An amazing night- Turtle Walk part II

            It looked like a hurricane might be headed our way…. so what did we do?  We jumped in our car and headed right towards it, to my parent’s house on a little barrier island that is prone to flooding, vulnerable to high winds, and right in what looked like the path of the storm.    Normally, we are not so irresponsible or crazy but it had been about 55 days since our “turtle walk” back in June and “our” baby turtles were due to hatch!  

All day Friday, we had watched the storm’s progress.  We watched the projected track and we calculated our window of opportunity.  Then, we decided that as long as we could be back home by Sunday afternoon, it was safe enough to go see if we could witness the hatching of the turtle eggs we had so carefully helped mark and protect weeks ago.

My mom contacted her friends from the turtle watch patrol and they informed us that though hatchings were never guaranteed, they would be “evacuating a nest” Saturday evening and we were welcome to come along to watch the process.   I could not help but think the word “evacuate” was a little ironic considering the oncoming threat of “Isaac”.  “Evacuating” a turtle nest is not like evacuating the island for a hurricane though, thank goodness.  No long lines of traffic, no hurrying to get away from danger, no whipping winds or torrential rain squalls.  

Just some rubber gloves and a lot of digging.  

When sea turtle nests are newly discovered (from the tracks the mama turtles leave on the sand), in the beginning of nesting season, they are verified and then marked and dated.  That is what we witnessed back in June.  

Towards the end of the season, after the baby hatchlings have left the nest (which the turtle experts can tell from the tracks the babies leave on the sand) the sticks and caution tape are taken down and then the remains of the nest are examined and the leftover egg shells counted for official government record keeping. 

The nest to be evacuated did not turn out to be one of the nests we had helped mark but we were still excited to be part of the process, especially when we heard there was a chance that a left-behind hatchling or two might be found in the nest.   So Saturday evening, we watched with baited breath as a nest was dug up and little mounds of cracked, abandoned egg shells piled up.  In the end, there were a few un-hatched eggs and ninety hatched eggs but no baby turtles still lingering behind.

 

“There is a nest just a few blocks away that we think is due to hatch this evening,” the turtle walkers told us.  They then shared with us that they had turtle walking friends that once thought a hatching was eminent and ended up sitting by a nest for 6 evenings straight only to have it finally hatch the seventh night, after they had given up.  They told us they themselves had sat at nests for hours on end a few times- as late as 2 a.m. they said, to see the babies finally emerge and head to the sea.  ‘We can’t guarantee anything but it does look like this nest is ready,” they informed us.

We figured it was worth coming back after dark to see.  

At nine p.m. we approached the nest and found the turtle walkers there watching quietly as one tiny loggerhead baby stuck his head up through the sand.   “It may take a while, but when they are all ready the baby turtles will all come out together and head to the water.  Wait and see,” they told us.   We did not have to wait long.  Within minutes, a few more little heads wiggled free of the sand and then all of the sudden, just as they promised us, the nest started to shake and baby turtles climbed out, scrambling quite quickly towards the Gulf.  About 12 hatchlings emerged and we followed them, watching closely to make sure they arrived safely at their destination about 50 feet away.  

Then we returned to the nest to wait for more.  But the sand was quiet.  The turtle walkers told us there were always about 100 eggs per nest and they had never seen a hatching with so few babies.  So we waited, and waited, and waited.  

While we waited, we went for a little walk down the beach and saw another nest that had obviously just hatched and we viewed the hundreds of tiny turtle tracks in the sand.  “This was a normal hatching,” we were told.  “All the babies came at once and it looks like there were a lot of them.”  

The turtle walkers doubted we would see any more baby turtles but we headed back to the first nest just in case, as they speculated about what might have caused the low numbers.  Maybe there were fire ants in the nest that ate right through the eggs, they thought.  Maybe ghost crabs ate some of the eggs.

We walked slowly back to the still marked off nest and when we got there were thrilled to see a little movement in the sand.  Another little hatchling was trying to dig his way out.  So we sat in the sand to wait and see what might happen.  

It was a beautiful night, cool and breezy with the moon over head, its glow a little hazy from thin cloud cover.  A halo of light surrounded it in the sky and the water lapped gently at the shore.  There was no sign of a hurricane lurking out in the distance, no indication of the danger that lay beyond the horizon.  It was just us, a few other tourists, and the turtle walkers, to appreciate the quiet sound of the little waves and the cool gusts of soft wind that blew every few minutes on the beautiful beaches of Anna Maria Island. The turtle babies were in no hurry and we had all night to wait.

