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The time I met the nicest snapping turtle and the most furious softshell turtle. I was a child. I was forced to go visit some far-removed extended “family,” the kind of passive-aggressive and authoritarian people who took in a distant cousin for a weekend and treated you like an obnoxious dog or something, people who I was only slightly familiar with, which made me uncomfortable. “Family” not being something that I ever consistently had access to, “family” not a concept I was (or am, honestly) used to, “family” being something I only knew less of as time passed. They had a job which they were contracted to do that day. They brought me to a decaying industrial site in northern Appalachia, a paragon of Rust Belt gothic, to clean out the junk from a riverside lot that was scheduled to be redeveloped. My impression:

It felt like that stereotypical scene of pulp Americana, where a middle-aged man sits in a construction job-site trailer, flies buzzing, an old outdated fan from the 1970s unhelpfully churning warm air, and he, face half-obscured in shadow, hires a bunch of 19-year-olds to go to a post-industrial site to “take care of things.” Despite it still being morning, everyone is sweating, nobody is happy. A developer, dealing under the table in cash only, who despite owning several private properties is somehow always on the verge of bankruptcies and calls you from a landline after midnight on Tuesday night to offer you $150 to spend the next morning chugging gas station coffee before clandestinely salvaging some rusted metal from an overgrown property he may or may not actually own.

You wouldn’t know how far you were from Morgantown, Pittsburgh, or Zanesville because of the nature of the hills, hills everywhere, always obscuring the horizon, and the density of western Appalachian slopes’ deep green foilage drunk on late spring rain. I was the youngest person present, like a fragile goofy dainty pre-teen stowaway, barely tolerated on their Gruff-and-Serious Mission to tromp through the stagnating mud to reclaim bent rusted metal in the oppressive humidity. Pungent vernal pools. Too many toads and frogs to count. And in the flooded oxbows, and where the rain puddles collected in gravel, there were two turtles, and both of them were tiny little babies that could fit in the palm of your hand. One was a snapping turtle, the other a spiny softshell.

I almost saw this as a spiritual experience, because: (1) I actually lived far away, nowhere near this kind of humidity, where there were much fewer reptiles and amphibians, in a region at the extreme range limits of both of these turtles, where these turtles were rare. Acres and acres of degraded cattle rangeland or barley monoculture. Not very friendly to streams. There was also yucca-covered badlands, shortgrass prairie, sagebrush steppe. Friendlier to reptiles generally, but not generous in providing streams for the turtles. However, if circumstances aligned, and you paid attention to the humidity and the insects and the goings-on of the prairie, you might be lucky enough to sometimes see a snapping turtle or spiny softshell in little stock ponds and vernal pools in the “wide-open” prairie. They were like harbingers of ... something special, I guess.

And it was also a “spiritual” experience because (2) they were my two favorite North American turtles, at least at that time, partially because they both had interesting distribution ranges on the edge of their range, and I often went out looking but could rarely find them, so the auspiciousness of seeing both species together was cool.

And both turtles are so unique. The snapping turtle is like a dragon or dinosaur, full of personality and charisma. The serrated shell, the rough skin, the mass of muscle escaping bursting out and escaping the shell’s confines, the long dragon-like, almost-horned tail. And spiny softshells are almost alien. The dramatically long neck, the unique flat pancake shell, the leathery soft texture of the shell, they’re highly aquatic even for a turtle, etc. Softshells can sit at the bottom of a river, and extend their neck up to the water’s surface, so that they can breath, like a submarine’s periscope. And they’re very skittish, very fast when you encounter them and they retreat, just a blur, like an apparition.

So these, like, dudes in their twenties, seeing me watch the turtles, they all wanted to either (1) take the turtles home as “pets,” or (2) kill and eat them. (!!! But don’t worry, everything was fine, I eventually convinced them to save the turtles, to re-release at the river nearby.) But for a while, these people placed both turtles together, each in a pail with some water, the pails side by side.

You know how snapping turtles have a reputation for being fiery, grumpy, dangerous to handle?

This little snapping turtle was - to this day, still - the most passive and pleasant turtle I’ve ever encountered. Just completely calm and charming. I swear she was smiling. The dudes “babysitting” me were insisting on handling the snapping turtle to demonstrate their fearlessness or some other bullshit. I don’t like handling reptiles and amphibians unless its necessary for their own safety (remove them from the road or residential yard, transplant amphibians from a dangerously drying vernal pool, transplant a rattlesnake to somewhere it won’t be killed, etc.). But this time, to keep these dudes from harassing the snapping turtle, I was the one who would take it, and place it back into the wet pail after each of these guys had Proved Their Courage or whatever. This snapping turtle, not once did it appear agitated or aggressive. Nervous and uncomfortable with the harassment? Yes, but not a violent turtle.

But the softshell? Violent turtle. In the best way. The two turtles were polar opposites.

To this day, that was the angriest turtle I ever met. Hissing, clawing, wriggling, biting. I was 110% vibing with this softshell, because I shared its righteous fury. This turtle didn’t want to be harassed by these guys, treated like garbage. I myself was not enjoying being teased and harassed by these guys. They had spent their down-time that day fishing for and arbitrarily/sadistically killing carp and catfish to toss to the crows.

The softshell, the snapper, and I, all hostages.

To this day, I still love these two “alien” turtle species.

The turtles ended up being transplanted somewhere safer. So did I, when I returned “home.” The turtles lived. So did I, I guess.

#my writing i guess #turtle story #multispecies #ecologies