Mother of Turtles

Todos Santos, Mexico, December 2021

The first baby turtle I saw was a disappointment. I had thought he would be green. Poor thing, he didn’t know how much he let me down. How many foolish hopes I had placed on his little fragile body.

He was supposed to fix my burnout. When I first taught environmental science fourteen years ago, students didn’t believe in global warming and thus were apathetic. Nowadays, most believe in global warming but also that the situation is hopeless and thus are apathetic. I try to get students excited about solutions, but it’s hard, especially when I feel myself succumbing to despair. The despair was getting worse after I broke my foot. Being trapped behind my teacher’s desk made me feel even more useless. I hoped that volunteering a day with Tortugeuros las Playitas on my vacation to Mexico would revive me, prove my utility. I hoped I would gain photos to show my students. Photos showing a species threatened with extinction thriving. Photos proving that people can be helpful, that I can be helpful.

He was also supposed to be cute. To warm my heart with his tiny flippers. My maternal instincts have always been stronger for young animals than for children. (I once gifted a friend bear pajamas for her son, just so that I would like him more). I used to worry that my aversion to babies made me a monster. But after teaching about overpopulation for years, I’ve made peace with a life without human children. On this trip, I would be a mother to turtles.

But this turtle, who crawled out of his nest in the high noon heat and would have died if he hadn’t been scooped out by a volunteer, is gray black, thrashing, reminiscent of the huge waterbugs that plagued my old basement apartment in NYC. My first impression is revulsion. The turtle looks distinctly unhappy to have been born.

“He’s just a little dehydrated,” the volunteer named Mark says as he sprinkles sea water on the newborn. Like magic, the gray flesh becomes a slippery black and the turtle slows, as though pacified. The turtle isn’t what I had expected, but I can feel myself beginning to love him.

We sit in the shade of a palm frond palapa fifty yards from the ocean, surrounded by a blinding white sand beach. The palapa abuts a plastic-tarped greenhouse. It is too cold this time of year for the turtle eggs to successfully incubate its added heat. The temperature of the greenhouse also keeps the gender ratio equal: if it’s too cold more females are born, if it is too warm, too many males. So volunteers have painstakingly dug up nests and relocated the eggs here. Even aside from the cold, the nests would be vulnerable to poachers, coyotes, ATVs, and even overeager mother turtles who often dig nests on top of other nests. The greenhouse isn’t natural; but it does give the turtles a fighting chance.

I look at the other volunteers. There is a family of four from Tribeca, a fancy part of NYC. Their clothes are crisp and bright: they must have packed a new outfit for every day of their trip. I have a salsa stain on my shirt and sand in my hair and face from when I toppled off my crutches into the sand. The tween daughter is absorbed in a fantasy novel, her younger brother is rapt with a game on his cell phone. The parents are trim and tan with Fit Bits and good health. They have paid extra money to have a turtle nest named in their honor. They are polite but aloof when I try to chat, so I stop trying.

Volunteer Mark is 6’4” with a football player build. He would have been intimidating but for his rainbow painted toenails, his braided goatee reaching his chest, his whimsical tattoos and jolly expression. He tells about the art he has welded for Burning Man, his former jobs as a chef and nightclub owner in SF, how he now prefers a quieter life in the friendly Mexican town of Todos Santos where he volunteers with baby turtles three days a week. He seems content. I wonder if I would be happier if I quit my job, moved to Mexico, spent my days with turtles instead of teenagers.

Then there is my husband, who has had to carry my crutches for me all over the cobbled streets of Mexico. He hadn’t even wanted to come on this trip. He doesn’t like the water. He would have rather gone rock climbing. So would I, but that was impossible with my foot. Still he was gamely making the best of it and perked up when he saw the first turtle. The paternal way he gazed at the little wriggly body made my heart melt.

Time to check the greenhouse again. My crutches are wobbly in the sand. The greenhouse is a good twenty degrees hotter than outside. The nests that we are supposed to check, that are sixty days old, are marked with numbered sticks and rimmed with plastic. We are told to gently scoop our hands into the warm sand, to feel for any hatchling that might have emerged early. Ungracefully, I let go of the crutches and plop down to my knees. The grains of sand are working their way into my legs. It hurts but it feels good to be working, to be capable of doing something. I want so badly to hold one of the babies. I sift through the sand, feeling impatient. But I only find broken shells from old nests.

