Turtles

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.