This story was written earlier in the summer when the snappers were laying their eggs…
Snapping Turtle (c) Joy Marzolf.
As I drove out this morning through the fresh, clean Berkshire air and sunshine, I soon came to a small, familiar bridge that crosses over a narrow channel in a wide swamp. There, I was brought up short by a medium-sized snapping turtle treading along the double yellow line in the middle of the road in front of me. I came to a stop and watched its slow progress as it shuffled along not towards the right or left side of the road, where it could re-enter its wetland home and safety, but straight along the painted line. I beeped the horn lightly to alert it to danger, and ever so slowly it turned towards the edge of the road. Straddling my car on the double yellow lines, I inched up at turtle-pace to protect its crossing from oncoming cars.
Just as I was relieved to see turtle number one’s tail tip disappear into the grasses, one, then another, then more turtle heads began to poke through the vegetation along both sides of the road. As if on cue, they all got busy. Six snappers began digging holes for their eggs while half their body length stuck out into the narrow road. This wouldn’t do! Why did they insist on risking their lives like this? We were surrounded by acres and acres of marsh land with hundreds of yards of muddy shoreline around the ponds. Yet something told them the dirt at the edge of the road was the perfect setting for their annual egg-laying ritual. Maybe it was the warmth of the pavement or the texture of the soil, or maybe they thought the eggs would be safe from predators where big machines with spinning tires flew past, but regardless of the reason, they risked being squashed by a car.
I stayed awhile to watch them in their work, waving my arm out the window to warn two cars that came flying along the narrow country road at great, unnecessary speed. Then I simply had to get on with my day. I wanted to stay until they were done with their task, but I was already late, and wasn’t I being overprotective? Hadn’t they survived millennia without me?
Ah, but that was before. Before people drove at high speeds through the countryside going places we deem terribly important. But, of course, they’re not. Neither we people nor the places are more important than the innocent, determined turtles who according to ancient intuition chose this spring morning to propagate their species.
I got out of the car to peer into the hole dug by a retreating turtle, but saw no eggs. Maybe she was just getting things ready? As I returned to the car, I nearly stepped on the carcass of a small, yellow bird squashed flat by a car tire into the pavement. A downy feather fluttered in the breeze. Such a sighting tears at my heart strings, every time, without fail, and it did once again. ‘Poor bird,’ I said, to the bird, to the turtles, to the blue sky it had once flown in.
The Hans Christian Anderson story of Thumbelina came vividly to my mind in that moment, specifically, the nearly dead swallow that Thumbelina meets inside the mole’s long, dark passage underground. I first saw the illustrations in this picture book when I was 3 or 4 years old. In them, she gently tends to the gravely ill bird, lays a blanket she wove from hay over his cold, still body, and when he is miraculously revived, gives him water from a leaf. The images come back as clear to my mind now as they were decades ago.
As a child with heightened sensitivity towards nature, that story touched me deeply and I felt for the first time the poignant, devastating love one can have for a wild creature. I experienced for the first time, but not the last, the shock and sorrow Thumbelina felt at encountering a dead or sick wild animal.
Thumbelina introduced me at a young age to the cruel and dismissive attitude of the mouse and the mole toward the swallow, whose song they mocked and whose very existence they felt to be meaningless and inferior to their own. To my own tiny self, their careless behavior was deeply disturbing. I remember sitting with the book open on my lap, petting the bird on the page with my small finger, absorbing every detail of the illustrations, and hurting. It was just a book, but the pain was real. Somehow I knew this was no fairy tale.
How I was as child explains a lot about how I am now, and it’s not at all an easy way to live. “You’re too sensitive for this world,” my mother would say kindly. “You need to grow a tougher skin.” Well, I didn’t know how to do that, and I still don’t! Why I responded so deeply to a bird in a fairy tale is a subject for another day. But I see now how beauty, cruelty, and betrayal are all messaged in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, as is his understanding of human nature.
Naturally, I disagree with Andersen’s centuries-old assumption that ownership by men is the sole solution to Thumbelina’s poverty and orphanhood. Worse still is knowing that this mindset persists today. Sadly, so does the pervasive message that Thumbelina’s value lies in whether her captors find her beautiful or ugly. These fairy tales are obsessed with looks! And when she’s found ugly, her value is redeemed because — luckily! — she can entertain the men with her beautiful song! In one scene, Andersen presents a cautionary tale: Thumbelina believes she is truly ugly simply because another creature tells her so. How willing women still are to believe this.
The ‘rich and learned’ older mole is disdainful of things he has never seen because he is blind: the sun and the flowers. The mouse and the mole lash out against all swallows and, by connection, all birds, because they are clearly jealous of the birds’ ability to fly and sing. There in the dark, holding the tiny girl hostage from her sunlit world aboveground, they cling to her beauty while despising everything beautiful they cannot experience or possess.
This propensity of human nature to covet beauty while at the same time destroying it — in order to ‘own’ it — is germane to our destruction of the planet today. Back in 1835, Hans Christian Andersen could not have known how this theme would play out in a world gone mad with ‘resource’ extraction, consumerism, and instant entertainment!
The speed at which we live our lives and gobble up false dreams of personal power through ownership while tethered to technology has done little to bring us happiness. Instead of gently tending to what is ailing in the world, we bulldoze all that is precious and primeval to swell our pride, fill our bank accounts, and possess more. On paved raceways we rush to tempting destinations only to find ourselves sitting there, drinking colorful iced drinks through a plastic straw out of a plastic cup, empty as before.
The swiftness with which Thumbelina’s value shifts in the eyes of certain creatures that want her and then possess her — from beauty to ugliness in mere seconds! — serves as the perfect metaphor for the empty consumerism we experience today. No sooner are the wrappings torn off and the object displayed on a shelf, on our bodies, or in the driveway, than we see it for what it is — just a thing — and we die a little. Then we grab at something else to numb the pain.
This morning, the usually hidden presence and the beauty of the turtles revealed itself through their unselfconscious, instinctive preparations. The soft sound of their claws scraping on the pavement as they traversed the unnatural terrain. The look on their faces as they dug into the soft earth with purpose. I stopped to watch them and my world shifted. I will remember them always.
I drove back home a few hours later, slowly rounding the corner on the approach to the bridge with fear in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to see the too-familiar sight of yet another crushed shell, the end of a life. But thank goodness! The road was clear of turtles! I rejoiced, and then remembered: the bird hadn’t been as lucky.
Running with Pencils 