The Stones Speak
Day dawned dark with news from afar;
Earth, water no longer sacred?
Money won—gods of greed and tar.
Now civil rights mired in hatred.
To my knees I fell, sobs escaped my lips;
Oh, my God! Has sanity been eclipsed?
Darkness gathered and shadows grew.
Hope dimmed, panic began to rise.
My mind raced, whatever can I do?
Darkness comes in golden disguise.
A voice then came through, so clear and so loud:
“Go to the stones and walk among the clouds.”
My grief and I put on our boots
And went out in the cold and snow.
We stood with stones in armored suits
And listened as the wisdom flowed.
“It’s time to wake-up and see the truth here.
None of this matters in five thousand years.”
The stones spoke—ages, wars went by:
Ancient wisdom, patience and trust,
I saw time make the darkness fly.
Peace grew strong, swords crumbled in rust.
“This is a moment in time, a heart beat.
Cry your tears, but don’t forever you weep.”
The peace of snow and ancient times
Enfolded me with grace and calm.
I walked along those Druid lines
And there I found the sweetest balm.
“Wake up and shine and know love is the key.
This world can heal and be one, you will see.”
Pretty Work
I heard the phrase, pretty work, echoing in my fatigued brain as I was crawling into bed at 1am. It was a busy night on the beach. My life coach has used the phrase for as long as I can remember.
What a night!! But this was last week, the night before Hermine brought us high tides and surf….and nothing else. But that’s for later in this tale.
Nest B25 was ready to tarp and I went as a tarp helper and to take photographs of sky and waves. I helped dig the trench and release 17 babies from the previous night that had been in ICU. Magic. Beautiful sea turtle magic.
I was leaving because the nest wasn’t that busy, it was my third night in a row of sea turtle work and three other women were there. But just as I got to the car, my friend got a call that babies were under a house nearby.
Cathy and I ran and met Jan and another seasoned team member. Tourists had found them every freaking where. We didn’t know the source of the turtles. I was putting them in my shirt (basket made from shirt) and they were tickling my belly. We were finding turtles almost to the road. Cathy and I found about 14. Jan found some. Jim did as well. Tourists put about 50 in the water. I tracked and tracked and finally found the nest. Just a little sink hole in the sand almost at waters edge with high surf. I helped Jan excavate it and we had almost a complete boil. And every turtle was within three or four feet of water and they went to house lights. We figure 70 made it to the water.
Stop a moment and think about that. The hatchlings were only a very short distance from the Gulf of Mexico and they chose to go to lights under houses, street lights….every single track went away from the water towards lights…or death. If the tourists had not found them and helped us we would have possibly never known the nest hatched due to rising water from Hermine.
The nest had been marked as a false crawl earlier in the season. That mama surprised us with her ability to conceal her nest among her tracks.
We were leaving that wild experience and got a call that Ken monitoring another nest had turtles emerging. The three of us ran down to B24 and helped oversee the babies journey to the sea. The tide was coming up high. Really high. We broke down part of trench after they boiled due to tide and waves.
The next morning brought heartache. I arrived by 6.30am to help with B22 which was flooded. Two teammates and I found 61 perfectly healthy hatchlings with their egg sac completely absorbed (meaning they were ready to swim into the Gulf). Unfortunately they had drowned. We had permission to excavate the nest due to the impending flood and the sounds that had been heard for two to three days prior to the storm (meaning they had hatched and had not emerged from the nest). It was determined that we could wait until the next morning….but it was too late.
We know that every turtle counts when a threatened species is involved so a loss like this hurts deeply. And we potentially lost eight nests due to flooding and erosion from the storm…the storm that wasn’t even close to us and produced maybe three drops of rain here. Only three of our remaining eleven nests remained dry and unaffected by the storm. That’s just in our 3 mile stretch of Laguna Key team’s beach.
It has been a record year for sea turtles across the southeast. At the beginning of the season, when we knew the female loggerheads were about to break Alabama’s record, I suspected we would have a storm. Somehow they know.. the mother turtles know. Of course that’s antidotal and biologists might scoff at the connection. But even in just the five season’s I’ve been a sea turtle volunteer I’ve noticed this trend.
