On a ridiculously cold day memories of a lazy childhood in the sun near Cutler, Florida keep me warm. Here is a story I started telling aloud just because bitter Winter needs an antidote. A Bucketful of Happiness In the middle of the old Seven Mile Bridge there was a sharp left turn. Hardly anyone ever took that turn onto Pigeon Key, a research outpost for the University of Miami. But what so many people rolled right on past on their way over the bridge that never seemed to end was one of the greatest things the Keys had to offer – a bucketful of happiness. When I was a teenager, my Dad always found ways to fill my idle time in the summer with projects. One of them that I was roped into without the slightest idea what would be involved was a program to save the Green Turtle, then endangered. It was run by a colleague of my Dad’s at the University of Miami and they needed some help for a week. I loved the Keys and eagerly agreed. They put us up on wooden barracks with paint peeling like a festering sunburn days old. They smelled of a hard life and sea breeze flapped together with the wave of broken screens. Our assignment was given with no time to settle into the quarters, however. There was work to do. An earlier crew had collected Green Turtle eggs from beaches all around Knight’s Key, always a bit more populated as Marathon sprawled out along the mile markers to touch the Seven Mile Grille at the base of the bridge. It was not a good place to be a turtle for so many reasons. Between the clumsy people smooshing the eggs and the seagulls that would feast on the baby turtles that managed to pop out of the sand the survival rate was horrible. The collected eggs would be hatched on Pigeon Key, raised up to a decent size of turtleness, and sent off on their way. Ideally, when it was their time to lay they’d return to the safety of this little dot everyone seemed to miss. What confronted us as kids were great big sink-like tanks with water whooshing through them a flurry of foam and flapping legs. The turtles were already getting big by the time we got there and had started to realize their great turtle purpose in the world. The water had to move hard because Green Turtles have one sacred mission in this world – to keep swimming, keep going, always moving on. In the pumped up current of the tanks they were nearly stationary, held in place until they were big enough to not be seagull bait. Our job was to feed them and measure them and report what we saw. But there was so much more than science wriggling constantly in the tanks. They were full of boundless energy, little reptiles who kept going not out of desperation but because they had to. They seemed to love it. The tank was full of more than waving green flippers and hope for a turtle filled tomorrow. It was filled with the pure joy of just being a turtle. It was filled with happiness, I thought. Once they were fed, measured, counted, and given all the rigors that good science demanded we were told that a few tanks were big enough to be released. It was time to have their own turtle lives. Following instructions carefully, our strong young arms filled up big buckets with seawater. We grabbed the biggest turtles and noted the tag numbers on their back flipper for the earnest and hairy grad students armed with clipboards and a stern earnestness. The subjects of all this measuring and noting slipped easily out of our hands and into the buckets as they kept wriggling, always eager to get going with their turtle lives away from the hands of humans. A sloppy wet splash was the only thing that interrupted their constant paddling. The buckets, one in each hand, were insanely heavy as we carried them off to the beach away from the rough cottages and tanks. This would be what they would think of as home for generations to come, and the whining of teens under a heavy load was pretty meaningless. The sun was slipping away into Florida Bay but still beat down on us. The work suddenly seemed unbearable. I had to keep my mind on the task, the importance of saving a species that was nearly gone forever. But in the buckets there was a simple magic to distract us. The turtles kept on being turtles, flapping away as if they had already hit the surf. They did it because that’s what they do. It wasn’t work, it wasn’t difficult. It was life as a turtle, always on the move. And there was a tremendous joy in simply being alive that day. It was a bucketful of happiness. When we got to the spot picked for the release, we tipped the buckets over carefully to let them out on their own. It was a tremendous relief for us, but for the turtles it was the moment they needed more than anything else. In a series of splashes and blurs of flippers they were simply, suddenly gone. There was no sign that they had ever been under the care of such earnest humans. Their lives were their own. The bucketful of happiness didn’t last forever, as everyone knew it shouldn’t. But it was one hell of a happy thing while it lasted on a hot summer day just there, off to the side of the Seven Mile Bridge on a spot of land that almost no one even bothered to notice was there.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:42:10 +0000
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