It was probably 40 minutes, maybe longer, when finally the hatchlings started to dig themselves out of a little hole in the sandy nest.  They call the hatching a “boil” because that is what it looks like the sand is doing, as dozens and dozens of tiny little turtles all squirm and wiggle and fight their way out of the nest to crawl towards their watery home.  This time, like they are supposed to, all the hatchlings decided to come out together and someone counted close to 70 babies.  

 Once again we followed carefully behind them straining our eyes in the dark to watch their perilous trek over seashells and seaweed to make it to the safety of the water.  Their little flippers moved quickly back and forth as they scurried to the Gulf.  Along the way, a few little hatchlings flipped and lay there helplessly waving their flippers in fear until a turtle walker saw them and flipped them back over helping them along.  In the end all the babies made it.  

It was such an indescribably amazing experience to be able to see their “birth” on the beach and their immediate independence, relying only on their innate instincts (and the kind turtle walking volunteers) to get themselves to safety.  

The brand new baby turtles were so, so cute and we wanted so much to photograph the event but were warned that any white light would disorient the hatchlings and put them in danger.  So we put our cameras away and just watched in wonder.  

When we left the beach at 11 p.m. to go back to my parent’s house for a shower and the comfortable beds in their guest room, we all sported huge satisfied smiles -- full of the memory of an awesome, awesome night.

This video is not ours and we did not see any hatchlings in daylight but it is an adorable video of a baby loggerhead on Anna Maria Island, from 2009.

Remembering Grandpa

    I received a short e-mail almost two weeks ago now.  “Grandpa is in the hospital with pneumonia, not doing well,” was all it said.  My grandfather had not been in good health for years.  He had spent the last three years in a nursing home.  But, this latest illness looked like it might have dire consequences.  I kept up with his prognosis through e-mail and phone calls, and Tim and I discussed the possibility of a visit to go see Grandpa.
    The truth is, I was not really that close to my paternal grandfather.  He was always a very quiet man and my family had not lived close to him since I was three years old.  Though we would go to visit often when I was a child, there were always aunts and uncles and cousins filling the house and I never really had much personal interaction with my grandpa.  He did not go out of his way to hang out with us grandkids and we were much too busy playing with each other in the finished basement to be bothered with the boring adult conversations going on upstairs.  Like my grandpa, I was quiet and shy and so the two of us never knew quite what to say to each other on the occasions when we were all together.  I have many memories of being with my dad’s family, gatherings that would include my own aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as my dad’s at times.  My memories of being with dad’s family are good memories full of talking, laughing, and tons of extended family who were always thrilled to see my siblings, my cousins, and me but in most of my memories Grandpa was not a prominent figure.  He was there, quietly sitting, always sort of in the background of our visits and of my memories.  I have only a few special personal memories of Grandpa.  He always had butterscotch candies in his shirt pocket and he would share them with us whenever we saw him.  I remember he would burn his trash in a fire pit in the backyard every evening and sometimes he would let me throw things in, like my Styrofoam cup or plastic candy wrappers.  I loved seeing how they would curl and dance in the heat before being burned up, neither Grandpa nor I knowing anything of the damage we might have been doing to the environment.  I remember one time sitting on Grandpa’s lap as we watched home movies for what seemed like hours.  And I remember going with my grandparents to a festival where Grandpa was playing his harmonica.  He was a professional harmonica player for years but I was only there to see him play in public that one time.  As I got older, our visits got fewer and farther between and since Grandma and Grandpa were never comfortable traveling we saw little of them in my teenage years.  Once I became an adult, it was even harder to see my grandparents.  I moved even farther away, Tim and I were on a very tight budget (still are actually), and our family was growing quickly, keeping us busy.  Time has a way of slipping by more quickly than I realize and, somehow, nine years passed without a trip to see Grandma and Grandpa.  So I found myself two weeks ago, reading my e-mail, not sure how much time Grandpa had left and not at all sure how I could get to see him, yet feeling in my heart that I needed to be there. 
    Tim and I talked about driving up to Pennsylvania, where Grandpa lay frail and sick in his hospital bed.  We talked about the 800+ mile drive, the time it would take to make the drive, the cold, snowy weather we would encounter, and the cost of it all.  It just didn’t seem feasible to go.  Then my mom offered to book a flight for me, with her and my dad, to fly up for five days.  It would require me leaving my four older children (the baby could fly free, sitting on my lap on the plane).  Tim would have to take time off work to be with them, but it was the only option and Grandpa’s health continued to deteriorate rapidly.  
    My grandfather died before we made it to town.  I did not get to talk to him one last time.  I did not see him before he passed away.  I did not get to introduce him to his youngest great-grandchild, my daughter with whom he shared his name and a definite family resemblance.  Instead of one last visit I would be there for his funeral. 
    The time I spent in Pennsylvania was an emotional roller coaster.  I was surrounded, like in childhood, by aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I got to see family I hadn’t seen in many, many years, including my grandmother, who though she was very sad seemed comforted by the presence of her family all around.  One night my uncle came by to hang out in our room and we sat up until midnight, my parents, my brother and I, listening to his stories and laughing so hard we practically cried.  And then there were the moments we did cry.  Not tears of joy but tears of mourning, tears of loss.  In many ways, I mourned as much for the relationship Grandpa and I never had, as for the end of his life here on earth.  I was sad for the years that he and I never spoke, the visits that went by with little more than a hug and kiss as we came and went when I was a kid, the significant moments of my life that Grandpa was not a part of.  I was sad that I knew my grandpa without ever really knowing him and that he knew me but didn’t really know me, either.  I was sad that my love for him, while very real, was rarely shared as it should have been.  I was so sad that Grandpa had suffered at the end of his life and that I had not had a chance to be there for him in his suffering.  I was sad for my dad who had lost his dad, for the times he had not seen his father for years at a time, for not being able to be with his dad at the end.  I was sad for my grandma who after 63 years of marriage was now a widow, alone and unsure of her future.  The emotions I experienced over the course of the week were raw and varied and overwhelming, at times.  The visit was joyful and sad, comforting and upsetting, close and far all at once.   
    My mom overheard one of my cousins explaining to her young niece, my other cousin’s 8 year old daughter, that some family reunions are happy and some are sad but that what matters most is that we are all together.  I wish my most recent visit to see family had been under different circumstances and that it had come earlier, at a time when  I could still visit with my grandfather before it was too late, but I am glad my extended family was together and that I could be there to pay my last respects to Grandpa, offering my prayers for his soul and thanking God for his life.

