turtle story

We drove down the dirt road towards the beach on a motorbike. Unable to find our lights, we instead strained our eyes in the moon-less night to make out the center line, our guide. “Look, fireflies,” Scott pointed. A moment of silent wonder, and then my attention back to the task at hand, even though I wasn’t steering. Suddenly, bright beams appeared to light our way. “Got ‘em,” Scott grinned over his shoulder.

We slowed at the jellyfish catching and salting operation, at the end of the line, a sort of putrid rotting smell lingering in the air. This was to be our point of departure for the night’s journey. We had crossed this channel earlier in the day via boat, leaving our boat at the other side, where we hiked another ten minutes before arriving at the second channel. There, three of the guys waded across knee-deep water for just a few hundred feet, leaving behind a chest with water, supplies and dry clothes to last us through the nights we would spend surveying beaches for turtles. But when we’d crossed the channel earlier, it was at low tide. Now, it was approaching high tide, the current flowing into the inlet.

At the water, Scott waded in immediately, without waiting for me to put on flippers. I yanked them on haphazardly, and got in. Bioluminescent creatures lit up our strokes bright, electric blue. A small offering from the Universe to offset the trauma of wandering through water in the pitch black, laden with jellyfish and who knew what else. I hoped my strategy of dressing in long sleeves and long pants would minimize the burn in case of contact with a jellyfish. The first swim wasn’t so bad – less than five minutes.

The next channel was the tough one.

Scott was in a hurry to get over. While pulling on my flippers, one of the straps loosened entirely and I couldn’t get it back on, nervous, hands fumbling. “I’ll just wear one and carry the other one,” I offered, as I got in the water, fearful to be left behind. Big mistake. The current was coming in by that time, and the water was carrying us to the right, away from the ocean, at least. The channel had expanded from a few hundred feet that afternoon to a few hundred yards this evening, and was significantly deeper. We could rarely touch the bottom. Halfway through the swim, it struck me that this was precisely the sort of scene that could be in a movie. Foolish girl drowns (or gets attacked by a shark) while crossing a dangerous channel in the dead of night with no one to witness except her Scottish mate, who also gets swept into the mangroves and nearly drowns, tangled in a root system near shore.

As I’m thinking of how fitting this whole scene would be in a movie, Scott – engaged in smooth, easy crawl strokes - casually asks back at me, “Have you seen Open Water?” That moment, I begin to panic.

“Don’t!” I say, and he shuts up immediately with an apology. My breathing begins to sound asthmatic and highly labored, but I’m still far enough away from the other shore that I can’t even tell how far we have left to go. He keeps asking if I’m okay; he can hear my breathing and he’s worried I might not make it. “Yep,” I keep repeating, and then return to the task at hand and try to minimize my panic. My second flipper has fallen off at this point, and I’m carrying both of them, adding drag to my journey. I’ve reverted to the backstroke, as I’m too tired to swim the crawl effectively.

“Take my hand,” he finally says, as he emerges into a shallow enough place to stand up. I take his hand, and wade up to shore, bedraggled and feeling a mix of elation and disorientation at what I’ve just done.

We don’t take even a moment to catch our breath; we head straight to the trees, looking without the aid of a flashlight for a chest buried in the greenery littering the beach. When we find it, we dig through for our flashlights, water bottles, and dry clothes. Twenty feet apart from a man who’s practically a stranger, I start to strip down. Half-naked, as I’m putting on a pair of long pants, Scott comes up. “What’s that light on the beach? Is it coming towards us?” he asks.

“Um, gimme a second,” I say, and we both flush in mild embarrassment. He turns away.

It turns out the light is stationary, on a boat. Distances are deceiving here, especially on the water. Boats that appear miles away may only be a mile away; boats that appear to be coming dangerously close to shore turn out to be miles away. Lights that appear to be moving towards us at first glance, upon further examination, are stationary, or disappear entirely.

We’re both a bit jumpy our first night on the beach. Our orientation has been pretty minimal; most of what we have heard has consisted of rumors from villagers or the other volunteers at the center. Turtle egg poachers may have guns, we have been told; our purpose is to beat them to the nest, not to rationalize with them. Illegal loggers work the beachfront across the channels, where we began our night. Fires on the beach keep them warm as they’re waiting for boats to pull up on shore and load up the booty. The rest of the lights and operations on the beach and offshore waters should be legal – people fishing or shrimping, mostly.

