MOUNTAIN VIEW: Return to Turtle Island

You knew I’d have another turtle or twenty to tell you about, after that last grand turtle-theft edition of this column.
So it is that three decades ago, I was introduced to the snapping turtle.
My family had gone with our Roanoke parish and rector, “Mister Turner,” to the Episcopal Retreat Center at Hungry Mother, for “fellowship” and some peaceable time with “God’s wonderful creation.” That is, we’d gone to play softball, float on our backs in the lake and eat Mrs. Turner’s famous gumbo.
I brought along a school friend, Carrie, and we wandered the lake trail one afternoon, debating which eighth-grade boy was the cutest and looking for a cove in which to plunge for a swim. In our minds, the kingdom of God was already here—life was good, the lake was cold and the sky sweetly blue; God liked us and so did everyone else; the world was full of kind people who fed you pie and loved Jesus.
It was a startling setting in which to learn of anything malicious. And I’m not referring to turtles.
“Liza LOOK!” Carrie stopped and pointed.
I looked from the water back to the trail ahead, where a cluster of tall, jeering teenagers were kicking and striking at something with sticks.
They didn’t notice our wary, indignant approach. Just as we’d intuited, the recipient of their attention was an animal.
A huge turtle sat in their midst, wide as a platter, taking up half the trail. His head alternately retreated and tried to thrust at his tormentors, who were waiting to bop it with their cudgels.
We stood gaping, a growing disbelief and outrage filling our insides like a fire. “Do something!” Carrie hissed as some kind of propulsion soared through my system. I’d already been party to the suffering of one turtle and would be darned if another would take more abuse from my kind.
Before realizing it, I was barreling right through the legs of those bewildered boys and lunging for the turtle. In that split second, a dozen thoughts flew through my head. Could I lift this turtle? What would I do with it? Would these boys lam me with a limb before I got Mr. Turtle out of there? Which way should I run?
By now I had the huge knobby turtle weight clutched to my chest and was aiming downhill toward the water, wondering if turtles could swim. This one would have to, I reckoned, since there was no place else to go, and I flung the arm-waving, helpless turtle KER-PLOSH into the lake. “Please help the turtle to swim,” I thought, and caught one glimpse of what looked like mobility to me, from the turtle’s submerged position; then he was gone.
I swiveled around to see six lag-jawed faces still staring from the trail, looks of incredulous outrage beginning to fill their blank expressions. I dashed up the trail behind Carrie (who had already sprinted past the group). We ran a lickity-split two miles back to the strangely-peaceful scene of oblivious, kind, supper-cooking mothers and Frisbee-throwing dads, and told nobody.
Later, of course, I learned that snapping turtles are “mean.” Besides being quite at home in water, they annoyingly eat up people’s catfish and singing toads and can neatly chomp down on a person’s finger, if provoked. I’ve talked with people pointing rifles at their fish-ponds, waiting for some huge old snapper to emerge, and my mother who wishes she had a gun to blast at the snapper who eats her beloved pond frogs. I understand the general grudge against these unpersonable pond dwellers.
But nothing deserves to be tormented, ridiculed or made to suffer. —No matter how inconvenient and rude that creature seems to us, who believe we ought to be the only creatures on the planet and never slowed or inconvenienced by any other species.
Each year, the approach of hunting season daunts me. I don’t oppose hunting. I just regret the sense of triumph that can be gotten from obliterating the life of another (unarmed) creature. With all the high-tech equipment, tons of artillery, binoculars, radar, traps and limited wild habitats of our time, the killing of wildlife is not exactly the feat of a Wilburn Waters wrestling bears to the ground.
And it is often accomplished by those who never otherwise go to the woods and haven’t the slightest love for the place, who drink liquor while they sit around with loaded weapons, who leave behind their beer and whiskey bottles, along with cigarette butts in the dry leaves.
Some dump deer carcasses down creek-banks in plastic garbage bags, as if the creature whose life they took were merely trash to toss out. They don’t mind contaminating the creek because they’re going back home with their trophy, unbothered that they’ve left this living place scathed with their disrespect and waste.
Yet other hunters show great respect for all wildlife and the land. They are the ones who pick up the trash of poachers. And it’s largely because they pay hunting fees and work to protect habitat that the rest of us have places to hike or see anything wild at all.
And those of us who eat meat surely realize something had to die before it was chopped up and plopped neatly on the meat shelf. And a clean shot at a turkey or grazing deer who’s lived a free life in the open air seems far more humane than penning up animals in a “cattle factory” or veal stockade or the stacked cages of a turkey warehouse.
What seems missing, either way, is some kind of training in understanding. Some kind of reverence for life which Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Jefferson believed had to be imparted from generation to generation. Otherwise, Jefferson noted in his journals, you’d have grown men who would look at a grove of trees and see no beauty, no life, but only money from the lumber it could yield.
Nobody had taught this to those long-ago boys at the lake. Nobody had taught me, for eight years in school and church buildings, what a snapping turtle was, whether it swam or bit or why it should exist. We were all the product of our disconnected times.
But those times are ending. We can’t keep living on the earth as if people are separate from other creatures and ought to turn every acre of habitat into subdivisions, asphalt and places to dump our trash. To survive, and even flourish, we have to grow in a way we have not grown yet. And part of that direction is down.