Chapter 22

The Ghost in the Trash Can Lid

I was hoping one day I could set him free

But in the end, that’s what he did for me

“The Possum Song”

Each of us wanted to be the hero who landed The Ghost. The Ghost was an incredibly elusive softshell turtle. Though not as intimidating as its cousin, the alligator snapping turtle, it captured our imaginations in a way that could only be eclipsed by the occasional gator coming up onto the bank or an extra-large water moccasin sunning itself next to our fishing buckets.

This was no ordinary turtle. It was big; nearly two feet long, head-to-tail, and a foot and a half wide. It was broad and, unlike most turtles, almost flat across the top, except at the edges where it rolled off like a roof. It was alien-like with the head of a snake and a protruding cartoon snout. Its slightly rounded, rubbery back looked like a dark trash can lid.

On any given day, we’d find a dozen or more turtles, like the Suwannee cooters and yellow-bellied sliders, fighting for a warm, dry spot on the cypress logs. They only reluctantly disappeared back into the water when we made some move to intercept them, and then they’d pop right back upon their log and start the sunning process all over again.

The softshell was different. He vanished for weeks at a time. We thought the alligator had made a meal of him, or that he had dared to swim into the large drainpipe and wound up in some koi pond in China. Then, just when we thought he was gone forever, someone would catch a quick glance of his green back gleaming in the sun as he broke through the water’s swampy surface or of his snorkeling nose trading the broader risk of exposure for the air he needed to disappear back into the depths. That one glimpse was always enough to reignite our interest in capturing him.

Even at ten, and maybe especially at ten, we had a deep love for nature and the need to protect it. Despite that, maybe due to ego or the adventurer inside us all, none of us could resist the urge to pull that prehistoric monster from its watery lair. We usually spotted him toward the middle of the pond, just after sunrise, on the edge of our favorite bass weeds. He surfaced unlike anything else in the water, with a ripple and a shine that was unmistakable.

I think it got used to our predictable efforts to catch it, like floating a piece of bread by its snout or drifting a wide net toward it. Unmoved by our futile attempts, The Ghost would sometimes stay at the surface, sluggishly taunting us. We shouted at the top of our little lungs whenever we got close to him.

“I think I got him this time!”

“You guys, come here! I got The Ghost!”

Time and time again, that alien trash can lid cut us off mid-celebration, diving for the bottom like a Trident submarine.

We were able to get close to him, even right next to him, but we never seemed to be able to close the deal. We were beginning to believe that he was uncatchable, and that he would wind up becoming the granddaddy of all granddaddy turtles generations later. If we couldn’t catch him, then we were certain that no boy or man alive could. We managed to be somewhat magnanimous in celebrating most of our successes but were outright blowhards when it came to every failure.

Early one Saturday morning, very late in the summer, the status quo between The Ghost and Sons of Starmount changed forever. John Maples and I managed to get up and out to the pond before anyone else and staked out our respective spots at the end of the dock for some early morning fishing. With a collection of cane poles and Zebco rods pulling double duty in the deeper waters just off the dock, John and I were poised to fill another bucket full of bream.

I was standing a few feet from the end of the dock, working my line out near some pond brush and almost fell in the water when I heard John scream at the top of his lungs, “Hey Mark, this ain’t no bream!” His round, red-and-white plastic bobber disappeared into the depths with the kind of speed that was uncharacteristic of even the biggest sunfish.

I yelled back with similar exuberance, “You think you got a bass on there, man?”

“I don’t know. I think it might be one of the gators,” he replied.

John definitely had something serious at the end of that line: his cane pole was bending beyond its known properties, and the Sunbeam bait now felt like a ship’s anchor, testing all we knew about the depth of that blue hole. We debated the possibilities: it could be some huge mutant bream, a prized largemouth bass, or like John said at first, one of the alligators taking its turn at the bait. We never contemplated the possibility that it could be The Ghost on the end of that line. That is, until we saw the water oddly displaced by a giant green bubble bursting to the surface.

“It’s the turtle!” I screamed. My voice miraculously found a pitch far above its already Vienna Boys’ Choir shrillness. “You got it, John. Man, you got it. Don’t lose it!”

“Oh my God, I got it, I got it,” John shot right back.

Though we had all longed to be the one to capture the softshell turtle, I was thrilled that John had it on the line. In the excitement of the moment, I had forgotten that I wanted to be the hero who brought it in. Now all I wanted was for John to land that beast, under my expert guidance, of course.

Algae-colored air bubbles finally found their release, wildly disturbing the pond’s surface, followed by flashes of yellow and green from the turtle’s back, mixing with the golden hues of the midmorning sun. I tried to give John the advice of a boy several years his senior, but he had the turtle solidly on the line and was beyond my instruction. He alternated slack and tension on the line like some deep-sea fishing pro.

