Just Came Here To Use The Word "Muck," Dear Reader

But I kind of want the blog to be stories about me catching turtles in a pond in New Hampshire when I was about 12, and such.

Those painted turtles dove fast. As fast as turtle doves do dive...

You needed one kid, leaning precariously over the bow of the canoe; fishing net poised for a plunge into the black waters, or more accurately; the waters that always looked black because there was black shit at the bottom. The pond was surrounded by hills, forested with the kind of trees that shed their leaves every fall. 

They sink to the bottom and turn into the black "muck" that you can smell if you are swimming and get a nose-full of water and can taste a little bit of in the perch and pickerel and occasional "rock" bass that came out of there.

So, we couldn't see the bottom, and whatever depths of water the turtles were diving to, after dipping hastily off the bogs they had hitherto been sunning on, could have been 30 feet, for all we knew, because all you could see was black, when you looked down.

The canoe would be set at a slow drift towards the sunning turtles, with us sitting motionless, until such a time that the encroachment of a large aluminum object that must have looked like The Titanic to a painted turtle, created enough alarm in them -their alarms seemingly all set at the same sensitivity level, or perhaps they were following the cue of an alpha tortoise, if there's such a thing; or maybe the most skittish turtle was enough to spook the others by being the first to dive- that dive, they did. And pretty fast.

At that point, the sitting perfectly still part is pointless, and the kid in the rear starts to paddle as hard as he can, full steam ahead, With a good enough surge of speed, the turtles can be reached before they are more than the length of a kids arm plus the handle on a fishing net down into the blackness that looked like it was over your head, and always gave me the impression of us hunting turtles in octopus' ink...

So, if I come up with stories such as the turtle one, where I might be able to kindle the same excitement and adrenaline rush in the readers, as they vicariously plunge their nets into the blackness, aiming for a quickly diving turtle. 

And then, we would take them back to the little camp-house and race them against each other. That's a lame sport, by the way. 

There seems to be no way to motivate a turtle to either run towards some goal or away from some danger. They're probably not thinking so much about the lettuce and strawberries at the finish line but; is it worth sticking your neck out for, type of thing. They were recently snatched right out of the water, then swallowed by one huge-ass sardine, so; they're not always ready to race in that circumstance...

But the turtle is also not going to stick his head out to try to outrun any threat. Outrunning is probably not one of their go-to survival strategies. Not in their wheelhouse. 

Instead, it's going to pull its head in as a defense; and doesn't it suck if that's the turtle you have an ice cream sandwich riding on?