MOUNTAIN VIEW: A Visit to Turtle Island

Have you seen a turtle lately? If you come across one, be kind to the old reptile. If it’s braving a busy road, stop and help it across. If one lives in your backyard, leave a flat dish of water, some tomatoes, a peach; I’ve seen them plunge their faces into each of these.
This summer I was watering my saplings at the New River Trail access in Draper, toting buckets and muttering a sweaty, discouraged, irreverent prayer for rain. “Don’t you think the animals are thirsty also?”
Of course there was no answer. But at last the tree-triage was done and I took off down the trail to lose my ornery mood. Naturally, by the third mile from my car, thunder rumbled. A wind scooted up, black clouds collided, and it poured!—sheets and torrents of rain, the kind that rolls into your eyes and sops your clothes.
“Thanks!” I exulted through the deluge.
But this gratitude was nothing like that which I saw in a turtle, sprawled-eagle, stretching himself blissfully into a puddle where he drank and drank. For entire minutes. It seemed he hadn’t had water in weeks and wished to absorb the entire puddle—so focused and intently gulping that he paid no heed as I knelt to watch, my face inches from his. Now here was gladness. Here was complete surrender and silent trust!
Turtles have taught me throughout a lifetime, from my earliest memories of hopping out of the car to move them across busy roads. Though my hoodlum friends thought of them as moving rocks, indestructible as the earth itself and as devoid of awareness, I felt these old, slow creatures unfairly exposed in our fast world. A car-wheel could instantly flatten them—and life in a shoebox seemed to me a lonely prison, far from what I imagined a turtle’s familiar home.
I especially pitied a large old turtle in one of my seventh-grade classrooms at James Madison Junior High. It sat in a dry fish tank, in the rear of a windowless, depressing, death-odored “biology” lab. Each day, the hoods would pause there to torment this turtle, poking it with pencils, turning it upside down and daring it to bite.
—All the hoods but me, that is, who boiled with anger and the helplessness of a girl. “Can’t we let it go?” I asked the teacher Mr. Perry, an imposing football coach whose afro nearly grazed the ceiling, and whose habitual, giant silence gave him the aspect of God.
He always shook his head, and I would desist for the day. It often occurred to me that Mr. Perry disliked school as much as I did—that he would far rather be out on the football field under the sky—so I didn’t want to make his job harder.
But by early September, I could no longer stand this torment, and dallied after class one day. Silent Mr. Perry looked at me over his papers. He looked at the turtle tank, and back at me. At last he stood up and went out to monitor the hallway—where I soon walked past him with a bulging stomach.
As I was skinny and flat-chested, the old turtle was the only bulge that could possibly have protruded from my ribcage. But Mr. Perry maintained his dark, godlike silence, and I spent the afternoon murmuring assurances down my shirt as the waving claws scraped and scratched my bare ribcage. At last the bus deposited us at the bottom of my hill and I joyfully strode home to dump the old turtle in the garden among the yellow stalks and decay.
The next day, my fellow hoods peered into the vacant aquarium and sent up a brief outcry to Mr. Perry. “Where’d that ole turtle go?” “Did you kill it?” they wondered with interest.
Mr. Perry stood still as a silent, powerful prophet, his face glowering back at them like a dark thundercloud, and class began. He gave me enough reproving looks, however, to remind me that not every silence indicated oblivion.
Including the turtle’s. All that time, she had taken her abuse, even her deportation beneath my shirt, in silence. And I say “she,” because she broke her silence when I ran down to check on her in the garden.
As you’ve likely noticed in our region, the yellow-and-brown earth underfoot looks very like a tortoise shell. This is one of many reasons native peoples related the earth to a turtle’s back, or the North American continent as “Turtle Island.”
So I couldn’t see the turtle in that landscape of autumn decay. In my clumsy, 12-year-old eagerness, I roamed around searching until I heard a loud HISS!
I froze, feeling certain I had stepped on turtle. Indeed, when I looked down, I saw a broken egg. Right beside it, my poor friend was looking at my foot in baleful, ancient, reptilian shock. I had destroyed her offspring, in my clumsy, ignorant attempt to help.
The burden under my shirt felt far heavier than the turtle itself, so the next day I had to confess to Mr. Perry. To my amazement, he was not surprised. But he did speak.
“If you had just left that turtle a few more days, she could have had that egg in this class, and we could have learned something.” It was the longest sentence I had ever heard come out of the man’s deep and silent recesses, and we stood for a long moment looking at each other, sharing the enormous regret.
Gradually, a trickle of old spunk returned to my spine. “But maybe she couldn’t lay that egg with those boys poking at her,” I said. “Maybe she hated being in school.”
Mr. Perry gazed at me for a long, expressionless moment. Then something flickered in his face. A slow smile widened his mouth, and a miracle happened. Mr. Perry began to chuckle. He tee-hee’d and then ha-ha’d recklessly until tears rolled out from behind his glasses. I stood watching, a helpless smile of disbelief on my own face, until the other hoods arrived for class.
The next day, the empty aquarium was gone. For the entire year, no animals returned to our stuffy room. More surprisingly, Mr. Perry took us outside each week to the scrubby, trash-strewn woods behind the school, where we were to learn about “wildlife habitat.” I don’t remember what we learned there from our silent teacher, but Mr. Perry and I had each already gotten a lesson that required no words.
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at .