"Excuse Me, Ma'am, Are You Using Those Cranberries?”

Seahorses are creatures I know very little about. I do know they seem to stay alive longer when constantly immersed in an aqueous solution other than pickle brine, Coors beer or gasoline.

Don't ask...

It is my understanding that they are normally captured in the ocean, hence, the name seahorses, rather than pondhorses or the generic form, waterhorses. While I can't actually prove that seahorses aren't native to smaller bodies of water such as beaver ponds, reservoirs, etc., I think they prefer salt water, primarily. The reasons for this are unknown to me, but if I had to venture a guess, I'd say it would most likely have something to do with chemistry or possibly biology.

In junior high, we didn't study seahorses much, maybe because I grew up in the Rocky Mountains. We had a lot of beaver ponds, but no real oceans to speak of, unless you include that gravel pit over by Lochbuie, which I always thought tasted kind of salty when I swallowed some. Myles Nuttall and I snuck in there often to swim. Myles was a year older than me and knew almost everything, since his father was in the Air Force. He assured me that if we got caught, we wouldn’t go to jail, although the same couldn't be said for our fathers.

I remember thinking that might be neat.

I dove down to see if I could touch the bottom, and I think I may have seen a waterhorse once, but it may have been just a piece of glass or duckweed or something, I'm not sure, the water was pretty murky. Plus, I had to concentrate on avoiding all those sunken barrels. Our parents tried to discourage us from swimming in there, since so many kids had drowned. That eight-foot fence around it was hard to climb, too, but that's another story. Personally, I think the warning signs they put up were just to keep us kids from having fun.

What exactly is hazardous waste, anyway?