When I was very small, I scavenged and rummaged in old barns and sheds on the farm, looking for scraps of steel and wood to make the kinds of weapons carried by mutated turtles.
It was the 1980s, and Donatello, Leonardo, Rafael and Michelangelo were on everyone’s minds. They, along with the robe-clad rat who raised them, lived in the sewers, ate lots of pizza and fought an evil syndicate led by a man in a samurai helmet and a disembodied brain.
As my six-year-old daughter and I walked down the street the other day, many years having passed, chatting and enjoying the rain as the dog skittered around in front of us, we passed a storm sewer drain.
“What is that, dad?” she asked.
“That’s where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live, honey,” I replied, not really thinking about my answer. It was essentially the A definition for the word “sewer” in my personal dictionary. B is “a place where excess water flows” and C is “Facebook.”
A few moments elapsed, and my daughter, locked in intense and pensive thought, squeezed my hand and looked up.
“Uh, what?” she asked.
“The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
“The rain is loud, Dad,” she replied. “I don’t think I can hear you right. What are you saying?”
To me, the term rolls off the tongue. I’ve been saying it nearly all my life. And for most adults, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” has landed on the ear so many times it has lost any semblance of strangeness or foreignness. Like “ketchup” or “Coca-Cola” or “Jesus.” If you heard someone talking about an adolescent deformed samurai racoon, you would probably stop what you were doing and listen up. But a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is simply part of everyday life in the United States.
Standing next to me daughter in the rain, I sighed, fearing she might have a gaping hole in her knowledge of the world, and said it again, but more slowly.
“Teenage. Mutant. Ninja. Turtles.” What are they even teaching her in school?! I thought silently.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “And who are they?”
“Leonardo leads. Donatello does machines. Rafael is cool (but rude). Michelangelo is a party dude.”
With that, I started singing: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Heroes in a half shell. Turtle power!!!”
When I looked down, my daughter seemed a tad worried. Perhaps about her father’s mental state. Perhaps about the world in general. These are strange times, after all. “Are these turtles real? Like, in this world?”
“Well, they’re as real as any other myth or story, and we’ve talked about that before, right? Real like Poseidon or Loki?”
“Oh, right. Sure.”
With that we continued on our walk, her eyes riveted to the next storm drain we passed, into which was surging a modest, swirling river of fresh rainwater mixed with shimmering blue motor oil.
I really love nature. I grew up around animals of many kinds, from the farm beasts to the wild, skittish things that shared the forests and fields with me and my dog. The only animal that ever really underwhelmed me, if I’m being honest, was a turtle.
“He’s small,” I remember thinking. “And he doesn’t do much.” Because my early exposure to turtles had promised something very different, offering images of human-sized crime fighters who wore colorful facemasks, loved junk food and skateboarding and could perform dazzling jump kicks. In comparison, the little reptile slowly walking across the damp gravel road in front of me when I was eight didn’t stand a chance.
When I was not much older than my daughter is now, I spent many hours clanging around in old piles of equipment, dragging out old broom handles, metal and tape. With a pair of old horseshoes and a couple short rods, I made the two elegant sai used by Rafael. With two pieces of wood, a chain and a generous application of eye screws, I made Michelangelo’s nunchuks. Two lengths of metal from an old milk tank became Leonardo’s twin katanas, and the easiest weapon to forge, Donatello’s staff, was simply an old wooden broom handle. I kept a sharp eye out for toxic, neon green ooze, which everyone knew could turn normal things into extraordinary ones, transforming regular turtles into wisecracking ninjas or morphing little boys into powerful superheroes. There were no storm sewers where I lived. There were not even paved roads. But you never knew where heroes might be needed, or where they would show up.
About thirty years later, I walked down the sidewalk with my daughter, the cool rain falling gently on our shoulders.
“Do you want to get some pizza?” I asked, looking down.
“Sure.”
“Radical.”
There is a famous story, made even more famous when Stephen Hawking used it in the beginning of one of his books, about turtles. There are many versions of it, but it goes something like this:
A famous astronomer is speaking to an old woman. She explains to him that his cosmology is entirely wrong.
“The world,” she says, “rests on the back of a turtle.”
“But if you don’t mind my asking,” he replies. “What does that turtle stand on?”
“Oh, that’s very clever,” she says, a glint in her eye. “But you don’t understand. It’s turtles-turtles-turtles all the way down.”
The idea that the world sits on the back of an animal is an ancient one. Sometimes it’s the World Elephant, but often it is a turtle. Perhaps it’s merely because they have unusually rigid backs that these slow, gentle creatures have been selected to serve as an Atlas upon whom all the weight of the world presses down. Over the past few decades, the story has become almost pop in its ubiquity. It has been the title of books and even a country song by Sturgill Simpson.
But the story is one that never goes away once you hear it. Because we all feel like turtles, with the weight of the world thrust upon us for all of eternity, and it’s comforting to realize there are others holding us aloft in the cosmos, the weight of the world, plus our own weight, propped up by them. But we mustn’t fret about their plight, because they stand on the backs of others, all the way down, and upon everyone’s shoulders rests the world, but no more so on one than on any other.
As the rain began to lighten, we rounded the corner and strolled back home. The playgrounds we passed were abandoned and silent due to the pandemic. I was thinking about my old nunchuks, wondering what became of them, and what will become of me. I vaguely recall the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being very controversial when I was young. People thought they were overly irreverent, or something, and a bad influence on children. With the perspective of thirty-plus years, the ’80s now seem like a quaint time in which to live, and being worried about turtles seems a bit silly. And I realize that my childhood is as far away today as the 1950s were to me then, and the 1950s had more in common with the Middle Ages than with 2020, except for the plague part.
While the 1980s are, in my memory, a safe and warm time, filled with cartoon characters and pizza and homemade swords, I know they were also one of the most perilous times in human history. Nuclear war was a constant threat. AIDS and other diseases filled people with a sense of genuine and warranted terror. Crime and poverty were rampant. People in the 1980s lived lives that were nearly ten years shorter than they are today, and they had far less access to food, money, art and information. If you got lost in the woods or took a wrong turn at any point in 1986, you had no cell phone and would have to simply curl up in a ball and die of exposure, I think. I can’t quite remember all the details. I was young.
It was a time that felt like the end of the world, in some ways, when heroes were reptiles that had fallen into toxic sludge, and everything seemed to be on the brink of collapse. And yet, for me and billions of other people, it was only the beginning of a long life, a life which rests on the backs of little moments, which rest on the backs of other little moments, walking in the rain and talking about turtles, all the way down.
Matt Geiger’s debut book won First Prize in the 2018 Midwest Book Awards and was named as a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the American Book Fest. His most recent book is a collection of stories and essays. He is also the winner of numerous journalism awards and one axe-throwing competition. He has an abnormally high percentage of Neanderthal DNA. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife and daughter.