Memories of the giant turtle

My memoir Keeping the Tryst has been getting around some.  I confess, its biggest audience seems to be composed of people who have known me, friends and family.  It's gotten some other purchases, though it's far from being a "bestseller".  Still, I've been happy.  And one never knows how far a book will get in the larger scheme of things.  A lot of books started out selling small but went on to bigger things.

One of the most consistent remarks that I've gotten about Keeping the Tryst has been about my memory.  This book covers half a century of the lifetime of an American boy, and it does so in at times almost microscopic detail.  As I said in the first chapter, I have no idea how it is that I remember some things so vividly and clearly.  It just "is".  Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: unstuck in time.  One moment I'm here in the present and the next I'm anywhen else down my timeline, and sometimes it's as if I can see a little bit ahead, too.  The memories come often without anything precipitating them.

Like this latest one, that has me stumped about why it should come to mind many decades later.

A few nights ago I remembered something that I saw on television, at an age so young that I couldn't pinpoint what year.  It had to do with a giant green turtle and a beautiful woman with glowing green eyes.  It was a movie.  And for some reason it made me sad, like it had a tragic ending.

I knew that I wasn't imagining this.  It's something that has crossed my mind a number of times over the years, without warning.  This was a thing that I had seen with my own eyes and it must have been before I ever started school at the age of five.  And it was haunting me.

Why?

The other day, the memory came again.  And finally, at long last, I plugged what little I knew into Google and braced myself for whatever might come.

Well, it turned out that I was not the only poor soul who had gone looking for the giant turtle and the girl with glowing green eyes.  Many others had too.  And so I followed the trail...

It led to one Michael Summers, proprietor of the Dangerous Universe website.  And with his post from 2000 titled "Dream of the Big, Huge Turtle" the final link in the long chain going back to my childhood snapped into place.

It was a movie after all.  Its title is The Bermuda Depths.  And it was broadcast on the American television network ABC on January 27th, 1978.

That was a few months shy of my fourth birthday.

I read the article on Wikipedia and found out more...

The Bermuda Depths is a science-fiction/fantasy/horror film, starring among other people Carl Weathers (who was in between the first two Rocky movies) and Burl Ives.  It's about a young man who grew up on Bermuda, meeting a girl named Jennie when he was younger, and after some time away comes back to the island.

I remembered that much, too.

And then there was that monstrously enormous turtle.  That more than anything else is what made the impression on me.  It was a terrifying spectacle.  I remember there being a fight with it toward the end of the movie.  And I think that in a way the turtle won.

I have memories of watching the final scenes and crying.  I cried a lot, as a child. I was very sensitive.  Sometimes I would cry listening to a song.  It just needed to sound sad enough.  Songs that don't faze me and haven't for a long time since then.  The Bermuda Depths made me cry, and I don't know why.

I suppose that I'm going to have to watch this, sometime or other, maybe in the near future.  I did a looksee and it's available on DVD at Amazon for thirteen bucks.  Maybe when I do see it, the real last pieces of this movie that has at times haunted me unbidden will fall into being.  Perhaps then I will understand why memory of it has lingered and persisted for going on fifty years.

If I do see it, I'll make a post about it.  But then again, I wonder if I really should watch it.  There should be a bit of mystery in one's life.

However this goes, my memory has a name now.  And I know that I wasn't imagining it.

EDIT 07-18-2026 02:06 AM: I was so startled by discovering that I hadn't hallucinated it that it didn't occur to me until just now that there might be clips of The Bermuda Depths on YouTube.  But there are some.  So I'll post that link and lure others to also partake of the madness.

(Turtle picture generated with Google Gemini)

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Perfect memory incident for 06/13/2026

Tonight it's another case of perfect recall come unbidden.  I've been told that how this translated into the writing for my book is pretty astonishing.  Sometimes I feel this is what it was like for Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five.  One moment I'm here in the present, then Bam! I'm in the past, reliving the moment.  And sometimes it's like flashes of the future come too.

So here's the latest trip back in time...

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on this night in 1992.  I was in Virginia Beach, there to see a friend I had been known in middle school and high school until she and her family relocated (her father was a Methodist minister and he was given a new church to pastor).  My sister and I had come to see Dana graduate from high school.  Anyway, that afternoon my friend and her family, and my sister and I went to the beach and had a great time.  We got back to their home and had pizza for dinner.  Then Dana's brother and I spent an hour just chillin' and watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (the episode was "The Masterpiece Society").  After the show we entertained ourselves, like a particularly cutthroat game of UNO at my friend's kitchen table.

Then the next morning we said our goodbyes to each other and my sister and I found our way back to US 58 and the six hour drive home.

I bought a Super Soaker while we were in Virginia Beach.  I still have it.  It's in perfect working order.

For once a pleasant memory.  I should try to evoke them more often.

Edit:  I forgot to mention how that evening I was wearing my favorite The Far Side t-shirt...

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My scary memory, again

As of five minutes ago I have finished drinking my first cup of coffee since 8:20 p.m. on March 5th, 1993.

If we were to take a time machine back to that moment in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, that's what you would find me doing.

I am sooo not kidding, folks.  As I say in the first chapter of my book, I have no idea why I remember some things with such pristine clarity.  It's as if I'm reliving them in the here and now.

The coffee I had then was a French vanilla brew.  This time it was a mocha-something.  Be kind, this is the very first coffee I've bought on my own so I'm not sure about a lot of things involving the stuff.  But last weekend a good friend told me I need to get some coffee and real tea into my diet.  She said it would improve me mentally.  So, we'll see where it goes.

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