the reptile was sought but remained missing. More details quickly emerged: the monitor lizard’s name was Goose, and he was illegally owned without a permit. Goose slithered out of a second story window in Webster, Massachusetts, and his owner either didn’t notice for several hours or failed to inform the authorities, afraid of the repercussions. The repercussions were that a small black dragon was on the loose in central Massachusetts, and the small town of Webster (population 17,000) was in a dangerous state of having too much fun. A local wag named Peter Tarbox bought a dinosaur costume and walked around dressed like a terrible lizard. People gave Tarbox what sounds like a thoroughly risky amount of high fives.

Obviously frightened off by the terrifying Tarbox, Goose disappeared for several days. He reappeared, however, in the full-color Sunday arts section (presumably the “travel” portion). Note the A+ alliteration in the headline.

From here the story gets murky. Monitor lizards love water, and can travel considerable distances—especially because, as previously established, they’re enormous. The beast was sighted, allegedly, over the border in Thompson, Connecticut. This would mean that Goose is so Massachusetts as to hassle Connecticut, or Connecticut was being so Connecticut here as to steal Massachusetts valor.

I’m going to say it: I’m a Thompson truther. On Goose’s alleged sojourn in Connecticut, no new photos were taken. And he’s a big lizard, and it’s the smartphone era—nobody snapped a pic? Nobody??? No way.

By this point, I began to hope that Goose might remain free forever. There’s something undeniably magical about the idea, I hope you’ll agree. Even though the risks to Goose himself would be significant—traffic and highways and poison and garbage, and monitor lizards aren’t native to this area, so when winter comes he would be likely to freeze and die—still! a dragon! the Questing Beast of Central Massachusetts! And if Goose were never found, then he would always remain out there, a myth; you might always run into him someday in a pond, in the woods, hissing seriously, as big as you are, ready to swallow you whole.

The people of Webster continued to have fun. Even as that spoilsport elf hunter Mike Elfland reported that the sought reptile had been spotted in Douglas, Massachusetts, we learned that Pete’s Tire & Oil in Webster was selling out of their Goose T-shirts.

I want to point out several excellent details from the Pete’s Tire & Oil article, if you missed them in my flawed photos:

1. Customer Zachary Campbell said the situation is “kind of funny, and scary at the same time because there’s a giant lizard running around.” Yes, Zach. Nailed it.

2. Small fact check: the original name of Webster Lake is probably Lake Chaubunagungamaug, and not Lake Char­gogg­a­gogg­man­chaugg­a­gogg­chau­bun­a­gung­a­maugg. In the Algonquian language used by the Nipmuc people of the region, the shorter name supposedly means either “Fishing Place at the Boundaries—Neutral Meeting Grounds” or “lake divided by islands.” The long name and the translation “You fish on your side; we fish on our side; nobody fish in the middle” is a hoax according to at least one anthropologist, but the joke has stuck around. I think we can all agree it’s Goose’s lake now regardless.

3. Please note the phrase: “It’s the most fun Webster has had in 100 years.” This is either a terrible thing to say about a town, or a great one, or maybe both at once.

Alas, Goose couldn’t evade authorities forever. On August 2, he was captured by the cops. Actually, the Massachusetts Environmental Police—a department which seems to consist of a handful of very tired, very overworked people—ended up contracting with reptile specialists. According to Mike Elfland’s reporting (of course it was Elfland, suspiciously on the hunt the whole time) Goose was lured out with bits of chicken not long after he sauntered down the street in Douglas, and now he’s being relocated to a nonprofit animal sanctuary where it sounds like he’ll receive proper care and feeding. He might even be viewable by the public—I’m not clear on this—so there’s a chance I might be able to go and see him.

But I’m heartbroken. I know it’s for the best, and Goose is safe now. But there’s less mystery in the world, if our black dragon isn’t wandering free in it. And there won’t be coverage of his escapades in the paper every day. Still, at least there is a local paper. The TV affiliates have been covering the case, but they just don’t have the same pop or style. Their headlines are flat, factual. There’s no wordplay or detailed coverage of entertaining local goofballs. There’s no joy, no silliness, no sense of what Goose has meant to the community. I love real news and good physical newspapers; I’m nostalgic for such things, and wish everyone had them.

It’s difficult to talk about “nostalgia” without people dismissing it as mindless sentiment or inherent conservativism, but I think it’s occasionally possible that certain things in the past were better than they are now. If you were to insist that every element of the present must be superior to every element of the past, then you would have to base your belief on a framework of pure linear progress—one which I think has been thoroughly discredited. It was better to have fewer parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere; it was better to have robust local media in most cities and small towns in the United States. It was better when human beings took delight and interest in the community and in the natural world around them. There is a being-in-the-worldness that feels increasingly lost these days, and that I miss. It was preferable when people were connected to a sense of physical reality which they increasingly lack.

Our human and animal neighbors anchor us to reality. Physical paper, held in the hand and delivered by hand, full of stories reported on by human beings (jury’s out in Mike Elfland’s case)² who spoke to other human beings, and found joy and interest or maybe horror and darkness in what was said—there’s simply no substitute. What you’re looking at now, before you, the disembodied black and white text of a person who most of you don’t know in real life, a voice easily deleted and forgotten by closing this tab in favor of another—it’s simply not the same.

The Telegram & Gazette isn’t a perfect paper by any means. Their coverage of local politics is much too favorable to authorities, or rather it does a lot of the classic “gotta hear both sides” nonsense. They are, after all, conglomerate-owned. If you want the real story about Worcester politics, you have to read Bill Shaner’s acerbic newsletter “Worcester Sucks and I Love It.” But while Shaner has mentioned the wild Goose chase in brief, he doesn’t have much time for true stories of courageous animals. It’s not really a contemporary newsletter writer’s beat; it’s the kind of thing for which you need a deep journalistic bench. You need time and space and energy, an appreciation of joy and fun and menace.

Really, the sought reptile is a classic “squirrels waterskiing” segment that was such a joke in the 1990s—a silly story about local animals doing wacky things. People love stories about animals because people love animals, as we should; interactions with adorable megafauna and microfauna are one of the primary means by which we experience connection to the natural world.³ Lately, however, these interactions are increasingly unreal and unbelievable, and our connections fray. Improbable stories about animals are indeed improbable because they didn’t happen, such as viral clips of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline, or images of cardinals that look just like Santa tossed onto birding forums with “is this real?” None of it is. Our love of animals has been snatched away by fakery. Our world has become increasingly false, flat, reduced to the exact dimensions and unreality of a screen.

But maybe somewhere, beyond the edge of sight, there might indeed be a black dragon as big as yourself, fully dimensional in all his beautiful limbs, forever sought and never captured, slithering into a pond.

1. A strong contender from the Wilkes-Barre Semi-Weekly Record, dated August 18, 1905: “CAT STEALS CORN: HIS NAME IS BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, BUT HIS MORALS ARE BAD.” I will note the lack of a caption, however—and that it’s also about an animal. I guarantee that most entrants in the greatest headline/subhead/caption category will be about animals.

2. That’s right, I’m also an elf truther.

3. A recent popular post by Derek Thompson partly blamed the death of partying on women spending more facetime with their pets than with people—well, have you seen people lately, Derek? And have you seen pets? Human beings are exhausting—they’re just on their phones. Animals don’t have phones, Derek.