By the time he had wrestled this historic catch into my dip net and we had it safely out of the water, the rest of the boys had begun to gather on the dock. There it was, with its two ball-bearing eyes and snorkel-snout, lying unceremoniously limp on the wooden planks. It had looked huge enough splashing around in the water, but once its soft, leathery body met with the gravity of the dry dock, it seemed to flatten out to twice its size.

We spent a considerable amount of time that summer tracking and trying to capture the great softshell. Now, in a matter of moments and quite unexpectedly, John had successfully ended that quest. The many months’ worth of advice and untested theories were now officially moot. Instead, we turned our sights and soapbox musings toward how best to get a well-embedded hook out of this particular reptile’s mouth.

The turtle seemed to have swallowed the hook and it became embedded deep in his hose-like throat. Though his mouth looked like it could only gum us to death, his extremely long neck made him look a lot like a snake, which gave us second thoughts about our plan to finger sweep his mouth. After several frustrating minutes, we decided that we needed to haul the creature back to my house, hook, line, and all, to seek more experienced help.

We stood around my dad on the back patio as he grabbed the turtle’s neck in one hand and, with extra-long needle-nose pliers in the other, quickly separated metal from mouth. He made it look way too easy, which prompted several predictable cries of, “Well, we could have done that,” and, “I think we got it loose for ya.”

We talked about the great catch as if it had been a group effort. In some ways, it was. We had collectively stalked, cajoled, tempted, and otherwise surrounded The Ghost for months on end. Between the pond’s limited size and the overwhelming force that was the Sons of Starmount, it was always just a matter of time before The Ghost was no longer just a spirit animal. The never-ending challenge had in fact ended, and the legend of a once uncatchable creature now lay subjugated by a young boy’s casual, early morning cast.

Once the backslapping and celebrating were over, a question confronted us that had never occurred to our young minds before: what would we do with it now?

We could return it to Alligator Pond, but that seemed too anticlimactic, and we needed to be able to set our expeditionary sights anew. We could put it in the creek that flowed through the woods, but the thought of that turtle eventually returning to the waters we had fought so hard to extricate it from just seemed like a merry-go-round that we weren’t interested in riding again. We could kill it and make turtle soup out of it, but thankfully, that plan was a nonstarter with my dad. Besides, none of us knew how to make turtle soup, and even if we did, we weren’t sure any of us would dare eat it.

Dad talked to us about the power we were feeling, having bested the beast and now gloating over it as it began to dry on the blistering concrete patio. Then he started to talk about the power we would feel in letting it go. With my dad’s guidance, we hatched a plan to release the turtle into a much better environment. After all the turtle had been through that day, it seemed only fair that, in the end, it should also be able to call it a win.

Dad contacted our local zoo. And the Tallahassee Junior Museum was no ordinary zoo. A group of teachers and civic groups had set it up to be an educational habitat that could serve as both a sanctuary for the animals and an outdoor classroom for area students. Located on a series of lakes with reconditioned old buildings, the zoo grew to be the crown jewel of Tallahassee’s outdoor attractions. It would eventually boast an expansive elevated boardwalk winding its way over creatures large and small, including red wolves and the famed Florida panther.

The zoo’s waters were the perfect place for us to release our prized catch. We looked for The Ghost every time we visited, just as we had when our sights were set on capturing him from Alligator Pond. On a few occasions, we even caught a glimpse of our dear old friend.

Under the right conditions, softshell turtles can live for many years, sometimes more than thirty. I hope The Ghost enjoyed many years in the zoo’s three lakes and side swamps. Maybe his luck in surviving a young boy’s hunting expedition led to an unusually long life, and he’s still there, ball-bearing eyes, snorkel-nose, and all.

A plaque hung on the wall in the lobby of the Zoo’s visitors center. My friends back in Tallahassee say it finally got replaced by some other display. But for nearly twenty years, the names of the Sons of Starmount hung amid congratulatory words in honor of our first effort at safeguarding the wild creatures we had come to love. The feeling of battling nature and temporarily conquering it was electrifying and intoxicating, but my father was right: releasing and relocating our grand softshell brought new and different feelings of excitement. We learned that letting a creature go could be as exhilarating as the catch itself; the pride it leaves behind, as adrenaline-filled as the hunt. That lesson in conservation stuck with us all during our shared time on Starmount, and for many of us, it has lasted a lifetime.

Stewardship of the natural world around us and the ownership of our decisions were all on the line in my backyard that Saturday. The important question of, “What do we do with it now?” exponentially grew into a far greater question of how we would define ourselves when presented with the choice between unnecessary cruelty and thoughtful compassion. It is a large, existential question, one weighty and often complicated. On that day, a bunch of kids responded with a simple ethical answer, worthy of many of life’s problems.

Let it go.