There is a shout. The Tribeca Dad has found a hatchling out of the nest. The baby flails against the plastic tarp of the greenhouse. Trying to reach the ocean but blocked. The baby is quickly scooped up, given water, and placed in the cool of the nursery. I feel sorry for the creature, glad he was found. And resentful of the father. He and his family were so nonchalant about the turtles. He didn’t need them the way I did.

And so the afternoon passes. Every twenty minutes we check the nests. A few more hatchlings are found by the children, on the rare turns when they break away from their book and phone. Unburdened by crutches, they always reach the nests first. I feel more and more jealous of their discoveries. I know I’m being childish. I decide to take a break, to take a swim.

I lay my crutches above the high tide line, so they don’t get swept out to sea. I crawl on my knees like a baby turtle to the water. The waves are high and slapping. I churn in the surf and for a few moments I’m afraid I’ll pummel my broken foot against the sand. Then I worry I won’t be able to breathe. But I break the surf and then the water is clear, cool, and deep with colorful fish darting in and out of sand swirled up by waves. The fish are beautiful, but I view them with suspicion: how many would snack on a baby turtle? I chide myself for thinking this. Don’t the fish deserve a chance just as much as the turtles? Is it wrong to prefer one species over another on the basis of cuteness?

Afterwards, I dry quickly in the greenhouse but the salt stays, leaving my hair crunchy and my skin sticky. At five PM it is time for the nest cleanout. The non-profit owners, the pros, arrive to dig out the nests. They say it is time for these creatures to be born. The scheduling of it feels like a planned c-section.

Thomas, the sixteen-year-old son of the owner, expertly digs out the nest with quick but gentle movements. Like a magic trick, two, then ten, then twenty turtles come to the surface. “You try,” Thomas tells me. I dig in and my hand emerges with a brand-new turtle. His flippers hold my fingers like a hug. But Thomas is concerned. “Not like that, you need to be more gentle.” I look at the turtle in my hands. His flipper looks a little crooked. Did I do that? I put him in the bucket with his siblings. He looks wonky. I want to cry.

I don’t dig in the nests anymore. I only help the Tribeca children to collect the turtles on the surface while their parents take photos. Other pro volunteers are doing the dirty work: they flip the turtles over to check if they have any yolk still connected to their abdomens. Those that do inevitably have maggots, which must be picked off and thrown into buckets of water where they thrash and die.

Over a hundred turtles are pulled from the two nests. That’s over fifty per mother. My environmental science curriculum calls this an r-strategy, having a large number of offspring but investing little in their care. In contrast, humans as a species are k-strategists, having few children that are raised to adulthood.

At sunset it is time to release the turtles. It is the best time, we are told. When there are the fewest predators. We need things as easy as we can for the babies. They have no parent to look out for them.

The turtles are divided up so that every pair of volunteers has a bucket. My husband carries the bucket towards the water, and he is too fast. I am clumsy on my crutches and tourists crowd him like a groupie. I yell at him to slow down and edge my way to his side.

There is a line in the sand where we are told to do the release. One by one we take the turtles out and place them gently on the sand. Some begin crawling to the ocean right away whereas others are slow to start, as though still sleepy from the egg. The turtle I had harmed moves crookedly, but then somehow straightens out. I exhale.

He moves towards the sea, towards the setting sun. I know the surf is rough. I worry for him. I want to pick him up, to swim him past the surf to where the ocean is calmer. I want to help all of the babies. But we are told they need to do this themselves.

Only one of the hundred is likely to survive to adulthood. I wish the odds were better. Aside from potentially getting eaten by predators the babies might choke on oil, eat plastic bags instead of jellyfish, or suffocate in fishing nets. Tortugeuros Las Playitas gave them a head start but the effort was a drop in the bucket compared with a whole troubled ocean.

In fourteen years of teaching I’ve taught well over a thousand students. Like a turtle mother, I was only with them for a brief time before sending them out on their own. I hope that they are happy, healthy, thriving as much as they can in this COVID chaos. I hope that they have learned that taking care of the planet is taking care of themselves. But I don’t know how they turned out. I have to assume that the odds are better than one in a hundred. I have to keep trying.

Three turtles reached the water only to get flipped back out onto the shore by a wave. But they turned around. They try again. Against the setting sun, it is impossible to see their color, if they are green or black.

I hold my husband’s hand. For a moment, I don’t worry about my own struggle across the sand that I will need to take with crutches to get back to the car. I don’t worry about the enormity of environmental problems. For a moment it is enough to sit and watch the turtles. The turtles know what to do. Just keep moving forward.