Self-Portrait With Turtles: A Memoir - Softcover

David M. Carroll is the author of The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections, and Swampwalker’s Journal, which won the John Burroughs Medal, the highest award for nature writers.

A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and of Tufts University, he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire and an Environmental Merit Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for his work on wetlands. In 2006 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, given to "to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations." He lives in New Hampshire.

The First Eight Years

Consecrated to the God of my parents before my eyes were open, I lived my first eight years in a closed circle of family, relatives, church, and school. I lived in a totally human environment filled with human concerns and considerations. It was a world built by people for people. To the four directions, all horizons were human horizons. All constructs I knew were human constructs, from God on high to carpets and sidewalks underfoot. The physical, intellectual, and emotional aspects of my life had their dawning in a place where there seemed no purpose beyond the getting of the daily bread.
In season I went out to play, but my life was essentially an indoor life. Curtained rooms, a velvety quiet; white lace on the credenza, carefully dusted knickknacks, glass doors closeting cups and saucers, parlor for Sundays. There were stairways and wallpaper, brooding harpy aunts and furtive alcoholic uncles, the clock and the evening paper. There were supper and love and, at times, exceptional wit for relief. My earliest field work lay in reading the faces around me, interpreting gestures, listening to intonations, analyzing turns of phrase. From behind, from a certain angle (I would position myself or wait for him to turn), I could read my father"s cheekbones and tell if he"d been drinking. I had to have an idea of how things were going to go.
The difference between inside and outside was not profound. Beyond the door, the steps of furnitured porches descended to sidewalks. Narrow alleys between close, high houses, creepings of moss in crevices of stone or cement where the sun never reached. Backyards, fences, hedgerows of phlox, sweet peas climbing the backs of houses, some butterflies and occasional birds. Sun-blinding summer streets, tightly clipped hedges with spiders and ants; rows of houses ascending hills, homes facing each other in long columns. Porches with gliders, shades lowered against the sun, raised with its passing; people sitting, at almost any hour, overlooking the street. On my walks I crossed the street time and again, seeking passage by vacant porches.
The central Pennsylvania summers were marked by heat and drought. Hot pavement, attic bedrooms hot even in the dead of night; after dark heat lightning always flickered, almost never bringing rain. When afternoon thunderstorms did come, they were torrential. Street floods surged against curbs. Quickly into swimsuits, we kids lay and splashed in gulleys, pavement-heated stormwater"s ephemeral streams. There was no detaining this water. Streets and sidewalks steamed and dried in less than a quarter of an hour.
Not far beyond my home and my street were my church and school. Church and school were one, and I in uniform. High stone steeples, dizzyingly high. Cold imposing stone ornamented with stained glass and reaching to heaven. No sun inside; the light of God was a mixture of wavering candlelight and unreachable jeweled gleamings of glass; light enough for crucifixes and tortured saints with strangely serene faces, and for the faithful gathered to pray to them. The purpled, incensed hush sustained a bewildering blend of ecstasy and guilt that I seemed to have no choice but to embrace. Everything in my nature resisted this.
Any corner I turned led to another street. Beyond that lay another street, always lined with houses of other people, and seldom far away, temples to other manifestations of God. For my first eight years I was in a cocoon, awaiting that first swamp, that first turtle.

