A large sea turtle washed up on the beach today. His thick shell is still green and moist, sloping down to mossy scalloped edges. The peak of the shell is beginning to dry in the hot sun and become transparent. The geometry of the heart-shaped shell identifies this large creature as a Loggerhead turtle; the shell is outlined with whitish fissures which will, like a brittle fingernail, soon peel back layer by layer. This four-hundred-pound corpse looks vulnerable and naked as gulls and sand pipers approach and retreat, hopping in a macabre death dance, pecking at the wet sand that swirls around the beast in shallow rivulets.
Sea turtles have inhabited the earth for 100 million years and are powerful swimmers; they are air-breathing and can dive for long periods. They their only real predator is man. It seems ironic that these creatures have evolved and adapted to life in the sea, pass through territorial and international waters migrating from nesting to feeding grounds and back again, expert navigators, sometimes swimming 1000 miles, only to become endangered in our century. The long tail and curled, elongated claw on each fore-flipper indicates that this Loggerhead is a male. It is speculated by the beach walkers that this ancient “gentleman” was drowned in a shrimp net and then carried ashore by the tide. This turtle is a grim reminder of man’s pursuits running counter to the fragile workings of nature.
Beach walkers and shell pickers stop to stare at the dead turtle, like motorists slowing at a traffic accident, an involuntary morbid fascination with the scene of carnage. Death seems large and unforgiving in such a beautiful giant as this Loggerhead. His flippers are perfectly engineered right to the tips of each small, hooked claw. Only the strangely stretched angle of his neck and the lolling grey tongue prove his mortality. He must have left a mate behind and although he may have fathered hundreds of hatchlings, who struggled to pass through that dangerous no-man’s-land of the stretch of sand from the nest to the sea and freedom, only a few surviving; his species seems doomed to extinction. The elongated claw signifies maturity; he must have lived at least fifty years before the sea, his natural habitat, drowned him. Sand fleas and flies begin to gather at the large powerful beak and the whitened eyes, and I wonder what mysteries of nature he experienced in his lifetime.
A child gingerly steps forward to touch the turtle. Like a shock has passed from him to her, she jumps back with a squeal. Giggling in nervous horror at her own bravery, she throws a handful of sand and broken shell, which rattles down the turtle’s carapace with a dry patter. Her brother probes the milky eye with a twig of driftwood. Soon an official looking truck drives slowly up the hard-packed sand. Men in drab khaki overalls and caps come forward with rope and tackle. Expertly they lasso the hulk and hoist him onto their flatbed truck. Where they will take him, I cannot say. Perhaps there is a special graveyard for those sea creatures that are washed up on the shoreline. The truck pulls away; the people move on up the beach. All that remains is a fossil-like imprint of the turtle in the sand and soon even that will disappear, obliterated by the sea and time.
