The Flight Attendant and the Tumbling Turtle of Turtle Cove

The Cats and I were walking the woodsy trail alongside the cove to the small floating dock. I was in the lead. They were moving along as the feline spirit moved and accomplishing their typical various goals of grazing select grasses, sniffing suspect drooping branches and cone-shaped holes left by browsing armadillos or possum, and malingering with purpose with occasional forward progress made. They've been known to dart ahead of me or keep up with my patient pace, but this wasn't one of those walks. They eventually caught up to me but not before all the excitement had commenced and the drama concluded.

Suddenly something ahead of me caught my attention. At a medium distance, it looked and sounded like a 10-pound rock tumbling roughly over and over down the steep shaded rocky slope to my left. I wondered why it had suddenly fallen, if maybe a deer had brushed up against it as I’ve seen happen, or if eroded ground beneath it had finally given way.

Surprisingly, it was a turtle, its shell now lying almost evened-out flat with the dusty ground contiguous with the harder-packed trail, with the critter's nobly-shaped head and soft neck protruding out the front. It must be in shock or stunned, I thought, because normally it would be hiding entirely inside its shell with someone as close to it as I was, about one foot away. I looked closely for wounds or a crack in the shell but could find nothing except maybe a scuff or two. It seemed turtle had escaped a more debilitating fate.

Turtle is one of the numerous red slider turtles native to Turtle Cove, which its beautifully hued red horizontal racing stripe on each cheek divulged. It's a small adult, likely a female, who might have been trying to find her way back to the water after laying her eggs, or maybe she was still searching for a great spot for a nest. Either way, the hard pounding jolts she felt while piggybacking on gravity’s way down the slope, the partial hollowness of the shell providing the loud thunks, interrupted whatever mission she had been on.

Given her condition, her state of shock or mere dazedness, and because she's probably just shaken up and only a little bruised, I decided she most needed to get back in the water. That cool quick immersion would uncloud her head, I reasoned and hoped. After that, she could decide what she needs to do next. It’s still her life, after all. Turtles pretty much live in water and right beside it. There’s nothing like pleasant familiar territory and creature comforts to buck up one of nature’s unlikely little miracles

I picked her up, with her aerodynamically shaped head and slender neck a fuselage sticking frontward out of her shell, and carried her at a quick pace in front of me waist-high, her deeply dark and clear eyes peering directly forward. She was virtually flying through the air, and she seemed actually amazed though was probably more stunned still than anything else.

I'd give almost anything to know what she's thinking, or feeling, as she flew along out in front of me. She turned her neck right and left and back again, looking for familiar signs to try and help make sense of what was happening to her. She seemed to briefly catch sight of me, which could cause alarm, but most importantly to her, when she looked back to the right and slightly downward through the line of cypresses, she saw the silvery wetness of the cove stretching out glistening almost as far as she could see.

From the moment she first saw the water - until I gently set her down on a flat limestone rock directly on the edge of the shore and she immediately leaped down and into the water - she had kept her head turned directly toward the cove and never took her eyes off the water, knowing she had found her salvation. She knew, just knew, that if only she could get back to the water she would be okay, and there it was, beckoning, no matter how strange things had become for her in the last brief interval.

The whole interlude, from tumbling down the rocky slope to her split-decision, once set down on the rock, to quietly plop down into the shallow depth, lasted only about one minute.

I think her instantaneous, sure-footed leap a few inches down into the cool cove water made me almost as happy as it made her, though I know it's impossible for me to truly walk a mile in her shell. Congratulations, little friend. You made it back to your cove harbor, your haven, partly the hard way, partly at the insistence of a taller power, and finished with a splash entirely your own.

Thought Xperiment @JEWanon #jfds;lfjrjfsdr

There's a fluid stasis
as the basis
for those thoughts
that hound and chase us
reduce and trace us
and would erase us
and debase us
if not waste us
real head cases
that mentally race us
instead of pace us
and embrace us
and truly face us
in our places
of oasis.

No my country's not made of good people who make sick things up and stick by them because they know it scares and intimidates everyone else. No it couldn't be..We're better than that. We're not total nazis yet. Are we? ARE WE?