Lost turtle

Last week I decided we should take to Fort Wayne not only Frisco our dog but also our land turtles Greenville and Speckles, who had not been on a trip for while and who both needed their weekly baths and walks. Although they don’t love being put in a box and left for long stretches and they worry about the temperature extremes (outside; in the car), they basically like trips, because they always get baths in the motel bathtub and then get to walk around the motel room.

I should have interpreted it as a bad sign when we got to our smoky Fort Wayne Motel 6 room and – very unusually – there was no bathtub, just a shower. But what I noticed next was much more scary. I remembered picking Greenville and Speckles up and putting them into a relatively short box with newspaper in it and leaving it for a brief time on the table in the Florida room. Then I picked up the box and put it on top of the car and then into the back seat. It was precariously placed in the back seat, and so several times the whole box almost flipped over. Vincent had to right it. Now, keep in mind that we have lost two turtles. Water turtle Speedy died after we’d had her just six months. After three years, I let Sawyer an Ohio land turtle, out in the back yard too long, and he escaped from a wire fence circle and into Grandma Martha’s then messy back yard (where despite six plus hours of raking, we did not find him.), and he was gone for good (and it went down into the 20s that night, while he had pretty much been inside for three years).

You may recall that – after a break – we then got Greenville, a beaten up male, from David, who had picked up this box turtle while the turtle was crossing the road, in Greenville, FL, hometown of singer Ray Charles. Greenville – and Madison, a boy with whom Sawyer had fought (until we separated them) on the one play date that they had – had lived in David and Helen’s back yard for four years. Stephanie had engineered this shift of Greenville to me, so he and I could go to Minnesota together, around the time that David moved (Madison and the other turtles ended up escaping at the new house anyway). Greenville did not like living inside and in Minnesota, and he went on a hunger strike for five months until I tinkered enough with his environment and food enough and brother-in-law, Serge, gave him a healing. Then he started eating again.

On the way to Stephanie taking the PRAXIS teaching standardized tests in Richmond and a rehearsal dinner and wedding and lunch (Chris and Sabina’s) (and staying with Cindy and Rob) in Washington, D.C., Stephanie and I tried to save money by staying with Greenville in Medoc Mountain State Park, in northern North Carolina, in out tent. Even though it was June, all three of us froze in that tent (I eventually shifted to the car). After we got up, we drove in between tobacco fields, and Stephanie noticed a land turtle crossing the road. I stopped, and Stephanie got me to walk back, pick up the turtle, and put it in the box with Greenville. That night we showed the two turtles to Cindy and Rob’s kids.

Back in Tallahassee we put Greenville and Speckles in different dry aquariums, since we had read that turtles are not social (and having watched Sawyer and Greenville not get along (we didn’t know the probably ornamental (or Oriental?) turtle we came to call Speckles – for the bright – well, speckles – on the top of her neck – was a girl..

But when we tried putting them together, they didn’t fight and they seemed to snuggle up with each other, often under the big piece of tree bark that gives them privacy/protection. They were buddies. After some time, it became clear that Speckles was a girl, because we came home finding them doing things we’d of course never want any biological kids of ours doing together – plus she laid eggs.

Historically, Speckles – even though she’s smaller – is more agile and is a much more aggressive (and voracious) eater. In general, she’ll try to push Greenville out of the way so she can get to food or water. We think Greenville has poor eye sight, and perhaps partly because of that? – he’s a very picky eater. In one area – sex- though, he’s definitely the pushy, more aggressive one.

You’ll recall from “Babies (?)” that Speckles has continued to lay eggs periodically. In spite of our incubation procedure, no eggs have ever hatched, and this latest batch now looks no more promising than the previous batches.

Imagine our terror and sadness on Saturday night. As I unpack our stuff and got Greenville out (but not for a bath), I am shocked to realize that there is no second turtle in the box. I assume that Speckles crawled out of the box into the car- which she’s done before – perhaps in connection with the box essentially tipping over. (The short box is no doubt a factor too, as I usually bring them in a larger box – but it takes up so much space.) But when I got out of the car – before picking up Vincent from the “rave” – I am again shocked that I cannot find her. I substantially clean up the car that night and the next morning – throwing away a bunch of stuff and bagging up some recycling to take home – but still no Speckles. Stephanie looks too, and we both look carefully before the motel room, where she might have escaped also.

My theory then focuses, first, on the house and, second, on other Fort Wayne locales. I figure there’s a chance that I never picked Speckles up – that I forgot and left her in the aquarium – or, more likely, that she escaped out of the box while it was perched in the Florida room – or, more terrifyingly, while on top of the car. Another remote possibility is that I gave Speckles her bath back at home in the bathtub and I forgot and left her in there.

