Okay, I didn’t even actually see a turtle, much less write about one. I was lost for a title and thinking about classic literature. However, I dedicate this essay to Yertle, the smartest turtle in the whole damned stack.
What incredible changes time has wrought upon this area and the entire world. If only you could speak. You’d speak in tongues; languages long lost to human ears. More likely, you’d communicate in way as alien to us as a whale’s shrill language. You’d speak of everything before the existence of my eldest forefather – a living world. The mountains of malleable stone slashing across endless grasslands; the creviced depths of the ocean – unfathomably vast; the dense jungle tropics – teeming and writhing on brink of bursting with life.
All these great changes and so many more occur every day and will into the future. "Let it also be borne in mind now infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life," Darwin cautioned. In the right environment – the wind blowing swiftly and rattling the tree limbs, (and sending some particularly pokey ones in the direction of my eyes,) the pond water flowing noisily down a stone stairway, and an innumerable pack of inch-long almost-obscure-black tadpoles swimming below – its impossible to forget. Everything seems right. Everything seems to be in perfect order.
On the banks of this cluttered, man-made pond, through the cement and stone, four different plants are growing in one inhospitable square-foot of earth. One small tree reaches four feet above the water, its roots dug far into the soil and branches forming a small canopy overhead, densely leafed and flowered. Another lies drooping against the earth, but alive none-the-less, bearing wide-green leaves. The third plant is small, but grows dense and erratically. Dozens of shoots spring up in no recognizable pattern, each stem no more than three millimeters in diameter but filled out two inches thick by new leaves. Those pointed barbs barely peek over the rock ledge in which this plant resides. The final plant, a true native of the water, extends from the stream of a small waterfall up into the rocks, covering the ground below in an array of hundreds of chlorophyll umbrellas. These are merely the differences visible to the naked eye!
Such a plethora of organisms swim about in the pond water, crawl about the stone ledge, and float on the breeze. Each and every one a living creature with a design for one function: survival.
I don’t think that we’ve learned much from nature when we arrogantly craft monuments to honor human beauty and symbolize the virtuous benevolence with which we oversee our society. Our designs come from opulence, theirs, from necessity. Scott Sanders wrote, "Most of us don’t recognize that ‘undeveloped nature,’ that nature which dances and unfurls its life without regard for human purposes." Everything has its own beauty or appreciable quality. A functional aestheticism. Still, when we think of preserving nature, of saving species, its the tigers and eagles and whales that come to mind.
Long live the microbes and poisonous snakes and insects too.