The Turtle

Where do spirituality and environmentalism meet? Rick Bass on the wonder of releasing a painted turtle on the safe side of the road.

by Rick Bass

Surely I am becoming a pagan; and not through any formal rejection or even dubious re-examination of the mystery of my childhood, Christianity, but more through the evolution of some closer fit between my spirit and this Montana landscape. So glorious does this engagement feel some days that I must confess, in the beginning I wondered if I was not being tempted somehow by the archetypal devil himself—for surely anything this pleasurable had to be sinful, even lustful; and worst of all, placing myself, rather than any God, at the center of things.

I’m not even sure what a pagan is exactly—perhaps I’m misusing the word—but yesterday, after I had dropped the girls off to play at a friend’s house over on the backside of the valley, just across the state line, in Idaho, I encountered a painted turtle crossing the gravel road, traveling from one marsh to another, and my spirits soared, at the life-affirming tenacity of her journey, her crossing, as well as at this most physical manifestation that indeed the back of winter was broken; for here, exhumed once again by the warm breath of the awakening earth, was the most primitive vertebrate still among us.

It was not a busy road, but I stopped anyway and picked up the turtle. Her extraordinarily long front claws, so like a grizzly’s, confirmed that she was a female—the longer claws are useful in excavating a nest in which to lay her eggs—and I put her in a cardboard box to show the girls upon my return.

I continued on my way, down across the giant Kootenai River and into Bonners Ferry, to run errands, and then drove back to our friend’s, where all the children examined the turtle with appropriate and gratifying fascination. They learned the words “carapace” and “scute” and “plastron,” and a bit of the natural history of the painted turtle, but what I suspect lodged deepest in their memory was the mesmerizing hieroglyphics, or cartography, of red and orange swirls on the underside of the shell; and the image that probably went deepest into either their consciousness or subconscious, into the matrix of memory and formative identity—or so I hope—was the three of us stopping on the trip home to release the turtle on the other, safe side of the road, pointed down toward the larger marsh—the direction she had been headed—despite the fact that there was still no traffic.

We kept watch over her then, as she slithered her way through last autumn’s dead grass, and the newly emerging green-up, toward the cattails and chilly dark waters that would receive her and the future of her kind.