Here I am in a cabin on the Maine coast, needing to get this sad story off my chest. The first thing that happened this vacation week was that I watched a beautiful animal explode. My son, my nephew, and I were less than 10 minutes into what would be a six-hour drive when I glimpsed, in the middle of the right lane of Route 41, a small black object. A long-time turtle watcher, I knew it to be a painted turtle, but I didn’t have enough time to slow down and swerve around it. Its position midway, however, allowed it to pass safely under the carriage of my car and thus live another 60 seconds or so.
“Oh no! I almost killed a turtle! Gotta go back to save it!” I cried. I could hear my son heading in the direction of complaint—we were ten minutes behind Dad, and there was an informal family race on to arrive first—and then give up. He knew it was futile.
Futile, too, was my quick u-turning, pulling over, and turning on of my hazard lights in preparation for a rescue. A beige Lexus SUV was peeling around the corner from which I had just emerged, barreling toward us. I flashed a polite, “Hey there friend, slow down, please, there’s something here to pay attention to” warning, which went ignored. My flickering grew frantic as the car bore down at top speed, and I realized that I was about to witness the death of a turtle.
For the turtle’s part, he had been hustling to put one foot in front of the other as fast as possible, but his laudable efforts were, of course, much too slow. He had managed to progress just far enough across the lane so that he passed directly under the right tires of that massive tank of a vehicle. The driver continued on, unimpeded in any way by his destruction of a fragile little living thing.
Many times I have seen the results of car strikes on our most well-protected and also most vulnerable creatures, and the sight of a broken, bloody carapace never fails to break my heart. But I—we, including the horrified boys in the back—had never witnessed a turtle get blown to bits. Little sections of shell, like a detonated jigsaw puzzle, flew in every direction, and spurts of red blood rose and fell in a momentary fountain.
I was very angry.
“Bastard!” I screamed. “Who does that?” The boys were quiet in the back. There was nothing to add to my tirade, and nothing to do about the dead turtle.
I didn’t speak again for a while. Then, somewhere around the McDonalds near Blandford, I finally asked them, “Hey, did you guys bring snacks?”
That last part about my mind turning inevitably to snacks recalls for me an essay by Edward Hoagland called “The Courage of Turtles.” It is one part tribute to animal optimism, and one part catalogue of contrivances we humans come up with to ruin things for them.
In the Connecticut of Hoagland’s 1960s childhood, there were at first all sorts of turtles inhabiting all sorts of available terrain, and there was plenty of water. Then the imperatives of development dried up the turtles’ discreet, watery homes, making them susceptible to entombment by mud and capture by children. As he described it, “Most of the painted turtles of Mud Pond, who had been inaccessible as they sunned on their rocks, wound up in boxes in boys’ closets within a matter of days. Their footsteps in the dry leaves gave them away as they wandered forlornly.”
Turtles—painted, snapper, box, wood—are burdened with awkward, boxy bodies and short, far-apart legs that render impossible a walking pace that keeps up with modern life. Outside the world of fairy tale, the tortoise will never beat the hare, because our world is filled with death traps called roads, which hares can hop over in a tiny fraction of the time it takes the cruelly dimensioned tortoise to plod across.
Yet, not only do turtles not resent their lot in life, even against enormous odds, they haven’t given up the fight to live. “They don’t feel that the contest is unfair,” Hoagland explains. “[T]hey keep plugging, rolling like sailorly souls—a bobbing, infirm gait, a brave, sea-legged momentum—stopping occasionally to judge the lay of the land.”
Turtles stimulate our protective instincts because of their gumption, and the poignant mismatch between their old-world armor and our cutting-edge weaponry. Nature has gone far out of its way to equip the turtle with a formidable defense against crushability, and yet it is still routinely, casually crushed.
Also, I think that, although we more closely resemble squirrels and hares than we do turtles, we see more of ourselves in their bulky infrastructure. Our invisible burdens they wear out in the open, on their actual backs. “I am a rock, I am an island,” sang Paul Simon. That was figurative language to describe the human condition, but turtles can morph into actual rocks and islands. They show us, as they make their dangerous and ponderous way, what loneliness and vulnerability looks like. A turtle’s journey is, as Hoagland puts it, “like the nightmare most of us have whimpered through, where we are weighted down disastrously while trying to flee; fleeing our home ground, we try to run.”
We admire them, too, because they put us in mind of relics from another era, of tiny dinosaurs and knights, when a hard shell came in handy as a barrier against sharp teeth and swords. Today, all that matters is speed, and everything else just gets in the way.
“Who does that?” I had asked aloud, surveying the bits of painted turtle body spread across the asphalt. That was not a fair question. All humans do that. The turtle’s temporarily fortuitous position in the road is the only reason I didn’t kill it myself. If the Lexus hadn’t been the car to do it, then the Subaru riding its tail would have been. Fact is, we are all both the potential perpetrator wielding a lethal weapon and the potential victim with that breakable shell. One minute we are the zoned-out driver, the next we are the soft, crushable body looking to cross the road on foot. Would that all of us flying around driving unthinkably powerful vehicles could carry around some old-world patience, and keep in mind what it means to truly share the road.
Meanwhile, turtles will continue to have no choice but to make their way from one side of those roads to the other. Their nature dictates that they must find food here and lay their eggs there. Our 2023 nature dictates that we sit ever higher, ever more obliviously above the life of the earth, one hand on the wheel, one hand on something to distract our fragile senses.
