One of my favorite images from mythology is the world-supporting tortoise, common to a number of disparate cultures and traditions. It’s featured in creation stories from China, India, and more than one of the original nations of North America. Among these are the Lenape people of the Delaware Valley, the area I live in, the area they were uprooted from between two and three centuries ago.
And although I’m pretty sure that the world-tortoise has been reshaped and reassembled on its journey into our Western sensibilities, probably in the most ham-fisted way possible, its ancient core of genius is still visible.
Can’t you feel it echoing through time? Through forms?
What I mean is, in the 21st century it’s still possible to equate them—the gentle earth-green curve of a turtle’s carapace, like living obsidian, and the rounded pool of our planet’s backside, mottled with mountains and deserts and dying forests, observed from space.
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September. Walks by the lake with my kids are harder to come by, but we make them happen. We look for turtles basking on logs. One or two can still be found.
“Someday we’ll get binoculars and see them up close,” I promise the twins. But we’re talking about a sizeable investment. It’ll have to be next summer.
“Can we go to the pet store? Can we go to the pet store?”
The local Pets Plus doubles as a free-admission zoo. We go all the time but never buy anything, because as hard-hearted as it sounds we don’t currently allow pets in the house. We don’t have the money and the environment is already too chaotic. The kids hate us for it but that’s life. Anyway, you can’t buy turtles at pet stores in New Jersey, it’s a state law.
Meanwhile our resident scholars continue to gobble up all kinds of useful facts on reptiles and amphibians. They love reading about reptiles and amphibians, watching shows about reptiles and amphibians, making cardboard habitats for as yet un-acquired reptiles and amphibians. If they could forget about math and spelling and study only reptiles and amphibians all day, they’d be sleepless with delight.
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I think back to a day earlier in the year, before summer. The twins were still in first grade. I was driving a block or so away from our house and spotted a young box turtle struggling in the street. Got out, picked it up, the Great Eco-Savior in his gas-guzzling Oldsmobile.
Jubilantly I anticipated the end of the school day. I couldn’t wait for those kids to get off the bus and hear about the living treasure we had at home.
It seemed to go as planned. We brought the critter out of its Tupperware motel and let it crawl in the backyard a while. Then we took it down to the lake (after I called various state and county agencies to determine the best option) and let it go, off to one side of a trail.
With some belated reading I learned that our release site might have been too wet. Box turtles like dry places and, worse, they don’t do well in the reorientation department – you’re supposed to put them back exactly where you find them. I regretted it but didn’t say anything to the kids.
The fact is there really weren’t any other choices. I wasn’t going to put Shelly back on the street or plunk him/her down on somebody’s front lawn.
Now and then one of the twins will say, “I wonder how Shelly’s doing.” “Fine, I’m sure,” I respond. My wife reassures me that Shelly is tougher than I think.
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I “rescued” another turtle several years earlier. It had dragged itself halfway across Route 29 north of Titusville and I pulled over to get it. I knew even less about turtles then. Squeamish that it would be half-crushed or asphalt-fried or something, I almost didn’t want to pick it up. But it was in good shape. I looked around for the best place to take it, finally choosing a stream at the bottom of a fifteen-foot embankment.
Down, down, down – the helpless terrapin’s descent, secure as it was in my grip, had to have been alarming. In retrospect I realize it didn’t want to swim or bathe. It wanted to scratch its way along the sun-soaked cement, it wanted to be up in the daylight. But the stream was the best I could do at the time, ignoramus that I am.
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So it would seem for all self-congratulatory episodes in life. We think of ourselves as carriers of compassion and knowledge, but what are we really carrying? Aren’t we the ones being carried? Will we ever outgrow the bone-headed Dutch missionary, scribbling in his journal about the inferior cosmologies he encounters?
It’s hard to say. We ride along, we gawk, we get out and try to help. We barely comprehend what’s at hand. We resume our trivial journeys through the universe.
And yet what’s wrong with trivial, if we’ve accepted it, if we realize that small is big and big is small? Seasons pass and we wait faithfully and ritualistically on street corners for the slow yellow vessels that bring us our children. We might complain about the rain or the cold or central New Jersey’s blast-furnace heat, but the ritual is steeped in love. The bus doors fold open and for a moment love is the only thing we know. We offer rides home on our aging, curving backs.
We allow cities to grow there, we develop complex cultures and new ways to communicate as we travel, we build schools and highways and mazes of bizarre information. We pray that it’s all useful, helpful to the innocent people we’re delivering.
The sun goes down and small silhouetted hands point skyward next to ours. The Hunter, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper – they all rotate in the obsidian, full of warnings and reassurances about the world we stand on.
