amanecer

I want to tell you about the sea turtles.

I was going to tell you about the vice president who leaned back in his chair for an entire meeting with his hands behind his head and talked and talked and said nothing at all. I was going to tell you about how I spent the last twenty minutes of the meeting feeling the underside of the fine conference table at which we sat, trying to divine whether it was made of real wood or formica. I was going to tell you that he never remembers anyone's name aside from his own staff, no matter how much or how closely he's worked with a person -- how he introduces himself every time he sees someone. But that's all I feel like saying about that.

I want to tell you about the sea turtles, and how, when I was eighteen, I had the chance of a lifetime to go see them.

My senior year of high school, my chemistry/physics teacher sponsored a project where we tracked sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. Each turtle was fitted with a radio transmittor tracking device, and we received data from a satellite that told us the coordinates of the turtle, as well as the depths it dove and the lengths of time it stayed underwater.

Our primary interest was in the Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the smallest of the sea turtle species, and the most endangered. They nest occasionally on Padre Island, but their primary nesting ground is still the playa at Rancho Nuevo, in Mexico. In the 1940s, a camera captured tens of thousands of these turtles nesting on the beach. They were so densely packed that you couldn't cross the beach without stepping on a shell.

And yet, over the next several years, the species was brought nearly to extinction. Locals stole the eggs from the nests because they believed eating raw sea turtle eggs would increase their virility. Shrimpers inadvertantly caught the turtles in their nets and left them with no way to surface, causing them to drown.

...which is all really just a long aside.

So I participated in this research project, tracked some turtles and their migration patterns, and was the only student to stick with the project until the end of the school year. Imagine my excitement when my teacher offered to take me to Mexico to see Rancho Nuevo for myself.

We left in June of that year, just after my high school graduation, and went into Mexico with a scientific caravan of sorts from the local university. It took a day and a half, but we drove to Rancho Nuevo. The route we took traveled through the Mexican countryside, dry and desolate and brushy like the ranches of southwest Texas. When we stopped for gas, children clamored on the front of the van, vying for the opportunity to clean our windshields, hoping for tips. And though they told me we were approaching Rancho Nuevo, I couldn't believe it until we crossed the final hill that overlooked the beach.

We camped out on the beach for a few days. I shared a tent with a graduate student who taught me about sargassum and saw more sunrises over the ocean than I'd seen previously in my entire life. And at the sunrise each morning, we'd crawl out of bed and climb on all-terrain vehicles to patrol the beaches. The time was called arribada -- roughly, arrival -- and the turtles were coming ashore in larger numbers as they nested. To protect the nesting turtles from poachers, Mexican soldiers patrolled on horseback, armed with huge rifles or machine guns.

We scanned the beach before us for turtle tracks to guide us to newly planted nests, and each nest we found, we painstakingly dug up, collecting the eggs in burlap sacks to be re-buried inside a fenced enclosure to protect from predators, human and natural.

And then, several times a day, we'd take a walk around the enclosure, inspecting the corralitos for signs that the eggs had begun to hatch. As the turtles broke out of their leathery shells, the fluid inside the egg would seep into the sand, reducing the volume of the eggs inside the hole. We could see it by the indentation in the sand, and we'd then help dig up the baby turtles and keep them in a tank for a few days, feeding them and allowing them to gain their strength.

And then, when they were prepared for their journey to the ocean, we'd wait for a clear night with a bright moon, gather them up, and carefully scatter them along the beach. Each hatchling, no bigger than a silver dollar, was pointed toward the waves. Some had a harder time finding their way. They'd turn and crawl in the wrong direction, only to have to be turned back around. Some made it into the surf -- a few never did.

Each one paddled mightily for such small creatures, struggling to overcome the force of the waves as they rolled upon the shore. Each one followed the light of the moon.