Bob Rayner: The Comforting Tale of the Rapidly Disappearing Eastern Box Turtle

Summer fades and sweet autumn approaches, with its promise of crystal blue skies, dry air, and full workweeks unsullied by uninterrupted stretches of sunlit leisure. Life is full of tradeoffs.

The consequences of swapping sports shirts for sweaters, lightning bugs for leaves of many colors, baseball for football, and long days for mild evenings depends entirely upon one's personal preferences and prejudices. Fall, as with all others, is a mixed blessing. It is perhaps most reassuring in that it always arrives as expected, utterly predictable but a surprise nevertheless -- even after a half-century of witness to the cooling of the Earth.

We seem, at the moment, to be a people hungry for all that's certain and easily defined. We want answers. No surprise, really, given the upheavals of recent years. We will be, I suspect, disappointed in our quest for the definitive. It's a futile pursuit anyway.

Progress will come, through hard work and good fortune, as it always does among free people. We'll salute its arrival and continue to fiddle with what's wrong.

IT WOULD BE tempting now to begin a discourse on the relative merit of material progress versus spiritual enlightenment or about appreciating small moments while pursuing big dreams. But most of you understand all of that already. The faith of a child melds with the power of works well done.

So let's turn instead to the turtle.

An eastern box turtle spent the summer months just west of our house -- in the backyard, to be precise. He's a morning turtle, for the most part, making his sudden appearances while one or another of us eats breakfast and stares out the back window.

(I'm assuming our turtle's a he, though I have no scientific basis. In fact, according to the Davidson College Herpetology Laboratory, "sexing turtles can often prove difficult, especially to someone unfamiliar with box turtles." Scientists aren't always skillful in their deployment of verbs, but this tidbit of information confirms my writerly decision to take the sex completely out of our turtle story.)

The seeing of the turtle always causes a stir, even in a home bereft of morning humans. Many a silent morn was broken by someone announcing, "The turtle's outside." (My family doesn't speak in sentences that require exclamation points.) Usually it was my wife or my son -- who has now departed for his first year of college, adding a bit of poignant nostalgia to our suburban summer turtle tale -- who first spotted the turtle, which, out of simple common decency, we refused to give a name.

A turtle sighting invariably lures at least one of us into the backyard. We learned quickly that there is no time to dawdle. While their reputations for slowness are completely accurate, turtles are -- for reasons we have not entirely figured out -- able to disappear in a hurry. This is a paradox, but not one worth fretting over. All you really have to remember is -- if you want to take a closer look at a turtle -- get moving right away! (Pardon the exclamation, but I'm serious about this.)

It turns out that spending a few minutes with a turtle, either alone or with an equally interested family member, is a fine way to start the day. Eastern box turtles, as best we can tell, have little or no fear of humans. They also appear to be invisible to cats, though this is not a theory that we tested with any rigor.

The turtle always takes a rest stop when one of us approaches him. He does not, however, draw his head into his shell. Instead, he looks around, seems to sniff the air, and resumes his trip into the ivy or the pile of dead leaves or the drooping wisteria bush. It's hard to tell if he sees us. Turtles do not have penetrating stares.

WE ALWAYS leave him be. By the time we return inside to the kitchen window, he is usually gone. Or at least impossible to see. Turtles, it turns out, are masters of disguise.

This tale has no moral, by the way, but it is worth noting that turtles live a long time, seem always to get where they're going no matter how long it takes, and, of course, carry their homes on their backs -- and a cozy fit it is.

So it's no surprise that a turtle is far more comforting -- and a much better early-morning companion -- than your typical reptiles, which tend to be pretty disgusting for the most part.

According to the National Zoo -- which is, it so happens, in Washington, site of so much of this summer's consternation -- in "the northern regions, box turtles go into hibernation in October or November, but farther south they remain active later in the year. To hibernate, they burrow as far as two-feet deep into loose earth, mud, stream bottoms, old stump holes, or mammal burrows . . . .They usually emerge from hibernation in April. They sometimes wake up and find a new hibernacula on warm days in the winter."

So autumn's approach promises both an end to steamy days and to turtle-filled mornings. We're not sure precisely when our turtle will decide it's time to take a break -- is Virginia a "northern region" in terms of turtles? -- and, quite frankly, I'd rather not know exactly when he'll disappear for the winter. There's such a thing as too much information.

It is good to know, though, that he's likely to return in the spring. Along with the pollen. Do turtles sneeze?

Contact Bob Rayner at (804) 649-6073 or .