The day of the storm was exhausting…emotionally and physically. After four hours sleep from the previous night’s wild goings-on, the excavation of the drowned hatchlings and another team member and I surveying a section of beach for nest damage…and getting ‘lost’ due to the rising tide and waves…I was ready to rest. We all were.
So many people compliment the work we do. It’s work of our hearts. Not everyone on the team participates at the same level due to work commitments, time constraints or simply lower interest levels. But those of us who are there no matter what, who lose sleep and exhaust ourselves, who wade through nasty, foamy water to dig out dead hatchlings as the waves wash underneath….who get screamed at by local homeowners who can’t grasp the need to walk near their property to access the beach….we cry, we laugh, we save sea turtles, we lose sea turtles….those that stick with it and dedicate themselves to these precious sea friends…we do pretty work. Even though it’s not always pretty.
Comfortably Numb
“Hello, Is anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?….
This is not how I am. I have become comfortably numb. I have become comfortably numb.”
Acres upon acres of wild backcountry are being cleared at Gulf State Park. It’s not just the width of another trail they are clearing. It’s wide swaths of trees, underbrush, ground cover….gone. Little-by-little this jewel of a state park is being turned into a manicured, groomed city park that continues to push wildlife into smaller blocks of land.
First it was condos. The building boom hit right after Hurricane Frederic in 1979. It’s good for the economy, they said. It will generate jobs, they said. No, we can’t turn the beach front into a national wildlife refuge, there’s too much money to be made, they said. And so we witnessed the taming of the shoreline. Concrete, glass and landscaping that demands hideous amounts of water to survive.
Now that the beaches are nearly full of monuments to human-demand-for-more, the governor of the State of Alabama is building a monument to himself on the state park beach. Drive by and see his legacy…the mountain of sand…the machinery….all hail one of the biggest crooks in the history of Alabama politics.
Off of Rosemary Dune Trail in the backcountry machines are busy in Gulf State Park. It’s not new trails that concern me, it’s the ridiculous amount of sacred land being cleared to make it appear more manicured? More city-park-like? There’s no reason for this kind of reckless behavior. None. And they are using restoration funds to do this?
I stopped to photograph the destruction and as soon as I unclipped from my pedals Sarah McLachian began singing, through my ear buds, the Prayer of Saint Francis….”Make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.”
It wasn’t just tears….it was sobs of grief. Where will the wild things go when humans bent on molding nature to their image and intention manicure it beyond recognition of what it once was?
And we sit by….and allow this destruction to continue. Pink Floyd nailed it….”We have become comfortably numb.”
Stars and Sea
The Big Dipper hangs at the northern horizon as I push up from the white sand. The stethoscope is still in my ears after it transmitted progress of the baby sea turtles hatching, scratching and making their way up…up…up from the darkness to the starlight.
With no moon to dim them, the stars are spectacular and are like jewels in the velvet sky. They seem to twinkle into infinity as the Milky Way winds its way through Scorpio and other constellations hanging gracefully over the Gulf of Mexico.
It is a perfect night on the beach. Music of the waves gently lapping against the shore is the background as the babies work diligently underground, in that dark Unknown. With instinct beyond human understanding, they tear and rip the rubbery egg shells and begin to crawl up…up…up to an unknown Source of Life.
Even when a nest hatched early and unattended and most babies crawled toward porch lights or were dispatched by crabs and coyotes and we hunted with visitors and ran and followed tracks with great sadness….there is still a sense of quiet peace. Nature isn’t always cuddly.
I now sit and listen with the stethoscope to the newly born working at the neatly tarped and trenched nest, ready for their imminent arrival, protected from lights that would surely draw them astray. Waves roll onto the shore. A shooting star flashes overhead. The warm breeze caresses my face. I am alone but only isolated from other humans. Everything here pushes in and tells me it’s okay.
The blood of dead hatchlings, killed by ghost crabs, is still on my hands…is on the hands of all humans as we alter and change wild habitat to claim it for ourselves.