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(as told by Mabel June Crowe, Historian Emerita of Piedmont, Alabama)

Now, everybody thinks they know how Terrapin Creek got its name, but everybody is wrong. I should know, because I’ve written three pamphlets and one unauthorized history about it. All of them contradict each other, but accuracy’s a moving target when you’re chasing the truth.

The city council once asked me to write an official version for the bicentennial, and I did. They rejected it on account of “implausibility,” which is their word for “too interesting.”

The story they like to tell, the one you’ll see printed on the welcome sign, is that early settlers saw a snapping turtle sunning on a rock and decided to call the place Terrapin Creek. Quaint, simple, utterly uninspired.

But the real story, the one the sign won’t tell you, is this:

Back in 1819, when Piedmont wasn’t much more than a muddy crossroads and a tavern with ambitions, a trapper named Gideon Moss wandered in. He was tall, thin, and carried a musket longer than most men’s tempers. He said he’d followed the creek down from the hills chasing a “talking terrapin” that promised him eternal luck. Folks figured he’d been drinking, which was true, but that didn’t mean he was lying.

Gideon swore that turtle could speak plain English, though it preferred philosophy and hymns. He said it told him:

“If you follow the water ‘til it runs clear as a baby’s conscience, you’ll find what you’re owed.”

So, he followed it all the way to the big bend where the willows droop like old women. He set up camp, caught fish, and waited three days. On the fourth, he vanished. His musket turned up years later in the mud, but no bones, no boots, no sign of Gideon.

From then on, strange things happened by the creek. Lights at night. Voices when the fog rolled in. Fishermen claimed to hear hymn-singing from beneath the current. Children said they saw a man with a turtle shell glistening on his back, walking the shallows.

Now, that’s the good version. The better version. The version told mostly by the Dunn family, whose grasp on reality is as slippery as a catfish, claims Gideon became the terrapin, cursed to crawl the banks forever for confusing ambition with greed.

And as for me? Well, I’ve lived by that water for seventy years. I’ve seen the fog lift off it like breath from a sleeping giant, and I’ve heard the bullfrogs drone like mourners in a choir. Once, I even found a turtle shell with a hole clean through the top, like a bullet wound. I keep it on my mantel to remind myself that truth and legend share the same muddy boots.

The young people in town, the ones who come through on their way to somewhere shinier, they don’t believe a word of it. They laugh when they hear my stories, though they still lock their car doors when they park by Second Bridge.

But come the right kind of night when the mist is thick, the moon’s low, and the cicadas have gone quiet, you can stand on that bank a while, you might hear something. A hymn. A word. Or maybe just the low murmur of a creek that remembers more than it tells.

And if you listen close, you’ll understand why we never tried to rename it. Terrapin Creek already knows who it is. And that’s more than you can say for most folks.

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