MOULTRIE, Ga.  —  

A while back I stopped by a spot on the Ochlocknee River to reminisce. It was a spot that held a lot of fond memories for me — a spot where my dad and I used to launch our boat in pursuit of bluegill and redbreast bream.

On this day, there were several guys huddled around something on a sandbar. And there was a Department of Natural Resources officer there as well. My first thought was that they had pulled a body from the willow-choked stream. 

 I was very relieved to see that it was not a body. It was a very large turtle that had entangled itself on a catfish line. 

This species was what is commonly known as an alligator snapping turtle. It looks like something pre-historic. Its shell has ridges that resemble an alligator, thus its moniker. It probably has a scientific name in Latin, but I’ve never looked it up. 

This particular turtle was so big, it took two of the guys to move it onto the sandbar. Its head was as big as my two fists. One of the guys showed me where its powerful jaws had taken a chunk out of a wooden boat paddle.

The DNR officer said this turtle could be 125 to 150 years old.

Wow! I was looking at a creature that was around when Robert E. Lee was still alive. This same turtle could have very well stolen bait from my great-grandfather’s hook, given time and place. 

Some research told me that these turtles have changed very little if any over the past one million years. Now some of my fundamentalist friends think the earth is only 5,000 years old so for their sakes let me just say that these turtles haven’t changed since Kirk Douglas was a baby.

Now I grew up on this river and yes, I’ve seen a few alligator-snapping turtles. I’ve even had a few to try to take my fish stringer away from me. 

But I guess I had never seen one this large in its natural surroundings, nor had I considered one’s age. 

So I asked the fellows what they were going to do with it. You know some people eat turtle. They say it taste a lot like chicken.

They just kind of shrugged their shoulders as if they had not considered their next move. The DNR guy suggested that they put it back in the river. I quickly supported his suggestion. I told them we should respect something that old that was still living. 

But one of the guys showed only a couple of teeth when he grinned, and I quickly assumed he didn’t speak Latin either. He would take some convincing. So my challenge would be to make him think it was his idea to release the creature back to the wilds, and it would give him some sense of being a hero. It worked.

And so they teamed up and slid the turtle back into the shallows. It quickly slipped into the deeper, root-beer-colored water and disappeared.

“You did the right thing,” I told them. 

So driving home I thought about a living creature that could be 150 years old. That was back when the U.S. bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million and probably a case of Tennessee sipping whisky to boot. 

And I wondered what went through that turtle’s mind that day. I don’t know if turtles can think, but then there are some people I wonder about as well. I’m pretty sure that turtle didn’t live 150 years being stupid. So I wondered if humans would live longer if we were as smart as turtles?

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)