Nature & Outdoors

It had been a tough few years.

I became a single mother when my son was not quite two years old. I lost my first husband to a very public suicide, and it took time before I was ready to work again. In fact, if it hadn’t been for my son, I am not sure what I would have done. So maybe he saved my life? But the loggerhead sea turtles that nest on Anna Maria Island definitely deserve some credit as well.

I can safely say I know what it feels like to stand on the brink of insanity. The trauma from that sudden loss and the surrounding circumstances was so biting that even a decade later, the remembrance of it is visceral. The healing process was jagged, with intense peaks and valleys. But the requirements of parenthood meant that I never went completely over the edge. And, eventually, in order to heal, I had to resume work.

When my mother saw that the weekly newspaper where we live, on a barrier island on the west coast of Florida, was hiring, she suggested I apply. It was time. Everyone close to me knew I needed to find a purpose outside of raising my son and just surviving.

I had applied to work there 10 years prior when I moved home shortly after finishing graduate school. That time, the publisher/editor barely looked up when I, still in my twenties and full of hope and enthusiasm upon receiving my masters in mass communication from a well-respected institution, walked in all dolled up and smiling and presented her with my resume and writing samples. She brushed me off then. But I had since married into a family that was well known on the island and I was now worthy of her consideration. She apparently hadn’t read the front page of her competitor’s paper from a few years back when my husband jumped off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

In any case, this time I was hired, and my first beat was covering the organization that monitors the hundreds of sea turtles that nest every summer on our seven-mile spit of sand. Upon reaching maturity when they are about 35 years old, the female turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. Amazingly, always within a few miles of their birth spot. This is the only time they leave the water, and the males never return to land once they make their first crawl from sand to sea. I could relate to those female turtles; I never thought I would come back after I left for college in New England, but here I was, (previously) married with a child. The cycle continued for me and the turtles.

Maybe my husband could relate to the males.

The coverage entailed following the turtle watch executive director and her volunteers just before sunrise every morning, when they surveyed the beach to look for the tractor-like tracks indicating a sea turtle had crawled ashore to lay her nest. Immediately after nesting the turtles returned to the water, leaving only the tracks and a dug-up patch of sand, beneath which a clutch of about 100 eggs was laid. Volunteers then verified the spot to make sure it wasn’t a “false crawl,” a failed nesting attempt. If there were eggs, they staked off the nest for protection and monitored it for the roughly 75-day incubation period until the hatchlings erupted in a “boil” from beneath the sand and made their way to the Gulf of Mexico.

According to research, only about one in a thousand hatchlings make it to maturity.

The feeling of triumph shared among the volunteers and myself when the signs of a nest were spotted at sunrise was as if a mama turtle had just swept gold at the Olympics. When the nests hatched and a hundred tiny hatchlings scurried towards the water and swam away, a crowd of onlookers cheered from the shore.

I was part of something bigger than myself. By writing my stories I provided awareness of a prehistoric species threatened by a world developing around them. In educating the public, I helped ensure the survival of something ancient, something that started ages before I returned to that tiny strip of sand, and would continue long after I was gone.

During that first season, I longed to see one of these 250-pound mamas crawl ashore to lay her eggs. It became excruciating to see the results of late-night nesting but never actually see a turtle. So, at about 2am during the peak of season, I went out to the beach to hopefully catch sight of a loggerhead.

The tide was out, so the beach was vast and the full moon was shining bright enough to cast shadows. Sea turtles are drawn to the light of the moon, so this likely meant more nesters. Unlike the daytime when the beach was full of revelers, I was deliciously alone. As I walked, spotting no other signs of life, I joked to myself that maybe this whole thing was an intricately devised scam and there weren’t really any sea turtles here after all.

And then I saw it. A set of tracks about three feet across, leading about 40 feet up into the dunes. First, I followed with my eyes, which led me to a large hump slowly gyrating in the sand. Then I walked that direction, maintaining distance to not disturb her. I laid down about 20 feet from the large loggerhead so that I could watch without disrupting her process.

I could sense her awareness of me, but she did not mind that I was there. She somehow knew I was not a threat; maybe she intuited I had been crippled by grief, that the weight of what my husband’s mental illness had done to me, to our son, to his family, had permanently changed me into the opposite of a predator. At least a part of me would be forever gentle and sad. We made eye contact, but she was engaged in something so deeply instinctual that my witnessing her was infinitely more significant to me than to her. I watched silently as she labored her eggs into the sand. I don’t know how long I was there, but did it really matter? How many thousands of her ancestors had done the same thing, called back to the same place, time after time? I was just lucky to be there.

I thought of my dead husband and how he chose to forsake experiencing life’s big and little beauties. I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of sea turtles, when he leapt into the same waters where they floated slowly, waiting for their turn on the beach. And there I was. On the beach.

After about 30 minutes, she used her flippers to cover her newly formed nest with sand, slowly turned around and then, faster than it seemed a body that cumbersome should be able to move, scampered down the beach and slipped beneath the waves.

Many stories emerged from the five years I covered turtle watch. I saw injured animals rescued, healthy turtles satellite-tracked for research and hundreds of hatchlings waddle to the water.

During my time at the paper, I maintained many beats, including city government for the three municipalities that make up our island. (Yes, we have three cities in a seven-mile radius). Whether you are covering the presidency or a town comprising 400 residents, politics is politics and politicians are still politicians, which made my job brutal at times.

But I wouldn’t trade those five years at the newspaper for anything. I won awards, got publishing opportunities, discovered more about the human experience than I did about sea turtles, and learned to write in AP Style, which is a whole other language. But, most of all, I came back to life after significant trauma. And when my job at the paper devolved to its own form of slow-wrought trauma, I understood it was time to go.

Leaving the paper was like breaking up with a dysfunctional partner. I even did the “Let’s try and get back together and see if we can work it out,” thing, which of course failed miserably.

The work which had once given me life now consumed my life, and took me away from the people and activities that mattered most. So I walked away.

Unlike my husband, I refused to be consumed.

I read last week that the first nest of the season was spotted on the island. The volunteers have resumed their posts on the beach. And the process that has occurred for millennia, the continuing cycle of life for the loggerheads of Anna Maria Island, starts again. And even though I am no longer their messenger, I am eternally grateful to have served them. Maybe a hatchling or two that was born under my watch is out there in the Gulf, growing and gaining strength to one day return to our beach and lay eggs of her own, and then swam back into the dark night waters.