What I wanted at that point was someone who knew to enter our house and check the dry aquarium, the bathtub, and Florida room for Speckles – partly so they could – if they found her – relieve our anxiety – and also so – if they found her – that would relieve of us exploring the Fort Wayne locales. Reaching neither the church nor anyone else Sunday morning (except for a church friend who was in the middle of orchestrating her parents’ anniversary party, from which I did not want to pull her away.

So, instead, on our way out of town, we drove by the Burger King Vincent and I had stopped at for lunch on Saturday (the Virginia Tate memorial Burger King). While Stephanie and Vincent had more lunch at Taco Bell, I searched the parking lot where we had parked on Saturday and the surrounding grounds for our lost turtle. An hour later, on the way to Indy, we turned around and stopped at the northbound rest area) where Vincent and I had stopped on the way to Fort Wayne Saturday. There I searched the parking lot and then walked to the back of the lot – and imagining Speckles having raced across the lot, avoiding all of the semis (Saturday we had mistakenly parked on the truck side), and sauntering through the prairie behind the lot – Frisco (pictured above) and I – with some help from Stephanie and Vincent (though they got distracted by the flowers) – hunted for Speckles all over the prairie and into an adjoining creek bed. No turtle.

I also asked the Burger King manager and the rest area maintenance staff person if anyone had turned in a land turtle or mentioned that they’d seen a turtle. No dice.

And so we had a good three hours (plus a Scottsburg, IN Ponderosa stop) of driving – anxious and feeing guilty– before we could check out our other theories, because we had never gotten through to anyone (this pointed out some chinks in our thin friendship ranks in Louisville. Three of my colleagues had served as turtle sitters for me, but one no longer works at the Center, another is now my manager and goes home quickly after church, and is busy with her family on weekends and lives pretty far away. I only reached the anniversary party woman and no one else from church. I actually tried calling a new colleague (Joelle) but couldn’t find her number. Our friend Sarah is a pastor, and so by Sunday afternoon she’s already been working hard for quite a while and deserves a break. It had to be someone I didn’t think would be that busy on Sunday, who lived relatively nearby, whom I felt comfortable asking (and he preferably was OK with animals).

I went straight for the aquarium and Stephanie for the bathtub, and Speckles was in neither of these places. I then looked through the Florida room and found nothing. It was already dark, and so we kept looking there, and then throughout the rest of the house. The longest I remember having hunted for Greenville when he and I lived in Minnesota by ourselves was 1 ½ hours. Since then once or twice I’ve given up for a night on finding them and tried again – successfully – in the morning.

One scary possibility: when Speckles and/or Greenville are having their night on the town, we always shut the door to the stairs of the basement – in the kitchen – because we fear Speckles will crash down the (carpeted) stairs (or even plunge down the side) – and crack her shell and get killed. Also – with all of the boxes in the finished part of the basement and the boxes and equipment in the unfinished part – we’d thought it would be very difficult to find her down there.

I went to look down in the basement once and didn’t find her there. I noticed that she could have fallen into the sump pump (for which there is a big hole in the floor in the unfinished part of the basement) and drowned. By this time it had started to sink in that we probably weren’t going to find her and that – unlike with Sawyer – we’d probably never know what happened to her. Was she somewhere we had looked but not carefully enough Had she gotten run over by a semi and left no evidence in the the truck parking lot or King parking lot? Was she some completely different place we hadn’t thought of?

Of course, I felt terrible because it was apparently all my fault. And we were sad because we had previously lost Sawyer and Speedy – our water turtle who died after six months – and once again Speckles’ eggs seemed to be on their last legs. Stephanie and I both wondered if we couldn’t have Speckles’ babies, at least, if we lost contact with their mother.

One other thing that worried me. What if months later we found Speckles dead (having dried out or starved to death in the house) because she had hid some place where we didn’t look. Couldn’t we look a little harder? I went one more time to the ,basement and looked a few new places, including behind the poster boxes against the basement north wall

As I pushed over the last poster, there was that familiar hissing noise, and there she was, on the carpet, next to the wall, under the box. “Stephenie!” I yelled. “Stephanie . . .. . !” “I found her.”

I was so happy – I almost couldn’t believe it. Much of the time I was looking for her, I didn’t really believe I was going to find her (a sure-fire way to make sure you don’t.) it was like she had died and been raised from the dead. Welcome back, Speckles (pictured back in the terrarium below)!

Afterwards, Mother and Stephanie pressed me not to take these two again on any pleasure trips – unless there’s a strong reason for them to go – I’m probably all right with that because I don’t ever want this to happen again. But I was so happy having resolved it OK this time.

Now if we can just find Sawyer back in Tallahassee.

-- Perry