On Time, Turtles, and a Story to Tell
A year ago, a friend about my age (I’m 65) moved in up the street. We see each other every few days. Sometimes we walk together. Some days I don’t see him at all, but that’s OK. He doesn’t always feel like coming out of his pond, because he is a 42-pound wild snapping turtle.
(For the Travel and Nature Writer.)
Fire Chief, as we call him, used to live in a pond by a fire house in a different state. All the firefighters knew him. They loved seeing him on the days he’d emerge, especially in spring and fall, when he’d commute from his summer pond to his winter hibernation pond across the street. When he’d first crawled to the fire pond as a hatchling, that street was a country lane. Now it’s a state highway—and one October day in 2018, when Fire Chief crossing, he was hit by a truck.
The firefighters, though trained to run into burning buildings to save others, were afraid to pick up a giant, injured snapper. Someone phoned Turtle Rescue League for help. With lights flashing, soon a yellow ambulance appeared, a kayak strapped to the roof. Meanwhile the Chief, his shell cracked and bloodied, his back legs and tail paralyzed, had used his powerful front legs to crawl back into his summer pond. As the firefighters stood by, two slender ladies—Alexxia Bell, who is sighted, and Natasha Nowick, who is blind—emerged from the ambulance and launched their craft. Alexxia spotted the big turtle, dove into the water, and came up holding him and handed him to Natasha waiting in the boat.
I didn’t meet The Chief till early 2020. That was when, with my wildlife artist friend Matt Patterson, I began volunteering with Turtle Rescue League. Its hospital is in the basement of Alexxia and Natasha’s suburban home in Southbridge, Mass. Fire Chief was just one of the 150-1,000 injured, sick, or hatchling freshwater and woodland turtles in residence there at any given time.
We came to help with the turtles—and while doing so, we were researching and illustrating a new book. I had previously written a book on octopuses, which, along with telling the stories of the sentient invertebrate animals I met, explored the philosophical mystery of consciousness. Now I wanted to examine the other “hard problem” in philosophy: time. What is it? Is time even real? Does it shoot forward like an arrow, or run out like sand in an hourglass? Turtles—ancient reptiles who arose with the dinosaurs, famed for their long and slow-paced lives—seemed the perfect mentors to guide me on this journey.
When I had pitched the idea to the publisher, I’d had no idea, of course, that the stories lived in this book would unfold during a global pandemic—when time itself seemed to stall. The lockdown robbed us of the routines of office and school. We lost the markers of clock and calendar. No more could we gather for holidays, birthdays, graduations. People felt stuck, unmoored from the events that give our days meaning and structure. The New York Times described the world’s psychological state as “languishing.”
Matt and I donned masks to work in the turtle hospital; we all worried about the strange new contagion and how it would affect our friends and family, our nation and world. But because of the turtles, we did not languish.
Our days had structure—though they were not measured in minutes or hours, by appointments or deadlines—the ordinary, pre-pandemic time, the kind of time the Greeks called Kronos. Thanks to the turtles, we learned to live in another kind of time.
Were turtles crossing roads to their nesting grounds? Our days at the hospital were hectic then. But by now we were also volunteering with another group, protecting local turtle nesting grounds. There, we learned to wait for mother turtles to lay, so we could then protect the nest with wire mesh. Were turtles hatching? Then we would check the nests several times daily and carry the new babies to the banks of the river from which their parents had emerged.
Our time became turtle time, tethered to rain and sun and season. This was the kind of time the Greeks called Kairos, or sacred time—not the kind of time that flies away like an arrow. Not the time that runs out, like sand in an hourglass. Kairos, the cyclical, renewing time of the seasons, is time that connects us to eternity.
And at the turtle hospital, we learned to measure time in another way: by healing.
Turtles live slowly; they heal slowly, too. But with expert care, with patience, and importantly, given enough time, they can survive incredible damage.
Turtles came into the hospital with shattered shells; they came in missing eyes and limbs and with brain concussions. Some had swallowed fish hooks. Our patients had been hit by cars, chewed by dogs, run over by lawn mowers. Amazingly, in Natasha and Alexxia’s hands, an astonishing number of these horribly wounded turtles not only survived, but recovered enough to be released back into the wild.
This was what we hoped for Fire Chief. Matt and I always looked in on him in the big hospital stock tank to which he had been confined while his injuries healed. Sometimes, Natasha or Alexxia would drop in a banana. His head and neck would explode out of the water like a crocodile, and my heart always skipped a beat. Even injured, his power and dignity were magnificent.
Check out Sy Montgomery’s Of Time and Turtles here:
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The Chief’s legs and tail could now move again. Turtles, unlike people, can regenerate nerves. But his muscles were weak. To strengthen them, Matt and I were given the happy task of supervising the snapping turtle’s physical therapy.
When Matt lifted him out of his tank for that first session and set him down in the grass, I gasped. The Chief was enormous. He was dinosaurian. Most impressive of all was his shell. It was a gorgeous burnt Sienna color, unlike any we had ever seen. But his shell was even more striking because of the story it told.
His shell bore the tale of the catastrophe that brought him here. The breaks, where the truck had shattered his bony carapace, were clear to see. But the healing was just as visible, if not more so: The edges of the wounds had knitted unevenly, and the scutes of his carapace looked like great tectonic plates had crashed together to create a mighty mountain range.
During Fire Chief’s first steps on solid ground, Matt and I hovered over him like helicopter parents. His back legs were too withered to hold the back of his belly shield up, so if we saw a sharp rock ahead of him, we moved it—or we moved him. We made sure he didn’t flip over. If he did, we would right him. And at one point during that first therapy session, Matt and I came to the same realization at once. Wordlessly, and at the same moment, we both reached out to do what no sane person would ever do with a 42-pound, wild snapping turtle: with our ungloved fingers, we stroked the soft spot near his armpits, his tender turtleneck, and finally his powerful, hard, scaley, reptilian head.
Today, our friend The Chief rules his own pond again; his journey, as well as my journey through turtle time, form the literary scaffolding of our book. I revisit it each time Fire Chief comes out of the water and I clearly see his shell. I can read many chapters written on his shattered and mended back: I see the careless violence of a cruel driver and the dangers of our busy roads. I see, too, the compassion and expertise of Natasha and Alexxia’s care. I see Fire Chief’s own fortitude and patience. And I can see, as well, as his body grows ever stronger, the nourishing power of Matt’s and my love for him, and the story of an unlikely friendship between two humans and a species most people dread and fear. To me, this only makes his shell even more beautiful than an unscarred and perfect one.
Practitioners of the Japanese art of kintsugi, or “golden repair,” understand this well. Kintsugi is an ancient technique of repairing broken ceramics. Rather than trying to conceal the breaks and make the vessel seem new, the craftsman bonds the broken edges together with a sealant dusted with gold, silver, or platinum. It reflects the philosophy of wabi-sabi, embracing the idea of aging and imperfection. Kintsugi celebrates the beauty of broken things, honoring the effects of time—and gives the artisan the great gift of being able to make a repair.
For me, the chance to write this book was such a gift as well. Like Natasha and Alexia’s repairing those shattered shells, telling this story was an act of mending. My words may not glitter with the precious metals of a kintsugi craftsman’s artistic repair. But I will be grateful if the book shares with its readers even a fraction of the compassion and bravery, healing and hope written so eloquently on Fire Chief’s brave and beautiful shell.