I want to learn that rebel yell for the supermarket.
More info and more video of the Turtle Man
In a world without the Crocodile Hunter, there has been since 2006 a swashbuckling-swamp-hero fame vacuum waiting to be filled.
Now comes Ernie Brown Jr., a rogue naturalist of sorts who thinks he might just be able to step in and be that guy.
The man from Lebanon calls himself, variously, “Kentucky’s best-kept secret” and “the poorest famous guy around.”
Mostly, though, he’s just The Turtle Man, known for being paid in gas money to go on his intrepid forays cleaning out Kentucky’s troubled farm ponds plagued by apple-stealing, horse-biting, cow udder-clutching, jaw-snapping turtles.
He works only with his hands, in a job few men in the world are equipped or willing to do.
It is so rare – and, he imagines, so entertaining to watch – that he has his own superhero name, his own soon-to-be-working Web site, and his own imagination working on what he has to do to be famous.
“I don’t kill it,” says The Turtle Man. “I only catch it. Don’t never torture nothing. That’s my name of the game. That’s how you stay into it. Keep people liking you.”
Entertainment is sometimes just that simple, he figures. “Most people use cane poles, jugs, stakes and hooks.” Not The Turtle Man.
He invented his method: Look “for (air) bubble trails, dive on top of them, and it’s a tug of war from there.”
Actually, from there he uses his brains, his biceps and his back as well as his finely tuned sense of where to look, even when underwater with his eyes closed.
He figures he’s darn near halfway to Hollywood.
Somebody in Iraq gave him a shout-out while CNN’s cameras were on. He’s already been seen on YouTube, and two disc jockeys on a Dallas radio station wrote a tune that The Turtle Man likes to play for anyone willing to listen.
He has his own signature rebel yell and a “Snapper-licious” logo. As silly and circus-themed as all that might seem, the point is, people need him. Horses really do get bitten on the lips. Cows do get bitten on the udders. Ornamental birds get bitten, and small pets get killed.
It’s why you have to respect the turtle. And why the public has to understand what a rare and dying thing The Turtle Man is doing and what a rare and dying job he is preserving.
“I’m kind of like a warrior, like Robin Hood,” says The Turtle Man. “I bring a turtle out of this pond, put him in another where he won’t do no violence.”
It’s cold this late autumn morning when he’s out to show his stuff. And that’s good because the turtle has a fighting chance and the audience, whoever it is that gathers, likes a fair fight.
“Turtles have three natural enemies: the sun, the bulldozer and,” he adds after a little prompting, “The Turtle Man.”
Most times The Turtle Man wins, though he’s been bitten 25 times in his 36 years of wrestling reptiles. “Let’s see, one got me in the butt back in 2004. Didn’t see him. Sat down on him. He bit my butt and I was walking on water,” he says, laughing and pointing at his war-torn pants.
It doesn’t take long for what The Turtle Man calls “live action” to ensue, when he’s slogging through waist-high mud and picking out turtles who think they’ve already camped in for the day or the season.
But, no, he yanks them out, yells that piercing, lingering victory screech and waves his prize above his head.
The turtle, for his part, rails at his own bad luck, snaps wildly at the warrior that has him by the tail and sneers at those few who might applaud the warrior’s luck.
On this day, one takes a bite out of The Turtle Man’s arm. A nip, really. No. 26, more or less. No spilled blood but a trickle. The Turtle Man openly admires the bite. A foe worthy of his time.
The Turtle Man, like a traveling showman, moves on to the next waiting throng. His appearance at a Lincoln County family reunion is set up by his manager.
The family seems a bit startled by the way he looks, first; his yell, second; and his special brand of entertainment, finally, when he rolls up in his truck, muddy from stem to stern, showing off the reptiles he’s already bagged that morning.
Do they want to go looking for turtles with The Turtle Man? Indeedy they do. On a hay trailer parked near a silo on an edge of a slimy, stinking pond, as family members marvel around her, Lynn Philpot of Cincinnati wonders aloud: “I hope this is very lucrative because I wouldn’t do it.
Who would get into that nasty water? Does he have a day job?” He does. He works long days at a sawmill.
Another family member wants to know if he is crazy. Another wants to know if he is single.
It is a fine afternoon in the waning days of 2008, and Philpot’s family has the forever memory of how 80-year-old Nana grabbed a clean handkerchief and held a freshly caught turtle and how 7-year-old Hunter rethought his career choice. Being a pharmacist, it seems, has nothing on being like this guy who gets to get filthy and rowdy and gross out Aunt Lynn, all at the same time.
“Another successful entertainment” for Ernie Brown Jr., aka The Turtle Man, who, it seems, is on some kind of a quest and learning all the while.
Finding turtles is easy.
Being famous is hard.