The Moral of the Story

I’ve been working on a book. Slow going at first. But, as most writers will attest, once the narrative ball gets rolling, even if it seems at times to be rolling uphill, the work becomes an oasis of sorts, a place to repair to in your mind.

It’s a bit like having the ability to summon a dream, or a semi-obedient genie whose job it is to gather kindling to feed fantasy’s fire, or at least provide food for thought.

So there I was on Sunday, helping to prepare the Promised Land Salvage Company’s 50 Shades of Montauk float for the St. Patrick’s Day parade when a fellow salver, and longtime friend, mentioned that he’d come upon the remains of a very large (over six feet long) leatherback turtle on the ocean side of Napeague.

Seemed a weird time of year to see a beached sea turtle. I called Kim Durham at the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation. She heads up the team that responds to strandings of marine mammals and sea turtles all over Long Island. If they’re dead, she endeavors to find out why.

Yes, she agreed, it was odd. March is the month when ocean temperatures are usually at their nadir, especially after the winter just past — or has it passed?  Durham said leatherbacks possess a higher level of body fat than other sea turtles. This, and their large size allows them to survive in colder water, she said. In fact, they are known to migrate as far north as Newfoundland. But mid-March, with ocean temps in the mid-30s?

Durham said it was possible that the big turtle had been buried under sand, snow, and for a long time, like the vegetable monster in the “The Thing From Another World,” or Otzi the iceman found frozen in the Austrian-Italian Alps, a natural mummy at least 3,000 years old. And also like the carcasses of birds and deer, now appearing, that winter’s reaper harvested and then entombed in snow.

It’s different to see evidence of Nature’s cull all at once in the spring melt, while at the same time listening to birds singing in the spring. Perhaps the contrast explains the five turkey vultures roosting shoulder to shoulder on a neighboring rooftop facing the setting sun on Sunday. We’re listening for peepers, watching for alewives making their return to sweet water dreens to spawn, and for the first striped bass to show. The ocean-warming Gulf Stream is still a long way off.

How ’bout a children’s book about a wise old leatherback that loved Montauk so much that she decided to forego the usual southern migration with the others, to risk the cold. And if she didn’t make it, it would be okay to die here, she thinks. It’s been a long, rich life.

But then she lives through the winter to tell younger turtle friends about the ice, the seals, and the surfers dressed as seals who rode the waves dodging big chunks of ice. She tells of befriending a young surfer girl, who, after being scared by the big turtle at first, finally accepts a ride on her leatherback. I see an evil gill-netter whose nets ensnarl the turtle.

A friendly member of the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol — Ed Michels comes to mind — frees the leatherback with a knife. The turtle falls in love with her gallant savior and asks him to sail away with her into the sunset, sailboats being the only kind she’d be able to keep up with, but Michels explains that to sail into the sunset would mean going through the Panama Canal, and besides, he hates sailboats.

Heartbroken, and immune to the “you have the whole world before you” efforts of her surfer friend to raise her spirits, the old leatherback decides to wait for the coldest part of the coming winter, crawl up onto the beach and let Nature freeze her into the mysterious heroine in a story that becomes so famous — Owl-and-the-Pussy-Cat famous — that a fan cuts the head off her carcass as a wall trophy to remind his young daughter of the moral of the tale. . . . 

I haven’t got that far, but it’s true, the part about someone taking the leatherback’s head. And if he mounts it, like the one that has peered sagaciously from the wall of the Shagwong bar and restaurant for the past half century, the turtle is sure to generate stories more farfetched than this. In fact, the truth is very far-fetched, that is it has come a great distance in time. 

Carl Safina of Amagansett wrote “Voyage of the Turtle,” a wonderful book about leatherbacks, which he calls the closest animal there is to a living dinosaur. I suspect this old turtle died in late fall and washed up. A storm surge buried it in sand, which was then covered by snow. A recent storm has brought it to light in the spring thaw. The moral of that story is: The wondrous circle of life is revealed in the season when youngest life meets its oldest remains.