My Story
Craig, J

>>JENNIFER: Hi, name is Jennifer Craig and I'm with the Aiken Writing Project in South Carolina. The story I'd like to share is a personal narrative and when I'm teaching my kids personal narratives this is always the one that I give. It starts back a long time ago as far as my kids are concerned, back in '96 when I was sixteen and driving to school through the back woods of South Carolina. It was an early morning, it had just rained, and I always looked out for turtles after it just rained on the roads, we can save them. Me and my girlfriend were in the car and sure enough there was this big - looks like a rock in the road - we're coming up on this looking rock and I'm slowing down and it's the biggest, ugliest turtle I've ever seen in my life. It is an alligator snapping turtle and I didn't know these things existed. Well, we weren't one to judge something by the way it looked so we pulled off to the side of the road and we were going to get this turtle out of the way. Well this thing hissed at us like it was an angry cat, it was crazy, but we weren't going to stop, we were not going to be deterred at 7 o'clock in the morning. So we grabbed a big stick and we were poking it trying to get it off the road. Meanwhile, the traffic is backing up, we're in the road stopping everybody. Horns are honking, they were finally starting to go around us and we were about to give up hope for this poor turtle and leave it to fend for itself and this pickup truck pulls up, old pickup truck, some guys are in the back obviously going to work. They hop out of the truck; we were a little anxious at first because they don't know if they were going to help us or not and sure enough one of them just walks into the woods and gets a big tree limb, comes over and puts it in front of the turtle's face and the turtle bites down on this tree limb and won't let go. The man picks up the turtle with both hands, it's huge, slings it into the bed of the truck and we're like, "Oh, ok, well thanks for getting him out the road." We're thinking, well at least it's not going to die in the road like that. Then we said, "Well what were you planning on doing with the turtle, because it's not going to make a very good pet?" And they said, "Oh no, honey, that's going to make good stew later for dinner." My friend and I just kind of looked at each other and we hung our heads and we had to drive to school with the notion that we got the turtle out of the road, we pretty much took him out of the frying pan and into the dinner pot is what we did. So it's always a nice little story to tell the kids because they weren't expecting the ending. And that's it. [Laughing]