The First Turtle

At age eight, on June tenth, after supper, on my third day in a new town eight hundred miles from the circumscribed streets I had known all my life, I set out on a walk alone. My new street was called an avenue, and its houses were low units arranged in clusters, imaginatively termed courtyards, in a housing project. Here, in one direction at least, there were not other streets and rows of houses encircling my backyard. To the east, beyond a chain-link fence, parking lot, and ball field, I could see a horizon of trees. I headed there along the fence, passing the back ends of six courtyards. Even the people in my own court were still strangers to me.
I turned a corner and followed the fence to where it ended at the deserted ball field. The woods to the left grew deeper and darker. Windows and rooflines fell away. I could hear no voices. Although I had never been in the woods with anyone, let alone by myself, I did not feel intimidated, but beckoned. Still, I kept to the lighted outer edge of the trees as they dropped to lower, wetter ground. Here I slipped through a dense screen of brush and grassy growth and emerged on the bank of a brook that sparkled out of a darkening swamp. Here was the first border I had ever crossed that did not have the same thing on the other side. The water"s slight murmurs and movements among stones and plants were entrancing, and beckoned me even more than the woods.
Frog calls and the sound of intermittent splashings drew me to cross the brook on stepping stones that seemed to have been set out for my passage. A short push through tall, thick growth brought me to an opening at the edge of a pool, where the lowering sun cast an otherworldly light across dark water. It glimmered in dragonfly wings and sporadic silver-beaded sprays tossed up by leaping frogs. Sweet songs from unseen birds drifted on the still air. Everything here was new to me, every sight, sound, and smell a new experience. I doubt my eyes had ever opened wider or tried harder to take in my surroundings. I was in another world, a new world utterly distinct from any I had known. It was all the more miraculous for being real.
For some time I stood still, absorbing, becoming absorbed. A shivering intensity came over me, all my senses became heightened; it was as though I had new senses. Stirrings in the reeds caught my eye. Not far from my watching-place, with slow deliberate movements that caused partings and closings in a bed of emergent grassy growth, something moved in the water. After a long pause, more stirrings. I had no picture to go by, no idea what to expect, as I waited for something to become visible. More jostlings. Afraid to move, lest I frighten away whatever was on the prowl, I continued to wait and watch. Even before I saw my first turtle, in watching and attempting to interpret these reedy shiftings, I began to develop one of the search-images that was to became a foundation of the rest of my life.
At length a small section of the outer fringe of reeds was pushed aside and a turtle appeared in the shallows, moving slowly, gracefully over the bottom, so at ease, at home underwater. I was transfixed. How could any living thing be marked like this? The turtle was as black as jet and adorned with radiant yellow and orange; head, legs, and tail aglow with scatterings of spots, intense blazings of orange at the sides of her head, markings all the more brilliant for being seen through clear water. I was spellbound by her patterns and the way she moved. With the living vision of this turtle at its center, the realm I had entered came all the more to life for me. Everything I was seeing and feeling suddenly became magnified. I was keenly fascinated by the frogs and dragonflies and all, but this turtle . . . Her cautious black head turned slowly left and right. I could see her pale orange face, her black and amber-gold eyes.
Shaking all over, barely breathing, I watched her. I had to hold that turtle but was frozen by the feelings surging through me. Shifting her eyes toward the surface, the turtle saw me. She began to turn back into the reeds. I was afraid that I might never see her again. I could not let her get away. Suddenly I was in the water, shoes and all, my hand closing over the jeweled dome of her carapace.
Back up on the banking, I marveled at the feel of the turtle in my trembling hands. It was as if I had been allowed to clasp life itself in my hands. How could I begin to imagine all that was represented by a connection this tangible; the smooth, flat bottom shell resting on my left palm, the caressable contour of the perfect dome of her top shell lying beneath the fingertips of my right hand. Gradually, with great caution, the turtle came forth from her shell. I could see no more than the tip of her nose for some minutes, then her spectacular head (so close now) and gracefully extending neck. The deep eyes of the wild living thing I held in my hands appeared so calm. Holding that first turtle and looking into her eyes, I bonded inextricably with her kind and her world. She became the center of an endlessly expanding universe within the universe.
Her wild eyes imparted patience. But her legs began to reach out of the protection of her shell, tentatively at first, then suddenly with resistance, struggling against my hands with spasmodic thrusts.
I couldn"t let her go. I carried her home with me. I was only beginning to sort out, to learn. It would take a regrettably long time for me to understand that no turtle should be taken from its place.
With that first turtle I crossed a boundary of greater dimensions than I can ever fully comprehend. I changed lives within a life, worlds within a world. Metamorphosis . . . I had wings now, and different eyes; the sun was not the same. I could not yet name a plant or animal around me, except in the most general terms: "grass," "bird," "frog," "turtle." I had no idea what kind of turtle I had found, and when I asked someone in my neighborhood the next day, I was told that it was a "sun turtle." It was certainly a turtle of the sun to me.
Turtle was the alphabet of a new language, and not only a passkey into a new world but a key to open the gate of a world I knew I had to leave. The entering was immediate, the opening I saw before me extended forever. I never turned back, though the leaving was gradual, much of it a struggle. The swamp, the marsh, looking for turtles, being there; every time I went out was a reaffirmation. It was too real for superstition and far exceeded magic. I needed no ritual, no priest or priestess, shaman, intercessor, or interpreter. I needed only my eyes, ears, hands and feet, awakening mind, and deepening intuition. I didn"t even need a map. I was home.

