When I was 16, my family moved up to Massachusetts. Within a few weeks of arriving, I met a kid and we became friends. He took me to a lake one day, and we went swimming...I had a ball. I had spent most of my life in the ocean around Navy bases, and didn’t do a lot of swimming in fresh water, so it was different and fun.
There were two small lakes separated by a causeway with a road, and there was a big pipe connecting the two probably six feet wide that you could swim through and come out the other side in a different lake. I don’t know why, but it seemed novel and fun!
I am so nearsighted I cannot see pretty much anything, but given that I wore those old military issue black plastic BCD (Birth Control Device) glasses which I had no way to keep from losing, I had to take them off when I went swimming.
As we got out, I saw a bunch of rocks nearby when I put my glasses on, and I said “Hey, I didn’t see those rocks there...I didn’t think it was that shallow!” and he said “What rocks?” When I pointed to them, he said “Oh man, those are snappers! I didn’t know they had them here!”
Damned if they weren’t a group of huge snapping turtles that looked as big as hubcaps!
I never went swimming in that lake again, and that has been nearly 45 years now! All I can think of every time I remember that is the Chuck Berry song...
“One day swimming cross turtle creek, man, them snappers all around my feet...sure was hard swimmin’ cross that thing, with both hands holdin’ my ding-a-ling-a-ling!”
LOL, do I seem fixated with these things????? I swear, the moment I realized those things were snapping turtles, I thought I had been close to being an involuntary vanguard of the transsexual movement!
(In all honesty, I have no idea about snapping turtle behavior, if they would have bitten us or run the other way, but they seem ornery enough and dangerous enough to bite people for just being in the same zip code with them!)