Contact With Nature

Descending the slope, moments from the roadway, a turtle pauses to survey the change in terrain. He’s leaving the shelter of ditch row, a path between vineyard and trees that he’s presumably followed for the first time. He’s smelling Poxabogue Pond and looking for it. Here, the turtle must cross the first of two busy roads.

The lady stops her car. She knows only a little about turtles and has ferried many, including ungrateful snappers, across local roadways. She considers herself a nature lover.

You know the type — they don’t even bother switching on their hazards. They just stop their car in the middle of the road and jump out. They can be dangerous in their pursuit of benevolence.

This turtle is the size of a small snapping turtle. The lady cautiously approaches, and the turtle withdraws. He is shaped, and marked, like a painted turtle, but so big that she must carry it with two hands. Eight, maybe 10 pounds, she guessed.

She decides this turtle is old enough, and important enough, that she can’t risk him getting hit or otherwise killed in the treachery yet beyond, to come.

Coming in contact with nature is good for you. It is well-known, if less well understood, that a walk in the woods among birdsong and insect flight benefits both mental and physical health.

The lady, elated by the opportunity to save this turtle, decides that the benefits outweigh the risks. She puts the turtle in her passenger seat and drives it a quarter mile to the nature park. She has decided she needs to take him all the way to the water’s edge: “I had to be sure he made it, and I didn’t want it to get disoriented.”

When we decide to have contact with nature, we also must realize that this means nature, in turn, has contact with us. We are big but little morsels.

By the time she made it to the water, the lady told me she’d had enough time carrying the heavy turtle to consider the meat beneath its shell.

She set him at the water, paused to take a picture — and it was here where she first noticed the ticks, an onslaught, a stampede coming up over her ankles. If we go to nature for exercise and inner peace, what does nature come to us for?

Later, the lady discovers that the turtle she risked so much for, is called a slider. It’s a pet shop variety that gets dumped in the wild when its adoptive family wearies of it.

It is considered invasive.

On my tractor, I skirted the edge of the field with my implement raised. I tilled no dirt and was merely transporting when a cattle egret swooped in from behind. The bird flew so low that its long legs nearly grazed my cap. I ducked and clutched, snatched back the throttle, and came to a quick and complete stop as the bird had landed directly and defiantly in front of me.

Swallows criss-cross the landscape, starlings comb the grass. The egret, as if examining the agricultural contraption, takes a bold step closer and adjusts its eye to meet mine. I drop the disk and slowly release the clutch.

The bird lifts lightly and barely off the ground to land again, just behind me, where the turned earth, offering a meal, takes all the bird’s attention.