Patrol Night 2 or I Have Turtle Blood on My Hands

June 22, 2010

Tonight I am on the beach writing by the gibbous moonlight. The Atlantic is beating a persistent time, the stars sparkle, the fireflies twinkle, the palm trees are silhouetted against the midnight blue sky, and the sand looks like gray moon dust in the moonlight. The breeze from off the water is blowing on my face as we sit on a washed up log in the center of our zone, the lights from the oil rigs glow ever so faintly on the horizon. I am at peace. There is a spaciousness here that reminds me how incomprehensibly massive the universe is, how I am only a tiny but precious part of it, just like the turtles.

When you see one coming out of the surf, her black shell glistening like an enormous black beetle, like some otherworldly dinosaur, like a phantom of the ocean, it is ghostly, surreal, haunting. We are still waiting for our first of the night.

I mentioned body pitting earlier but I will explain this ritual in more detail. After she heaves herself onto shore, pulling her massive body with her front flippers, pushing with her rear flippers, and finds "the spot" in the softer sand above the high water line, she begins the pit. She uses her front flippers like wings and makes, well, a snow angel, but in the sand, and in the shape of a turtle - a turtle angel I suppose. She does this to build up sand along her sides, creating a pit to balance herself over the egg chamber she will soon dig. She uses the build up of sand to anchor herself over the egg chamber by her front flippers. Brilliant.

I am hoping for a quiet night where I can just sit with one turtle from start to finish, no lights, no tagging, no data recording. Just sit with her and watch her in wonder. The data gathering is certainly interesting, and I am concerned with accuracy, but when you are so focused on the data, you are not focused on the wonder. It reminds me of the William Wordsworth poem, The Tables Turned.

THE TABLES TURNED

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet, 10
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 20

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves; 30
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

"Sweet is the lore which nature brings/our meddling intellect/mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things/we murder to dissect." How perfectly these lines capture the process of intellectual deconstruction. Certainly we gain an understanding of one sort by studying, measuring, solving, but we miss another kind of understanding all together, the one that involves just being, the one that involves the Limitlessness of life.

I want to just be with a turtle. But tonight is not my night. I have done my first PIT tagging. When our first turtle finally arrived, we prepared our equipment, waited. She took a long time to dig. Stephan joked, "Can you tell her to come on?" "Typical man," I said, "you can't rush these things. Perfection takes time." We can only tag her when she is laying. This is because she is in a trance of sorts, concentrating so hard on the laying that you really cannot spook her. I loaded the tag gun with the needle, knelt in front of her, massaged the meaty shoulder with my thumb, and pushed the needle in. Her shoulder was thick; I pushed the trigger forward, inserting the tag, and pulled the gun out, leaving my finger over the wound. That's when I felt it, blood. Oh God! Did I do it wrong? She's bleeding! Did I hurt her? No, not really. I forgot to put my thumb right on the spot before I withdrew the needle. A minor error in technique, but it did not hurt her. But now I have turtle blood on my hands, quite literally.

All of the tagging and measuring and GPSing and scanning and examinining means that you are lying, kneeling, sitting, leaning, balancing, hovering, etc. in sand. Sand sand sand. I have sand everywhere. Under my finger nails, in my nose (I got a flipper full in my face), in my ears, behind my ears, in my hair, in my belly button. I have sand in every crevice. I have sand in crevices I didn't know I had. And yes, I have sand in that crevice too, front and back. Yay.