THE SEA TURTLE
Trevor Ritland
This story was originally published in The EcoTheo Review in December, 2020
Photo courtesy of Tanner Frank
In the warm blue waters of the Caribbean, it is nesting season for the sea turtles. At nightfall or in the very early morning, the ocean will part for them as they mount the hidden beaches, crawling onto the soft edge of the continent to tuck their eggs beneath the shelf of the cool sand. In the salty air, they will deposit their legacy in the heart of the earth, trusting an instinct that whispers from the hollows of their biology— the greens, the olive-ridleys, the hawksbills, and the old leatherbacks.
It is a tradition they have been upholding for eons. The earliest likely ancestor of today’s sea turtles can be traced back to the Middle Permian in the swamps of what is now known as southern Africa, but was then only the thick interior of Pangea, the supercontinent that would spend the next few million years fracturing and drifting into pieces out to sea. If that early ancestor could somehow endure the ragged wilderness of time, it might observe the midnight ritual of its old descendants and marvel at their foreign world, which would be made up of the scattered, broken pieces of its own. But that prehistoric forerunner, the first of them, died out close to 260 million years ago. That is a long time to wait.
Patience is a natural art; it exists in the ecology of being, buried deep in a wandering lineage of genetic history. It is an instinct borne from a collective memory, something that earthly life crafted and developed entirely independent of the creative force that put us here — the finger of god or the anonymous galactic matter spinning into eternity. The traces of it that we find today are the remnants of a larger echo down the caverns of our history.
When I am tasked with waiting, I study the ones that have learned to do it best.
Some burrowing frogs await the rain for months on end, the same way that desert plants do — their waxy stems reaching toward the arid sky, holding precious moisture in their bones. Some people wait for frogs; in the highlands of Monteverde, Costa Rica, where the golden toads have been gone for close to thirty years, some people are still waiting.
There are trap-door spiders and and sidewinders, ambush predators that have learned to lie in wait for dinner; they possess the discipline to hold their bodies still and believe that their long days will be rewarded. They have faith that the trust of waiting will be honored.
Patience is a sister of faith. The box turtle, slow-moving in the riverbed, is patient, but the sea turtle has faith; it returns each season to the beach that it was born on, drawn by the miracle of genetic memory, magnetic, trusting that it will find its way through the long deep swells; it buries its eggs in a hidden cache beneath heavy sand and trusts the wind and sky and beach to care for them, while it goes on to swim through other waters, until one day — maybe — it passes one of its offspring in the Caribbean, and all of its hardy faith is confirmed.
Patience is the last rung on the stoic’s ladder, a tough and sturdy koan that I might never fully reckon with. It is a fruit on the high branch, nearly ripe but out of reach, so close to the blistering sun. To someday live among the faithful ancestors, I practice waiting. I wait for the optimism to decay to fear, as the oceans rise and the fires consume the mountains. I wait for a precious Someday in the shadow of a cold Unless, that will turn our patience against us in an end to all our sins. I wait for the sea turtles to return each season to teach me again of faith.
Reckoning with the encroaching judgements — pollution, climate change, the end of our world — we find that they are riddled with our fingerprints. Rising nest temperatures will disrupt the genetic diversity of sea turtle populations; as coral reefs are lost, important food sources will disappear; and rising sea levels will swallow sea turtle nesting sites — the old turtles will return to the beaches they were born on to find no trace of their long-protected heritage.
Apathy is another sister; it digs a warren like the burrowing frogs, deep into the heart, to spread its deadly germ throughout the body. So related and akin to patience is it, it can slip between the cracks unseen; this force so similar to the one that has allowed life to endure might become its architect of doom.
To overcome it requires force of will — an olive-ridley fighting a crushing undertow to gain the beach. It requires a collective faith in our own species; a belief that this thread of life will keep unspooling, keep reaching out into the dark; that the sea turtles will return each season to their hidden beaches. The tide is patient, but equally determined; it lives its slow, deliberate rhythm, never failing, going on and on into eternity.
When I was twenty-three, I met a Leatherback on the Caribbean edge of Costa Rica, on the ragged line of a midnight beach under the white glow of the moon, like a lantern marking out the way ahead. That night, it seemed to me an ancient titan, carrying forgotten knowledge from the lineage of its long history, which had seen empires fall and continents shift in a long, modest, indecipherable dance. From a distance, I watched it dig its crib and tuck the clutch of eggs away, covering them in the earth like a heavy blanket before turning and beginning its slow journey back to the sea — offering a prayer for heritage and patience as it sunk into the empyrean depths, swimming into heaven.