David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

For the Love of Turtles

All thoughts of a turtle are turtles.
–R. W. Emerson

Something about turtles draws a smile. A box turtle crossed my path at the wooded edge of a Hartford, Connecticut cemetery on a June morning last year and left me buoyant for days. We spent several minutes staring at each other. Its high domed shell with intricate art deco-like yellow patterning was stunning. Recalling the moment still makes me happy.

Turtles are the reptiles we love. However wrongly, most people I know fear snakes, and lizards are seen as a bit creepy. So what’s so special about their shelled relatives? Also cold blooded with small beady eyes and decidedly not cuddly, turtles still steal our hearts.

The oldest surviving reptiles, turtles lived with the earliest dinosaurs some 200 million years ago. There are about 300 species worldwide, with eight inland species here in southern New England. These egg laying animals are strong beaked and toothless. An armor-like shell is their trademark characteristic, and time has proved it a remarkable defense against predation of this slow and deliberate creature. Our native turtles have a life span comparable to human beings, with box turtles living up to a century.

The Voice of Ruggles Pond (New England Trail Haibun)

Elongated and narrow like the trail, Ruggles Pond is a steely gray plain in January. Gone are soft cloud and piney shoreline reflections. Water lilies and duckweed dotting the surface have disappeared, and the unkempt sedgey, grassy edges on the opposite shore are desiccated and bronzed by cold. No kids frolic on the beach, and the spin-casters, canoers and kayakers are but memories. Fish, frogs and other lives are sealed beneath the hardened surface.

The flinty ice seems impassive. Sometimes milky or black, in places it’s pebbled, streaked, cracked, smooth, nubby or pocked—winter’s Braille tattletale about freeze and thaw and freeze again. Though solid and still, the pond remains restless with booming sounds, visceral grunting and grinding, or a quick rumbling roar as ice expands and contracts. Not sweet like birdsong or hurried like wind, winter’s voice is a sudden, startling shout vibrating in my chest.

pond’s frozen surface
still to eyes, open to ears
thunder in clear sky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/