5:08 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday, three hours and five minutes earlier than the Winter Solstice). 57 degrees, wind SE 3 mph. Sky: bland and doughy; drizzle passing through the sieve of branches, leaves drip and ground fog snakes into narrow valleys . . . crisscrossing like dispersing vipers. Fog overturns the familiar, ignites the imagination. Permanent streams: upper, water levels recede (again), a nearly speechless descent into the marsh; lower, the tongue-shaped peninsula of silt and mud growing (again). Least flycatchers and chestnut-side warblers rule the airwaves above the upper stream, red-eyed vireo and black-throated blue warblers above the lower. Voice of the veery, everywhere and gorgeous. Wetlands: mist softens colors and textures, blunts intractable evergreens—the world through gauze. Tiny, lacy sheet webs, rich with dew, stretch from twig to twig, reed to reed, the wicked snares of spiders—a welcome ally in the biting insect wars. Pond: female merganser bolts.
DOR: two-year-old garter snake
AOR: robins (of course), juncos, and two red efts, neon orange
Yesterday afternoon, a turtle on a hook. Jordan and I walk the dogs to the pond, listen to warblers, swat mosquitoes, smash blackflies . . . review packing protocols. Midway along the west shore, just above the waterline, where the overflow pipe directs water into a culvert under the road, a foot-long iron spike had been hammered into the bank. Tied to the tip, two blue nylon cords. One idles in the brown water, the other moves, subtly . . . micro-ripples spreading at the surface. I reeled in the cords. One end tapers into a monofilament fishing line and a naked hook; the other expands into an unhappy female snapping turtle, big as a bathroom sink. Jordan ran home for scissors or a knife or a machete or pruning shears. Anything sharp, really, and big enough to keep our hands from wedge-faced antiquity.
Five hundred mosquito bites later, Jordan returns with red-handled salad scissors, one size up from nail clippers. Our pod of dogs and people sweat excitement; Jordan controls the dogs; I pull the turtle up, her snap-trap jaws agape. Soft, pink mouth. Beady eyes. Leeches, like deflated balloons, dangle from spaces between the scutes—annelid ornamentation. Mosquitoes bite me, leeches bite turtle, blood-letting on both ends of the blue nylon line. Halfway up the bank, the fish hook pops out of the turtle's mouth. Hissing, she slides back into the pond—sinks into safety, a cloud of muck in her wake.
Wholeheartedly, Nana would have called the turtle rescue a mitzvah. Pea-brained turtle, a confidant of dinosaurs, an expressionless, irritable beast of dark water and dark spaces, never rendered an opinion. Long may she feast on the dead (and the occasional duckling and green frog).
Not for nothing - fixed bait on a set trotline can't be legal in VT? Certainly there are the lingering questions here of Fish and Game law violations and who rigged a trot line designed to kill a snapping turtle - or anything really. Subsistence neighbors? An adolescent without regard for laws? Do you investigate or know who? Do proper authorities respond? Turtle doesn't care at this point. Unethical way to kill turtles so indiscriminately... A duckling or frog avenger?
Definitely a mitzvah, anytime life is rescued. I think of Schweitzer and his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", of "The Star Thrower" by Loren Eiseley--you and Jordan saved more than a turtle, amid the muck and the effort. I've never forgotten the image from Vonnegut's BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS concerning a painting by Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of St. Anthony:
“I now give you my work of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal–the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us–in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
https://artinfiction.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/kurt-vonnegut-jr-breakfast-of-champions-1973/
Thanks for preserving an irritated turtle's vertical band of light.