TURTLE CROSSING
(NOTE: Dedicated to "Smokebreak's" new friend): I live by the beach and yesterday afternoon drove west across the bay-bridge and immediately noticed traffic ahead on the two-lane road swerving erratically around something crossing in the opposite lane, which I suddenly realized was a LARGE turtle. Despite the fact that I was late for a meeting to sign some papers with an impatient lawyer who was about to leave for his usual long lunch, I did a U-turn and pulled over to help out the poor critter, who was at least a foot-long from head-to-tail, and looked like a brownish-green World War II Sherman tank covered with dried mud. It had been a long time since I'd seen a turtle crossing the road around this densely-populated coastal area, so I wanted to give him a hand but not a finger: it was a SNAPPING TURTLE! So, I grabbed my camera and snapped some pix as I stood alongside him and he continued his slow crawl north across the hot asphalt towards the cool wet marshes next to a boat-yard on the other side, a guy in a pick-up truck suddenly stopped, then another guy in an Econoline van, and there we all were: three guys wearing cut-offs, tee shirts and flip-flops standing in the middle of the road around a big unfriendly turtle in the warm Spring sunshine, with passing drivers blasting their car-horns and zooming around us. We agreed we had to do something but the question was what? Should we transport him across the street to where he wanted to go or return him to where he came from? There ensued a brief but energetic debate as I, being the eternal idealist, argued for helping him go where he wanted to go in the marshy cattails across the road. The other two guys, who apparently spent much of their free time watching conservative cable-TV "Nature" documentaries, voted to return him where he came from. Realizing we had to act quickly and that there was no time to debate poltical philosophy or we'd have turtle soup on our hands, they ran to their vehicles and got two shovels and I got a broom from mine (I'd been to a "Beach Sweep" clean-up over the weekend and brought it as a photo-prop). And then we struggled, with shovels and a broom, trying to wrestle with a large, heavy, non-cooperative turtle, who kept snapping at us with his very powerful jaws, and didn't much like having his picture taken. But finally we secured him on the two shovels with me using the broom to give him something to chew on, and we carried him about twenty feet back to the prickly briars and bayberry he had come from, and he scampered away!