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Beginning when I was 3 years old, and ending after I had gone away to college, my family lived at the end of a dead end road. Technically we were in the city of Charlottesville, but if you looked around you would swear you were in the country. When my friend Darrell and I were in 4th or 5th grade, we were wandering around looking for something to do, and we came upon a snapping turtle right in the middle of the road. At that time there were only three families living on my road, which had the somewhat ridiculous name of Mountain View Drive*, and the turtle was near the top of a hill. This was rather far from any water body that was big enough for it to submerge itself. But that's not what we thought about at the time. We had never seen one up close and out of the water so that we could get a good look at it. We tossed little pebbles at it and it snapped at them. We weren't dumb enough to get close. After a while, I started to worry that it was eating too many pebbles, and feeling guilty, although I don't know if it really swallowed any of them. All it was doing was lying in the road, so we got bored and left. There was small chance of it being run over, because the only car likely to go down the road past where the turtle was, would be my parents' van, and they wouldn't run over a turtle. I guess it eventually found its way to water. At least I hope so.

This turtle probably weighed something in the neighborhood of 30 lbs. I know that alligator snappers can get up to at least 400 lb. Something you would not want to meet swimming in a lake! I learned that in college. My invertebrate zoology textbook, a light-blue tome by Barnes, was full of factoids. They kept me reading.

* We lived on the side of what passes for a mountain in the Piedmont, but we couldn't "view" the Blue Ridge from there. Mostly we saw trees, and at pretty close range. And, of course, wildlife.