More than thirty years ago, on a curving road near Dolgeville, N.Y., in the foothills of the Adirondacks, the driver ahead of me purposely swerved his car to hit a box turtle crossing the road, as though reenacting a heavy-handed bit of symbolism in The Grapes of Wrath. The turtle was thrown into the tall grass along the berm. I pulled over and found him, scuffed but with his shell intact and already heading back to the pavement. I carried him down the hill and left him in a dry creek bed, hoping he would be discouraged by the long, steep climb back to the road.
I have
little tolerance for gratuitous cruelty and I can think of few animals less
deserving of our abuse then turtles. Their protective armor and plodding ways make
them kin to humans. Ten years ago, Levi Stahl staged a contest with
Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary (1975) as
the prize. It was made into a good movie in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben
Kingsley. To win a copy of the novel all we had to do was submit our “best
turtle story.” I wrote an account of another close encounter on a road, this
time with an oversized snapping turtle. Go here to read it and the other
submissions. Now read Kay Ryan’s “Turtle” from Flamingo Watching (1994):
“Who would
be a turtle who could help it?
A barely
mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill
afford the chances she must take
In rowing
toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is
graceless, like dragging
A
packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her
modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often
stuck up to the axle on her way
To something
edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts
the ditch which would convert
Her shell
into a serving dish. She lives
Below
luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change
her load of pottery to wings.
Her only
levity is patience,
The sport of
truly chastened things.”
Ryan too
sees turtles as human-like and vice versa. Nice to see the good guys win for a
change.
2 comments:
I have a naturalist friend who is on call 24/7 to pull turtles out of the street in his rural county, especially snapping turtles. He recommends removing the largest mat from the floor of your car, slipping it under the snapper, and pulling it to the edge of the road or beyond.
Why would someone deliberately run over an animal in the street? My older brother is a decent man, a well-known journalist, and expert on birds and other wildlife. Yet I've been driving with him and seen him deliberately swerve to run over a squirrel. He thinks its good fun. People are mysterious.
Guitar composer-performer John Fahey was fond of turtles. Playing with The Song of Songs, he issued one of his albums as The Voice of the Turtle, and there are photos of him with the animals. (Some of his "experimental" recordings with audio clips, etc. are relics of their time, but a lot of his work is really good. You can sample his work at YouTube.)
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