Turtles Started It All

It was a sanctuary that soaked my fears and worries from me. It was a steady fortress against the sword-bearing problems of the world. It was my little universe to escape the present. It was a local park.

More importantly, I thought of it as my park.

Who had better claim to that park than me? Every day I would visit that park, and as a reward for my constancy the park had whispered its secrets to me. I knew where the squirrels chatted the loudest. I watched families throw food to the ducks as I smugly recalled times when I had coaxed them to feed from my hand. I knew that between the “island” and the main landmass, there was a log that would have twenty turtles lined up like they were elementary children ready to leave for lunch. A dam, messy yet efficient, was hidden to the casual observer but visible to the meticulous wanderer. Two koi fish would gift me with their regal presence in the murky lake water when I arrive. I would stop by a stump that was safely guarded by fellow trees to count its rings of life. I watched people cross the red bridge and I thought about the bird nests that would be under that bridge during summer. I knew what it was like to watch the rain be born, nature’s tear drops falling in a synchronized fashion across the surface of the lake as it came to greet you. I knew that the lake changed colors, from blue to green and in-between, to fit the mood of the day.
         
That park was my second home. I was one in a hundred. Who else would use a park instead of a bedroom as their sanctuary? Who else would lay on the grass and watch the mountainous clouds with wonder? I was one in a thousand. Who else would take the time to befriend ducks, name koi fish, or try to guess the lake’s mood that day? I was one in a million, and everybody else was ordinary.
         
A blind man doesn’t know he can’t see until somebody tells him. I thought that the park had chosen only me to be its confidante. I thought that I was the rose among the daisies, the special person in a crowd of uniform people. But one day, my perception was indelibly changed by a very impressionable person…
         
                   

I should’ve said no. When the boy had bluntly asked me if I had wanted a turtle, I probably should’ve said no.
         
But I said yes. The boy with jeans too large for him, bare feet, dirty hands, chubby cheeks and buck teeth—I thought he was Tom Sawyer reincarnated—turned on his heel on the red bridge and disappeared on a trail through the thick forest.
Now I stand on the banks of the lake, my hand clutching a green phone that didn’t belong to me and sitting next to a pocket knife that had been stabbed in the ground.
Watching a ten year old boy fully clothed wading chest deep in the murky public lake, trying to catch a turtle.

His arms are hovering over the water’s surface as if he has some preference to keep only his arms dry. Or maybe he can somehow “feel” the turtles, using the omnipotent mind that all kids claim to have. My skin crawls to think about what the boy’s bare feet would be feeling on the lake floor. My gaze snatched by movement, I see a couple walking their dog on the other side of the lake. In shocked realization, they see the insane child in unsanitary water and their accusatory stares pin me across the vast distance. I shrug dramatically and spread my hands out wide as if saying, “I have no idea!”
         
Sawyer’s head unexpectedly takes a dunk in the water, his head completely immersed. He comes spluttering back up, spitting out public lake water. “A ditch! I didn’t know there was a ditch there!” Wading out of the water, he sits down on the grassy bank and blows out a breath. He picks his foot up and inspects his heel, fingering a fresh cut from the rocks on the bottom. He then jerks his pocket knife from the soft ground. Sullenly he says, “I didn’t find any turtles.” He holds his hand out for his green cellphone and I give it to him. Just like he did on the bridge, he just starts to walk away. I scramble to my feet, not willing to let this encounter end just yet.
         
“Do your parents know what you do out here?” the words burst from my mouth.
         
Brushing dirt clinging to his sodden pants, Tom Sawyer nods. “They know.”
         
“How old are you?”
         
“Ten.”
         
“Do they know you have a pocket knife?”
         
“Yeah,” he answers, his tone suggesting that he thought I was the dumbest person he had ever met. I narrow my eyes at him as he slips his knife into his pocket and strolls towards the bridge, his steps light and lively.
         
“What’s your name, kid?”
         
I didn’t realize how much I had expected “Tom” to be uttered from his mouth, because when he replied “Nicholas” I feel a pang of disappointment. This was quickly overshadowed by my annoyance that Nicholas didn’t bother to ask for my name in return.
         
Crossing under the bridge, turning a blind eye to all the wispy spider webs, I ask, “Are you still looking for turtles?”
         
Nicholas shakes his head. “No, I never go in the water over here. There’s alligators in there.”
         
And so went one of the strangest encounters of my life that I would never forget.
         
Nicholas was no stranger to silence, but rather a friend. We talked sparingly, and only when I initiated the conversation. We walked in dense woods as I listened in silver enthrallment as he spun dark tales about alligators in the lake and the dead dogs that were their victims. I followed in his footsteps as we restlessly searched the creek for hidden adventures to find and conquer. That day, at that hour, we called each other friends. We were friends in the most simplistic, elemental way: We were friends because, for however brief that moment in time, we were content in the other’s company.

