2:10 My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
2:11 For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
2:12 The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
2:13 The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
I.
There is a burbling box in the bedroom of our friends’ house in which lives a red-eared slider named Ganymede. I cannot see this turtle and have never touched it, but I hear it jump into its water when I enter the room and swim excitedly. I hear its tank’s pumps work ferociously and spout fountain-like when the water evaporates and I fill the tank until the pump returns to a soothing swooshy hum. And I hear it chirp in the night.
I like to say I turtle-sit, but truthfully, most of Gany’s needs are fulfilled by Alabaster, who feeds it and cleans its tank by fishing for detritus. For me, this turtle named Ganymede is but a collection of sounds and a glowing box. There was a time when I not only saw red-eared sliders, but also handled them regularly, with little pleasure on either side.
II.
I believe I would not feel so much for Ganymede if I had not the visual and even more, the tactile memory of the red-eared slider. When I was a kid I volunteered for several years on the Nature Trail in the San Francisco Zoo, handling the animals brought out from the Animal House to be touched by other kids and sometimes their parents.
Before we took our first animals for the day out to the trail, we cleaned cages and performed feedings–some more unpleasant than others. One of my least favorite morning chores was feeding live crickets to the red-eared sliders. This was done by pulling toilet paper and paper towel cardboard tubes from the cricket bin and shaking them out into their turtle doom.
When assigned to turtle station in the first round of the Nature Trail, we’d put the turtles, snapping and scratching, into their carrying case and lug them out to turtle pond, which sat atop a blustery little hill. It was generally a cold and thankless station to man.
We’d open the door and watch the advance guard scramble out, scrabbling over one another in their hurry to be free. Necks stretched, red stripes flashing, they’d hurl themselves into the pond. Others hung back with noses poking out tentatively, pulling back when we reached for them. Still others were resolutely still as stones, until we picked them up and tossed them into the pond. Then all four limbs and head would pop out and start swimming.
Ah, Turtle Hill! It was a miserable station most days, especially for the morning and late afternoon shifts, when the fog was thick and penetrating, wrestling turtles who insisted on rushing steadfastly away from their happy pond towards unknown lands. Stubborn turtles! Our hands were wet and cold for two hours, hours that creeped by far more slowly than the turtles, who were in fact pretty quick on land though their grace shows in their true element of water.
III.
We’d have to let the kids touch them; then of course, they’d all be in the bottom of the little dark pond, and we’d have to reach in with our already numbed hands and grab a reluctant turtle with sharp nails and furious thrashing head, who would like nothing better than to snap at our momentary pupils and us.
But I liked the chatting and the feeling of power that came with knowledge and the answering of questions.
“What do we have here?” the parents would say as the child reached for it. Then I launched into my Nature Trail patter:
“This is a red-eared slider, a semiaquatic turtle native to the Southern United States, but now common in all parts of the world. The carapace, or upper shell, of this species can reach more than 16 inches in length, but the average length ranges from 6 to 8 inches….”
We had been given binders with colored pages: blue for birds, green for amphibians, orange for reptiles and pink for mammals. I was very excited to be a volunteer at the San Francisco Zoo. I studied hard and learned everything there was to learn so that I would be the most well informed kid with the most entertaining docent patter. I did not know that during my three years at the Nature Trail I would begin losing my vision to a degenerative retinal eye disease.
IV.
As I volunteered from age ten to thirteen, my eyes grew subtly worse. The first thing I remember was how hard it was for me to walk into the Animal House from the bright outdoors. I would be temporarily blinded and would stop short, blinking, until I could make out the silver line of small mammal cages on the right, and judge my direction accordingly.
One of my earliest and most vivid moments of self-awareness came when I was at the turtle station, looking for a turtle to pick up and offer to a visitor, and reached for a rock instead. I blushed, ashamed.
It was a strange aspect of my eye disease in the visually impaired years that when I touched something, it revealed itself to me in full, as the object it was in reality, not what I thought it was. Once seen, the rock could never again (at least that day) reappear as a turtle. But without movement or touch verification, I grew less confident in my ability to find and name things.
V.
I made the mistake of Googling “voice of the turtle” and find that the turtle of the Solomon text has been hotly debated for centuries. At Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange I learn that the voice of the turtle probably does not refer to a turtle, nor even a turtledove, but rather the generic creature that “‘creepeth upon the earth’ (Leviticus 11:29).” And that a possible candidate, the frog, may be heard to sing in the spring–“a perfect fit with the Solomonic context.”
The biblical scholars have not heard the turtle chirp, and do not believe in its voice. But, in the deep silence of the night, I have heard the voice of the turtle, the chirping of Ganymede, like the peeping of a solitary chick, and, even if others, even my lover, do not hear it, I am comforted by the tiny sound.
*This is essay #3 of #52essays2017, written with all four senses and remembered sight. Read essay #2 “What I See/Saw” here*