In the daylight, this stretch of the Andaman Coast of Thailand consists of blissfully unspoiled white sand beaches broken only by channels carving through the sprawling mangrove forests that creep toward towns further inland. Bivalve and crab-eating macaques roam the beaches in the early mornings, looking for treats. Mountains embrace the horizon to the east; a string of islands soaring upwards interrupt the blue ocean horizon. Longboats adorned with whipping slashes of colorful fabric cut through the ocean, stopping occasionally to scoop jellyfish from the seas before moving onward.

Yet in the night, this beach looks unfamiliar. The forest, prehistoric looking in the daylight, takes on a more sinister feel at night. Fruit bats, startled by our presence, make loud noises as they take to flight from the bare tree branches. Ghost crabs mostly scuttle away from our feet, but the occasional crab stops, pinchers upward, inviting a fight. In the moonlight, we see curving snake tracks, the smear left from a monitor lizard’s belly as he moves through the sand, giant prints left from water buffalo. Occasionally, when using a flashlight, our beam alights upon red pairs of eyes – water buffalo roaming the beach at night. Bioluminescent specks are left in a ribbon on shore, an offering from the surf.

We’re on our third walk at 1 in the morning, and I’m rambling about an awkward camping adventure from my past, Bill Bryson style, adding all sorts of flourishes to evoke hearty laughter from Scott, and mostly to keep myself awake. As lovely as the beach walk is, after four hours it is becoming stale in the face of my fatigue.

“Shh!” Scott interrupts, and he scans the ground furtively. Then, face down, Sherlock Holmes style, he ambles up the beach past the high tide watermark. “There he is!” he explodes, pointing with his flashlight. It’s a turtle. A gigantic one, thrashing her body from side to side, to make the bed for her eggs. “I think he’s a leatherback,” Scott guesses, continuing to use the wrong gender pronoun. He sneaks up to her like a kid sneaking up on Santa Claus, as quietly as possible but clumsy nonetheless, barely restraining his glee, and turns to me. “Yep, a leatherback! There are only a few of these left in Thailand now.” We sit a few feet away from her, avoiding the sand tossed behind her as she moves from making the bed to the deep, narrow chamber for her eggs.

She stops, ready to lay her first egg. I shift backwards to get a better angle to see, and a small cascade of sand falls straight into her chamber. A sharp intake of breath, then, and a furtive guilty look in Scott’s direction. “Don’t worry; I won’t tell anyone,” he chuckles quietly. She starts to lay, and large white rubbery eggs fall, protected largely from my gaze by her gigantic hind flippers. Scott had told me that once leatherback turtles begin to lay eggs, it’s as if they are in a trance. We weren’t likely to disturb her. He moved to her front to begin taking measurements and to look for distinguishing marks. I followed suit.

She grunted often, the effort of the undertaking wearing on her. At that moment, my only desire was to touch her without spooking her. I rubbed my hand, briefly, across the ridge of her shell. And then I held my palm in front of her nose, feeling the strength of her exhalations. Thick mucus leaked from her eyes; a turtle’s adaptation for excreting salt and keeping her eyes clean of sand. I scanned her body, noticing giant pink scars across her front left flipper and on her nose – likely from fishing boats or mishaps with humans.

She finished her task slowly, and then began covering up the eggs with sand. She moved up the beach to the treeline; started tossing sand around in random piles nowhere near her first nest. And then moved to the right, in a big circle, slowly tossing sand the whole time. I could feel her fatigue, just by watching. And yet she persisted! “You’re a good mom, aren’t you,” Scott whispered to her. “You’re doing a good job.”

After nearly 2 hours, she began her return to the sea. The tide had gone out and she had a long walk ahead of her. We would pause as she did, listening to her labored breathing and grunts. It seemed that she was motivated by the sound of crashing surf; when a bigger wave came in and unleashed its melody, she would again begin her walk.

A sickness rose inside of me; I knew I was part of the last generation that might see wild turtles laying eggs on beaches; leatherbacks are slated for extinction without serious intervention on behalf of governments and local communities. It was my own species responsible for her demise; trapping her in fishing nets, suspending her upside down while alive to store her for food on long ocean voyages, stealing her for her shell, poaching her eggs after her return to the safety of the sea, building giant resorts with disorienting lights on beachside property. As I waded behind her in her final moments before swimming away, I couldn’t help feeling like I was part of a funeral party.