I watched him part his way through the high grass, his searching gaze sweeping the ground for racer snakes. He was completely tense, his muscles ready to spring, his eyes sharp as a hawk’s, like he was taking in the smallest detail. His predatory intensity made me sad for him—sad that he had been born in the wrong time, in the wrong place. He should’ve been born centuries ago when they rode on wild mustangs and hunted through the pristine forests with long hunting knives. But he was here at a local park where a busy street intersected. This park was a tiny but delicious slice of the life he should’ve been born in, his imagination filling in the empty spaces.
         
“Did you ever get bitten by a snake?” I ask idly as I follow him, my eyes frantically searching for anything slithering in the high grass.
         
“Yeah, I had to go to the hospital,” he remarks casually. “Look!” He stoops down excitedly and I step back hurriedly, thinking he had found a snake. As he stands up, however, in his open palm there wasn’t a reptile but a rock. “It’s a fossil.”
         
I step closer, studying it with my skeptical eyes. It looks like a rock to me. But whether it was a fossil or not, I decide right then and there that I would keep this as a memento of the time I spent with a Tom Sawyer look-alike. Stubbornly, for the next hour, I kept a rock, small and ordinary, held securely in my fist.
         
As we explored the creek and the surrounding environment, we didn’t stray far from the bridge with the tethered barking dog that was his and the abandoned bike that was mine. We tried looking for lizards, we tried looking for turtles again. Once, Nicholas had spotted a snake in the water; the ledge he stood on was maybe four feet above the water. He coaxed me to hold him by the feet as he leaned over to try (unsuccessfully, thank God) to catch the water snake. Later we spotted a wire with a fish hook entangled on a log. He unwound it, placed it in my hands, and then dashed off with a hurried explanation. He returned seconds later with worms. I winced as he placed the wriggling, moist masses in my hands (with the fossil-rock inside). Then I watched in renewed fascination as he hooked a worm and dropped the hook into the water, his bare hands clutching a thin wire. Within a minute, he pulls the wire and a frantic fish rises from the water with a splash. He reels it up, hand over hand.
         
“This is a blue gill,” he says didactically, and he rambles off a few more facts. The smell of raw fish permeates the damp air. Its feeble flapping slaps at the bridge railing.
         
“What are you going to do with it?” I ask with raised eyebrows.
         
“Put it back.” As he says it, he throws the fish, wide-eyed and gulping, back into the water.
         
He pulls two more fish in quick succession to my dry amusement, his fingers nimbly picking the hook from the cheek and letting the sleek body slide from his wet hands over the bridge.
         
I remember I was thinking about why God had created worms when Sawyer suddenly cries, “A snake!”
         
Bewildered, I watch him sprint off, bare feet pounding a fast-tempo on the bridge’s wooden planks, leaving the wire and worms in my hands. In sudden premonition, I knew it was one of those snakes, bad-tempered, enormous, and presumed poisonous, that Nicholas had seen. Inhaling a sharp breath in rising panic, I yell, “Wait, Nicholas!” I run after him, dropping the worms and the fish wire as I plunge into the woods, dodging trees and jumping over bushes, stray branches whipping in my face.
         
Suddenly I am pulled back sharply—I look down to see that the fish hook is stuck in my shorts! The other end of it must’ve caught somewhere in the bushes back there. Cursing under my breath, I frantically try to work the silver hook free. My fingers are too clumsy in my haste, easily sweating because of the heavy air. My body is taut with adrenaline, my ears straining to hear the scream of a boy that was sure to come.
         
“Look!”
         
I swing my head to see Nicholas standing at the end of the pathway. He holds in his hand the tail of a five foot snake, dull black scales glinting in the sunlight. Time slowed down as I see the snake coil and twist furiously, snapping and striking at Nicholas’s feet in vain, its menacing hiss slicing through the air. Nicholas isn’t phased as he calmly holds the snake farther away from him. He points to the snake and casually remarks, “You see how its belly is flat? That means it’s mad.” Nicholas smiles as he switches the furious snake to his other hand.
         
Fear lodged in my throat, “I’m stuck,” I squeak. That means that I can’t run away if he tries to get me to “pet” the cute little snake. “Put that down!” Quickly I add, “But nowhere near me!”

         

It had been later in the day, after a few more adventures with Sawyer and a goodbye never said, that I had realized some things with startling and disappointing clarity: Not only couldn’t I honestly call the park mine in my heart any longer, I also couldn’t go on believing I was the only spot of bright color in a world draped in grey.
         
I thought about how Nicholas had handled that snake so fearlessly, how he swam in a public lake, how he had fished bare-handed, how a pocket knife was probably his best friend. If I had met him in a grocery store, I would’ve never guess what he did on Friday afternoons. It goes the same for everybody—we don’t know what their passions are, what juicy secrets they guard or possibly want to share with a willing ear; basically, we only see the surface of their Ocean. Who was I to feel supercilious in that everybody was the same and I was the only one that was different? The youthful fog that clouded my thoughts and judgment started to clear. I liked to think that I was unique, that I was so much more distinctive than people my age or even among my adult neighbors. But after that day, I wasn’t blind any longer: we are all unique, and we all claim that right as human beings.
         
I also learned that the world was strange. To think that I would’ve missed this important piece of wisdom if I had said “no” to a turtle…