When we bought the land, the irrigation pond, formed at the lowest point of the property by an earthen dam now overgrown with pines, cherry trees, and hobbles of tangled honey suckle, had failed. After cutting our way through the tall grass between the pond and the road and wading out into the swamp mud which now marked out the area where water had been, we found it: a four inch, rusted out, galvanized steel pipe down which water fell in a cold, sonorous trickle, despite the heat. Pieces of the rusted pipe, too few and small to form the whole of the missing riser, which otherwise seemed to have almost completely disintegrated, littered the area.
A year later, after we had repaired the riser with a clean new piece of white PVC, an orange bucket and twenty pounds of concrete mixed with muddy water, a storm rolled in over the ridge to the north west and I dreamed that I saw, from the porch, a huge turtle making its slow way through the grassy shallow ditch from the road down to the pond.
In May, and for several months afterwards, turtles, seeking new habitats or mates or following their own silent intuitions, make their way across the rural roads around our home. You see them standing on the side of the road as cars rush past in the morning, as if contemplating making a run for it.
Or you see their bodies, mangled or crushed into chunks of muscle and shell, attracting flies in the afternoon heat which melts the tar between the pebbles of the asphalt. That summer I found a special sympathy developing for those animals. The natural defenses of such animals give them a relaxed, even clumsy, attitude which doesn’t prepare them for the dangers of living among humans. Whenever I saw a turtle furtively planning a trip across a road I would pull over and, using a camouflage work glove with black, spray on, latex grips that I kept in the car for the purpose, move it across the road. Usually, deep into the grass on the other side to discourage a return trip.
A few months after I dreamed of the enormous turtle I took a canoe out onto the water to inspect the new riser. As I got close I saw a pale yellow something sticking out from the top. It was a turtle which had gotten stuck, head first, down the pipe. It was dead, and while its feet and shell had been baked and desiccated by the sunlight, its head was down in the trickling darkness and covered in a film of almost airy mucous that made me think of the ectoplasmic expulsions of spiritualists.
After that day I attached a foot long, perforated, PVC section to the top of the riser so that other animals wouldn’t get sucked in. I also started to keep a tally of the number of turtles I picked up and moved across the road and the number I saw killed or already dead.
This practice of counting turtles exposes you to suffering.
Once, unable to stop immediately to move a turtle, I watched the truck behind me pass it harmlessly only for its trailer to catch its edge and send it hurtling into the ditch alongside the road. Similar scenes often played out – you see the turtle crushed by the car behind you, or, after managing to find a place to turn around, you find only pieces. On one occasion, a turtle which was sitting at the side of the road, as through ready to cross, had already been hit. It seemed whole, but there were cracks along the seams of its shell. I carefully moved it under a tree. I wondered for some time whether turtles could survive such a thing or of it died of blood loss or dehydration, its essence sublimating off into the summer air.