Grandparents are so great

    Many of my best childhood memories are from times we spent with extended family.   We were always especially close to my maternal grandparents and I have so many happy memories of time spent with them.  We called them Gugger and Poppy.  For most of my life, most of my mom’s life, and I think even most of their own lives they lived in a little old house with a really big yard on a busy two lane highway in northwestern Pennsylvania.  That house, though old and far from fancy, was such a place of love and comfort.  It was a place of true happiness for me and my siblings.  I remember walking into it after a long drive and immediately feeling the warmth and coziness.  The smell was a mixture of yummy baked goods, Gugger’s apple pie or famous home made bread, and Poppy’s cigar smoke.  The old familiar furniture, Poppy’s lazy boy chair, the fold out sofa on one wall and the other couch on another, the wood end tables with full candy dishes on them, was always the same.  The wallpaper in the kitchen, with spices in muted colors, and the matted down multi colored carpet was too.  It was all so wonderful just because it was Gugger and Poppy‘s.  We would spend hours in the kitchen with Gugger as she made fabulous home cooked meals, always with her baked goodies for dessert.  Or we would sit at the tiny kitchen table playing Scrabble, Yahtzee, or Boggle.  Her small black and white t.v. sitting on a cabinet in the kitchen would be on, tuned to Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy.   In the family room, Poppy would be sitting in his chair with his t.v. tuned to Judge Judy or The People’s Court.  He would have an old baseball cap on his head, and several more caps, all sporting rubber bands around the brim to keep them in shape, would sit on the window seat in the dining room, next to his cluttered desk.   Outside that window, next to the long wooden seat, was Poppy’s bird feeder and he’d sometimes sit at the desk watching the birds with binoculars as they came to eat.  At bedtime the sofa bed would be unfolded and my parents would sleep there under Gugger’s comfy crocheted blankets.  My brother would sleep on the other couch nearby.  My oldest sister got a littler sofa bed in Gugger’s cozy little sewing room, which was in the corner of the main floor near the only bathroom in the house.  As the oldest she was the only one who got her own room to sleep in at grandma’s house and I always thought she must be very brave to sleep there with the dress form in the room looking suspiciously creepy in the dark.  My closest-in-age sister and I would get to sleep in Gugger’s bed upstairs.  We would ascend the staircase, lined with decades worth of old National Geographic magazines, and pass Poppy's little room with his high marshmallow-like bed, to get to Gugger’s room.  I loved the sloped ceilings of the little upstairs, which was really just a finished attic with two bedrooms that had curtains in place of doors and a short hallway between them.  I don’t know how my sister and I got so lucky to get the best bedroom in the house but Gugger’s bed was always so warm and comfortable and smelled clean and fresh like fabric softener.   My sister and I would lay there, rubbing each other’s backs and talking.  I remember stacks of books in the corner, old black and white pictures of my mom and her brothers atop the wooden wardrobe and always the sound of traffic rushing by on the busy street outside the little tiny window.  Whenever I hear the sound of traffic it still fills me with a strange but comfortable feeling of serenity.
The only thing about Gugger and Poppy’s house that wasn’t warm and cozy was the dark, cold cellar.  To get to the cellar you had to go down a steep, creaky staircase with each step covered in unmatched scraps of carpet.  The cellar wasn’t like our basement at home, it was truly a cellar, cold, damp, and really scary.  There were shadowy corners that I never, in all my years of visiting, ever went into.  I heard there was an old half built go-cart in one of those corners, but I was never brave enough to check for sure.  The laundry room was down in the cellar and sometimes I would go down with Gugger to watch her throw a load of clothes in the washer or get clean clothes out, to hang on the line in the yard to dry in the wind.  My grandpa’s work shop was there too, smelling strongly of gasoline with tools and jars of nails and screws on the workbench.  There were piles and piles of empty cigar boxes saved for years because Poppy never knew when he might need one for storing little things.  There was the big chest freezer full of enough frozen meat to feed an army.  And there was a small closet that Gugger called her “fruit cellar”.  It had a light that somehow turned on when you opened the door and turned off automatically when the door shut.   Whenever I was sent there to fetch a dusty can of vegetables or fruit, I would shudder at the thought of that door closing on me and I would hurry back up the stairs to safety as quickly as I could. 
