#I’m sure they were delighted when I eventually moved on to overnight nature camps somewhere else

[goddamnshinyrock]

flounder story, please?

well, in elementary school I went to this nature day camp at the local environmental center that my mother had worked at for years, and at one point, for reasons lost to time, the counselors had us all walking across the sandy tidal flats at the nearby state park. We were slogging through knee-deep saltwater, and I happened to be lagging well behind the group since I was a particularly shrimpy kid and that shit is hard work. I was barefoot, hands full with my shoes and dip-net, and I stepped directly on a large Summer Flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), which, alarmed, shot out from under my foot. This felt like what I can only describe as the tactile equivalent of how one of those metal ‘wobble boards’ sounds. But also slimy. I yelped, jumped, nearly toppled over backwards, dropped my shoes and net and then had to recover them, and by then the flounder was long gone. My groupmates and the counselors were so far ahead of me that they had neither seen nor heard this happen, and when I finally caught up and breathlessly told them all about it, the general consensus was that it must have been a big piece of seaweed and I just got scared.

I was slightly too well-mannered to say ‘bitch my mom is a marine biologist and produced your teaching materials, I know what I stepped on.’ but I was definitely thinking it loudly