I wake to a dark sky without hint of the sunrise to come.
The air is cool but humid, no movement just the promise of another beautiful
beach day. For two days and nights
my sister and I have delighted in our little condo on the beach, a gift from my
brother’s work partner. In decades
of Florida family visits, I have never stayed on the beach; in fact, on some
visits I have seen the water and beach only from the air or a quick
drive-by. So this time has been surprisingly
special.
Longboat Key is a narrow island between two others near
Sarasota on the West Coast of Florida. Yesterday I found out that it is a
turtle nesting spot, hence our condo’s name, Turtle Crawl. My heart lifted when I saw two yellow
stakes stuck in the sand on the beach in front of our rooms. Maybe this would fulfill
a long time dream of witnessing tiny turtles hatching. But both stakes have a date and
an H written on them, signifying, I think, that the hatches happened on 9/10
and 9/14, just a couple of days before our arrival.
I pull on yesterday’s clothes, fix a mug of green tea and
walk to the balcony offering a silent prayer of thanks for a wonderful family
visit and a quiet request for a turtle sighting. My sister is already at work on her computer at the kitchen
table. I sit to talk with her, but she is too focused on the landscaping plans
for the day ahead and a problem with a difficult client. My gaze turns to the
lightening sky over the beach. Two
men kneel at the 9/14 stake. I jump up, run out the door, down two flights of
stairs, along the bricked path between two buildings, past the open lawn, into
the sand and see one man walking to the water, his hand held up in front of
him. A turtle? I call out, “Wait.
Please. Wait!” He does, it is. As my feet step into the water’s edge, he holds
out his hand to show me the little turtle. I gasp, smile. “Thank you SO much!”I
always wanted to see this,” I say. The turtle’s tiny feet/flippers move even
before he touches the wet sand. He crawls so fast, as though he knows what lies
ahead and cannot wait to be in the enormous expanse of water. A wave meets him
and together they are pulled into the sea.
Gratitude explodes in my chest. My feet barely touch the
ground. The volunteer and I turn to join the biologist back at the yellow stake
who carefully pulls wet packed sand out of a hole with his gloved fingers. In a
small black bucket are two more turtles! The two men speak something I cannot hear
over the surf, and the biologist steps away to call someone. I ask the
volunteer who kneels over the hole, “Can you explain to me what is happening
here?” He looks at me and shakes
his head, “ This is very unusual, very surprising. We don’t expect to find
this.” “’What do you mean?” I urge. “We came to excavate the eggs from the
hatch three days ago. We always wait three days and then come back to check the
nest. We rarely find live
turtles. We know 25 turtles
hatched here on the 14th. We did not expect any today.” “ Do you think there are even more?” I
ask. “Probably,” he says. We look down and watch the sand moving.
“Look!” I cry, “Is that a flipper or a head?”