    The sprawling yard that spread in every direction outside grandma and grandpa’s house was as exciting as the old house itself.  Poppy was a bit of a pack rat and his yard was a testament to that.  He had a rusty black truck with splitting tires, a few broken down boats, their wood rotting away over the years, a tiny musty camper, an empty boat trailer and two VW Bugs in various spots around the yard.  All these, except for the black truck which was filled to the brim with junk, provided hours of fun, imaginative play for me, my siblings and cousins.  We’d sit at the wheel of the “Love Bugs” pretending we were racing, or in the boats imagining we were miles out at sea.  We would cook up bits of mulch in the camper, and climb on the boat trailer.  We would play “Mother May I” and “Red Light, Green Light” in the big field of the side yard or venture down the long hill in the back to the rushing creek that my older cousin had convinced me was all that separated Poppy’s yard from the country of China.  Just before the crest of the hill was Poppy’s garden, full of fresh vegetables and surrounded by wooden stakes connected by string meant to keep the bunnies out.  There was a clump of trees that formed the perfect playhouse, complete with two rooms and a few pieces of hardly recognizable metal lawn furniture.  Next to that was a little ring of stones around what Gugger said was a tea garden but just looked like a bunch of assorted green weeds.   I cannot begin to count the hours I spent playing in that wonderful old house and yard during my growing up years.  We moved around a lot as my dad climbed successfully up the corporate ladder but Gugger and Poppy’s house was the one constant in our life, the one place that was always familiar, always welcoming.  As much as I loved that old house, I now realize it wasn’t so much the walls, with their faded wallpaper and old fashioned paneling or the ceiling with its peeling paint and decorative metal register that made the house so precious to us all, it was the love of Gugger and Poppy that filled it, always there to be shared and to make each of us feel valued, accepted, and truly special.  In fact, no one in the world has ever made me feel as special and loved as my grandparents did when I was a child visiting them in their tiny, old house. 
    That old house was sold a few years back, after we lost Poppy to kidney disease.  Gugger, much to our delight, decided in 2004 to move to sunny Florida and settled just about an hour north of us in the Tampa Bay area.  For five years she lived close and my children were so blessed to have her be a part of their lives, building as strong a bond with her as I have always had.  When she was living near us we used to see her quite regularly.  We would go visit her, take her to the grocery store, and spend nearly every holiday with her. Then, last year Gugger decided to move back to her hometown in Pennsylvania.  She is now living close to her old friends, the church she has belonged to for at least 50 years, and extended family she hadn’t seen much of while living down here.  We miss her terribly but know she is happy to be home again. 
    This week, for the first time since her move, she has come back for a visit.  She has had the chance to meet our baby for the first time and to see how the other children have grown and changed.  We have had the chance to spend time with her, and share another holiday- celebrating the Fourth of July with her and my parents at their house over the weekend.   I’m not sure if they realize it but the bond my children and my grandmother have with each other means the world to me.  What a gift it is to watch the love span four generations and to know that my children are as surrounded by the affection of extended family as I was growing up.  The relationship they have with their great-grandmother is close and loving and I count that among my greatest blessings, along with the fact that I, too, share in the love and closeness.  There is just truly nothing like the bonds of family love and togetherness to make me see God at work and to fill me with gratitude for His abundant goodness.