First Night Out

¨What the hell are we even looking for?¨
It became a sort of mantra of our first night of patrol. The newcomers, six volunteers including myself, followed obediently behind our respective group leaders as we trudged blindly in different directions along the beach. I was accompanied by the girls I shared a dorm with whom I would later call friends but now thought of as cultured and worldly strangers who had experienced much more of the world than I. We newbies had arrived in Ostional a mere four hours ago. It was the evening of the sixth of April. It was hot. It was muggy. There were thousands of bugs. It was fantastic.
With the excitement that can only be generated by doing something for the first time, the kind of nervous twist of the stomach that leaves one feeling slightly winded and lightheaded, we donned our red cellophane wrapped headlamps and hit the sand: literally. Having never ventured on the beach before this moment, I was quickly lured into a false sense of security by the seemingly flat ground, but was even more rapidly overtaken by the various rocks and branches that sent all five feet and ten inches of me sprawling in the sand. As I righted myself, I looked up to find that my group had, thankfully, stopped a few feet in front of me. It appeared that they were all observing, with varying degrees of interest, what appeared to be the path of a large tree that had been dragged from the water up the beach. A large tree with...flippers? My heart leapt in amazement, they were turtle tracks! As I moved to follow our leader, Jami, up the beach she turned and flashed her light quickly at me as though she was shaking her head. I could only guess that meant stay put. I might as well, I would probably just trip over the turtle if I tried to follow her.
We waited as we watched Jami move slowly down the top part of the beach, her small red light the only thing we could see in the thick oily blackness of the humid, moonless night. I took a few moments to observe my surroundings and found myself dwarfed by the immensity of the world. The vast expanse of starlit sky stretched above us. The light from the stars dripped and melted in the humid air and briefly, lighted the white crests of the waves as they rolled in on themselves, swallowing the dark secrets of the heavens in its unknowable depths. I was reminded suddenly of a saying I had read or heard somewhere. It had something to do with the fact that humans don´t have wings to explore the heavens because they would never want to come down to earth again. I held it to be true in that one endless moment, unable to travel any farther, at the edge of the world, restrained only because of my physical form. Because I was human and could not leave the ground without being lost to the mysteries of the stars or the ocean. Overwhelmed, I looked down. Small spots of glowing sand, which I later learned was called bio luminescence, drew my thoughts immediately from the sky to the ground and I rubbed my big toe in it to see the sand spark and jump around my feet. I gasped and jumped backward. Looking up, my attention was caught by the quick flash of a red headlamp about 100 yards down the beach. Red, black, red, black. Jami had found the turtle.
It was incredible. The turtle was making the bed when we found it. It reminded me of some great sea faring dinosaur, an ancient, lost being that had emerged from the depths of the ocean and sat here before me, more real than I could have imagined. It was, by all accounts, an alien creature. This turtle also just so happened to be one of the biggest Olive Ridley turtles I would see throughout my stay there. It measured some 80 centimeters across and 75 centimeters long. Jami worked her way purposefully, gently, around the turtle, checking for blemishes or scars. Then she did the unthinkable, she pulled out two more pairs of gloves and handed them to the two new volunteers in the group, Kirsty and myself. We held the gloves, completely dumbfounded. What exactly did she want us to do? She looked up at us and laughed.
¨Don´t just stand there put the gloves on and touch the turtle! But don´t tell anyone I let you, it´s not really allowed.¨
I moved in a trance to kneel in the sand by the huge beast and stretched out my gloved hand tentatively to lay one finger, then my entire palm, on the hard shell of the turtle.Completely absorbed, I turned my red light to focus directly on the head of the turtle. She breathed deeply through her nose, and then she opened her eye. I stared directly into the huge dark, brown pools of the turtles eye and knew then that there was a story there I could never understand, a depth I could never discover. This turtle was a superbeing. She had dragged herself out of the water and yards up the beach to lay eggs. To continue her race. She was magnificent. I am not usually one to be caught up in the miracle of life sort of phenomenon, but this turtle deserved some serious respect. She was a fighter and I liked that about her, and all the turtles I saw after her. They all commanded the same respect, all carried the same mystery of the struggle of survival, of simply continuing. Here, I was the alien. I was the foreigner that was allowed a small glimpse into a different world, and I was afforded some small acceptance by the people who lived in accordance to the rules of this place. For the time being, I was welcome.
My hand moved in circles across her shell and then down to her flipper and her neck. The soft flesh of her unprotected body was warm and malleable beneath my fingers. I petted her flipper lovingly and knew in my core that the best thing to do would be to let her be. I took off my glove and sat in the sand to help count the eggs.
¨You know the eggs won´t survive,¨ Jami said as she wiped iodine onto the flipper of the turtle where she would then tag it, ¨It´s too hot for the eggs to develop. They pretty much just rot in the heat.¨
My jaw dropped. The turtle had done all of this work for nothing? I had no response for this unwanted revelation and trained my eye back to the eggs. One, two. One, two, three on the clicker. Counting the tiny lives that would never be.
We had been walking the beach since seven o´clock and it was now nearing 11. We wiped sweat from our brow and headed back to the station, tired and ready for sleep. As I took off my shoes and collapsed hot and uncomfortable into bed, I thought of the beach we had left behind us, of the secrets of life and death, of inevitability. Somehow these thoughts were drowned out by the crashing of waves that sent me drifting into a deep, dreamless sleep. Outside more turtles continued there doomed march up the sand before they too were dragged out, past knowing, into the waves. Rocking back and forth in ignorant bliss.