The morning after I found the first turtle I was out again, back again; passing along the fence, turning the corner, leaving houses and yards behind with an almost unbearable eagerness. With gathering elation I slipped among the alders. It had not been a dream. The screen awaited, and on the other side of it the brook still sparkled on. The stepping stones awaited me; the sweet rank growth of summer along the stream was all the more fragrant in the morning. I watched the water sliding by. Where to go? What watery route to follow? I had never entered the heart of a day before. This was not just an evening run; the landscape and the whole day spread out before me, and hidden somewhere within them, there had to be another turtle. Here was a returning I could almost taste. From the first entering I knew I would have to come back at every chance.
I crossed the brook on stones I would walk countless times over the next ten years and retraced the route that had led me to the first turtle. A lifelong quest whose dimensions I could not begin to grasp, had no need to grasp, had begun on a single turning in time. Spotted turtle was touchstone and magnet. In searching for the turtle, following the turtle, I was drawn into the turtle"s world. I discovered what seemed to me a limitless landscape, with the turtle at its center. I had crossed to Turtle Island.
The spotted turtle"s world was different from mine, yet it was a world I could enter, and come to be in. It was unknown but not alien, a world of endless revelation and abiding mystery. From my first solitary setting-out as an eight-year-old boy I was never afraid. Though uneasy at times, on the rare occasions when I became lost for a while, I was never afraid. I was where I belonged. I began to map the world I had entered by mapping the turtle"s world. In a pattern that would persist throughout my life, water led me on to more turtles, turtles led me on to new waters. And so my landscape, laced with waterways, unfolded.
There were pressures, spoken and unspoken, that would keep me at home, have me stay in my neighborhood . . . chores to do . . . wasn"t my house good enough? To go off to the swamps and woods was to abandon—in some measure to reject—home, family, and community. Human social units have a tendency to feel threatened by one who moves apart, particularly by one who goes toward the nonhuman. In the face of many uncertainties people seek reassurance, the reinforcement that they find in having a family stick close together, always having others be near them, never out of contact— thinking like them, saluting the same flag, attending the same church. A psychological and spiritual, even a physical, confinement becomes established, a subtle, binding entrapment. One who strays afield can come to feel the communal critique for separating out and be in for a difficult time.
I relished the days when I could feel free to walk out the door and leave the yard, to go back out to my new world and take the turtle day as my own. I meant no slight in setting out and could never understand why this could not be more freely given. But I could not wait for it to be granted. I knew that I had to take it for myself, no matter the risk, the eventual cost. At times I had to slip away, go out into the heart of that great glad day, not thinking ahead, letting what would come at the end of the day come. From the finding of the first turtle I became a time bandit, watching faces and the clock, the corner of my eye ever on the door.
Compañera

I was alone when I found the first spotted turtle, and over the years I would need to be alone to achieve my greatest awareness of the turtles and their places and find my deepest sense of being there. But in third grade, as my first full turtle season was beginning, I found one whom I wanted to bring into my outdoor world. She bonded with it at once. Although not always together, we were inseparable, and bound to swamp and stream, field and wood.
She could run faster than most boys, and certainly faster than I. Even in boyhood I walked far more often than I ran. "You have two speeds, David," my father told me. "Slow and all stop." I jogged when the goal was to get to a certain place, but once I entered the wilds, I mostly walked. Like a turtle, I had endurance, not speed. I walked and waded all day long. And always slowly, for the moment I slipped through one of those screens of brush I was where I wanted to be, and the more slowly I moved, the longer I kept still, the more I would see. My swift companion had that patience, too; her dark eyes searched with a similar focus. We would separate, fanning out to different shallows in a pool or working the opposite banks of a stream, calling out to each other when there was something that had to be looked at.
We parted grasses and sedges, peered into the water, stirred mud and leaves, searched under rocks and logs. We looked at whatever we could not catch and shared brief holdings of anything we could get our hands on. From the beginning I had a way of pulling turtles out of nowhere. Once, at the edge of a small pond on her grandmother"s property, among tree roots at an undercut bank, I saw a bit of a pattern of yellow spots in black water. I called out to her, and as she came near I reached in and caught the turtle. When I pulled my capture up to show her, I found that I had two turtles in hand. The dark-faced male whose shell I gripped was clasping an orange-faced female. Despite the dramatic intrusion, he would not let go of her. I set them back in place at once...