“Dad, stop! Be careful! We have to get him!” My 8 year-old son’s high, thin voice from the back seat of my SUV urged caution as I drove. His sister was silent beside him but I could see his anxious face framed in my rear-view mirror. Chris was leaning forward to see out of the windshield; on the road, a turtle was making a slow passage across the hot blacktop.
I had just driven away from the St. Louis zoo with Chris and his sister, Lauren. The zoo is a prominent feature of Forest Park, and because admission was free, we three spent a lot of time there when they visited with me from Indiana. Chris was interested in all things alive in the woods and forests, and used to read the Field Guides I gave him as if they were the most fascinating literature ever produced. I once listened in astonishment when he corrected a man who was idly speculating on the kind of turtle we could see swimming beneath a footbridge in a small park. “Actually,” Chris said, “that’s a soft shell turtle.” The man and his friend turned toward me, my 8-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, and listened in wonder as the child led us to understand the secret life of turtles.
On this day, I pulled to a stop at the side of the road, and Dad and kids piled out of the car and tracked down the turtle. “That’s a snapping turtle, Dad; they never get too far away from water.” I suggested that we gather up the turtle and take him to the Zoo, just down the road. “Let me pick him up,” Chris said. “They can extend their necks half the distance of their bodies to bite.” I bravely allowed my son to pick up the snapper, which was promptly rejected by the zoo.
“We can’t take in animals brought in by the public,” an employee of the zoo told us, citing concern for existing animals. He suggested that we take the turtle back to where we found it and release it. We drove back to where we had discovered the turtle and I again, bravely let my son place it on the ground on the side of the road it had seemed to be headed for when we first spotted it. We watched as it trundled into the weeds; Chris was excited to spot some marshy water through the grasses, and we left when the turtle slid below the surface.
Neither of my children were with me in Tarpon Springs, Florida almost twenty years later when I watched staffers from the Clearwater (Florida) Marine Aquarium return two rehabbed sea turtles to the sea. I was visiting with a friend who has volunteered at the marina since 2009. She got an e-mail notifying her of the turtle release and we met the caravan at Fred J. Howard beach in Tarpon Springs. The injured turtles, Guadalajara and Bellatrix, had been rescued by the Marina and nursed back to health. In a small ceremony on the beach, Clearwater Marine Aquarium personnel explained the marina’s mission, gave a short bio on the two turtles and returned them to the sea.
Unlike the sea turtles released by Lucy, in Pat Conroy’s novel, Beach Music, Bellatrix and “Guad” had no need to make their “halting, unskilled way to the roaring surf.” They flippered beneath the water and headed for the Gulf while I thought of my son, the erstwhile entomology aspirant and his new desire to be a field biologist, and all the turtles we have known, together.