Turtle Turtle Turtle

In the summer of 1994, as American televisions were tuned into O.J.'s harrowing slow-speed police chase, a slow-speed chase of another kind was talking place right in my backyard.

A few months earlier, a giant snapping turtle dug herself into my grandparents' garden and layed her eggs. The day they hatched, eight baby turtles started off on a long and perilous trek, presumably to the river to which their mother had returned after burrying the eggs in the dirt. Actually, it's not such a long and perilous trek. In fact, if they'd just gone in the opposite direction, the river was about ten feet away. But I guess instincts hadn't quite kicked in yet. So instead they traveled down the driveway, onto the path in the woods. Once they were in the woods, they once again could have made it to the river by taking a left, but instead followed the path into my backyard, where my dad found them.

He called me and my brothers outside to show us. They were tiny. Even with their tails they were still not much bigger than a fifty cent piece. We found a long windowbox to keep them in and put it on the front porch. We put some food and water in there, added something they could crawl in; everything we thought we would want if we were turtles.

That night, I heard what sounded like a cat screaching and whaling. I'll never forget that sound. My parents were downstairs watching Love Potion #9. My mom said the noise was the cat in the movie. Still, it sounded like it came from outside, and even though our doors were hollow and not very thick, I didn't hear any other part of the movie. The next morning one of the turtles was gone.

And then there were seven.

It would have been easy to just name them after the seven dwarves, but we had named them when there was still eight, although I couldn't tell you which one mysteriously vanished. They all looked the same, but they each had a characteristic that separated them from the rest. We did name one Sleepy, but not after the dwarf, but because it was always asleep. We kept thinking it was dead, only to have it wake up momentarly to prove it's still breathing before nodding off again. One of them had a larger lump on it's shell than the others, and was given the approriate name of Lumpy. The fastest was Speedy. I think there was one called Daredevil, because it was always trying to climb the walls and escape. And one was Gamera, friend of children, just because.

After a few days, we decided to let them go, except for two. So we brought them down to the river and realeased them. The other two were put in a small container while my dad took us out to the store to buy a bigger tank for them.

When we came back, one of them was gone. The one remaining was Speedy. It's more than likely that this wasn't the original Speedy, since he didn't try to make a run for it like his brother while we were gone. But Speedy seemed like a good name for a turtle, so that's what he was called from that day forward.

It may sound strange, but I was able to teach Speedy some tricks. I set up a circle of the clamshell Disney video cases around him and he could remember which ones were empty and therefore light enough to knock down. If he fell on his back, he'd use his long neck to flip himself over. He was a smart little guy. One day I put my finger on his eyebrow and he shut his eye. Then I put my finger on his other eyebrow and he shut that one. I went back and forth making him close different eyelids until he got pissed off and tried to bite me. He was in my lap at the time, and when he snapped, I jumped up and he flew in the air. No more messing with the eyebrows. Point taken.

I took him out to walk around every once in a while until he started snapping more. Then I just left him in his tank to do his own thing. He never came close to biting me, but it doesn't hurt err on the side of caution. The little bowl I gave him to swim around in eventually got too small for it's purpose and became a drinking bowl. He got a lot bigger than he was when he first found him wandering around in the backyard, but since he was confined to a 10 gallon tank, he didn't grow to be as big as he would have if he'd been in the wild.

I kept Speedy in my room for ten years. My mom always told me to let him go, but I said that he didn't have a chance out there and the other turtles that we let go were probably eaten long ago or didn't survive the harsh winters. Two summers ago when I moved to Quincy, I finially realised it was time for him to return to where he came from, so I brought his tank out to the bottom of the waterfall (because letting him go at the top would just be cruel) and let him walk out. He sat on a muddy patch and looked around at his new home. He stayed there until I left, but when I came back to check later on, he wasn't there.

Last summer my grandmother found a snapping turtle crawling up the steps to her pool. Sure enough, it was Speedy! His stunted growth due to years in captivity gave him away.

We gave him some bread and he started following me around, like a dog. A really slow dog. I walked over to the same path he'd traveled eleven years before and he followed. I lead him right back to the river where I'd let him go the year before, and stayed to make sure he went back into the water. It was a weird day, but it was good to know the little guy was still around, and seemingly even remembers me. That's pretty cool.





So here it is another year later, and what should I see down at the waterfall but my old friend, a completely different turtle! Even freed of the constraints of his tiny tank, Speedy couldn't have gotten this big in a year, unless Barry Bonds dumped his steroid stash in the Mill River. And anyway the shell is a different shape. But who's to say this isn't one of the babies I released in back in '94? It's still not anywhere near big enough to be the mother, but it could be one of Speedy's teenage non-mutant siblings.







It wasn't until after I took the pictures that I noticed something strange. Seems our little turtle friend has a few unwelcome visitors. And by that I mean disgusting freaking LEECHES!!!




Look at those things! Sapping and impurifying all of its precious bodily fluids. Holy crap that's gross. If I didn't value all my fingers, I would have tried to take those suckers off. As it is, I'm content just feeling bad about it. Poor turtle.