One night a few weeks ago I dreamed of turtles along a path I walked in a strange wood, a
dirt-floored forest absent of leaf litter, which revealed them easily, one
after another. Some balanced vertically
on the rear tips of their shells, like an egg is supposed to be able to on the vernal
equinox (it can—as well as on any other day of the year); others were as large
as boulders. They looked like wood
turtles, their pyramidal scutes smoothed by age and river gravel and lodging
under branches, lines of muted orange showing through. For as long as the dream lasted, I passed
turtle after turtle; they were mirrors, reflecting one another to infinity.
The next morning, on my walk, I
encountered a recently hatched snapping turtle from a nest that must have
decided, at the last minute, not to overwinter.
I picked him up and he wrapped his four clawed legs around my
forefinger, like an infant will with its little fist, producing the same
impossible feeling of connection. He was
walking away from the lake, which seemed like bad luck but could have just as
easily been nature’s imperceptible foresight. I decided to intervene. I turned him around and put him back in the muck
where his mother likely came from.
At the beginning of A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking
recounts a popular story of an astronomer approached by an old woman after
giving a lecture on the nature of the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the
universe. “That’s an interesting theory,
sir,” the woman says, “but it’s wrong.
The earth doesn’t revolve around the sun. It’s flat and it sits on the back of a
turtle.” “But what, my good woman,” the
astronomer respectfully asked, “is the turtle sitting on?” The woman looked at him shrewdly and replied,
“It’s turtles all the way down!”
My intersection with the little
snapping turtle was just chance, the dream coincidence. But I like to imagine I could feel him that
night while I was sleeping, like the princess and the pea, like the napping
infant who senses your whole human nature in that one finger and hangs on for
dear life. Perhaps I could sense that entire
nest of turtles under the earth, a mile away, wriggling to get out. Or perhaps it was the other turtles I felt,
the ones that were holding me up.
