A curious rough-skinned newt, distant relative to the mud-puppies of my childhood in the Ozarks.
What is it that etches an experience so deeply into your memory that you can recall it vividly almost 70 years later? An older boy named Mike and I trespassed across someone’s pasture land to get to the creek. We each had a Bologna sandwich we had made ourselves, and probably an apple and some potato chips, or maybe a couple soda crackers and some kind of vegetable my mom would have forced us to include in our movable feast.
It would have been a hot, dry day – those summer days in the early 1950’s were always hot and dry – and our destination was a small spring-fed stream with no name that we knew of. We would have made a day of it, heading out mid morning and not returning until the sun angle and our empty bellies told us it was nearly dinner time.
Once at the creek we first set out a minnow trap, then started wading up stream looking for crawdads, turning over countless rocks and shouting back and forth about captures or escapes in the process. The ones we did manage to catch we put in the old empty minnow bucket in which we had carried our lunch.
One of the stand-out memories of that day was the beauty of the many flat rocks in and alongside the creek. For awhile we took turns amazing each other by holding up some poor critter that had tried unsuccessfully to hide away from daylight and its predators; crawdads and mud-puppies were abundant, but we searched in vain for a snake. With the noise we were making we surely drove them off well before any encounter.
We tired of this activity after awhile and began chasing frogs, water-bugs, and anything else that moved. At one point Mike was standing on a large rock that was almost completely submerged in the deepest part of the creek. I recall being momentarily jealous that he had found such a lofty perch. Then it suddenly began moving.
In his hurry to vacate the rock and that part of the creek as fast as his soggy tennis shoes would take him, he slipped and fell headlong into the creek. By virtue of being the senior man on the excursion, he must have felt obliged to let loose a string of cuss words the likes of which I never heard around my house. I was very impressed.
I had been much closer to shore and was safely on dry land and laughing by the time he joined me. But a moment later we both stopped laughing and gazed in amazement as the biggest snapping turtle either of us had ever seen disappeared into the now roiled up down-stream waters. Long wispy strings of algae trailed behind, adding to the spookiness of the moment as it disappeared into the murk.
We were both wet and a bit subdued after that encounter, and remained very close to dry land for awhile, partly so our cloths would dry and partly to avoid any more run-ins with that dangerous critter.
At some point we must have remembered the minnow trap. We were thrilled to find it full of good sized minnows because my grandpa would buy them for a penny-a-piece, at least the few that would have still been alive by the time we got back.
As it so often seems to do, the profit motive probably hastened an end to our fun and brought that wonderful summer’s day to a close. But it still lives on in this old man’s memory.