COLUMN: Watch for the turtles

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, July 19, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. A version of this piece was part of last week’s edition of “Between You and Me” on KAXE.

Watch for the turtles
By Aaron J. Brown

Each year turtles crawl from an ancient landscape into our modern world. Lately we’ve been seeing more of them dead on the roadside, casualties of a war between nature and progress that rages on even though the outcome has already been decided. Turtles are reptiles but seem more like dinosaurs, or even more like creatures from another planet. Turtles have a reputation for being slow, that’s what I learned on Sesame Street anyway, but their slowness is relative, fixed to our current interpretation of sending an e-mail from Bovey, Minnesota, to Beijing in a millisecond.

Turtles are just what they are.

As a little kid I was aware of turtles, the way one might be aware of zebras, elephants or whales in northern Minnesota. Turtles have shells. Turtles are vaguely green. But I wasn’t ready for life with turtles until I encountered one for myself.

When I was a kid I lived in a trailer house on our family’s salvage yard in Zim, a location known mostly for its endless peat bog and rail lines. Indeed, the bog remains its economic driver. You know, for owl watching and such. Anyway, one day I was playing outside with my sisters and ran around the corner of the trailer house to encounter A LARGE CREATURE. It hissed at me the moment I saw it, thus relegating it to the category of things in my head that are scary and hiss at me even though I am innocent, or believe myself to be. There are few other things in this category. Most of the others are lawyers. This creature was a snapping turtle. Seeing this turtle was like seeing a space alien. Before this day my world did not include this hulking, armored, sharp beaked beast, and from then on it always would.

This large turtle had wandered onto the junkyard where we lived. Perhaps it was seeking a mate, perhaps food, perhaps it just wanted to start some trouble. Those are all plausible reasons for Iron Range people to head into town. In any event the turtle instead encountered a group of children and a rather undignified toss into the ditch along County Highway 7 at the hands of my dad. I still remember dad wrangling the turtle into a wheelbarrow, lifting it like Atlas’ stone and hurling this large scaled monstrosity into the ditch. We watched it for a time, in the ditch, swimming sleek like a torpedo – so unlike the awkward critter loitering near our septic mound.

I saw another turtle at this time in my life. My first friend in kindergarten was a little blond kid just down the highway from us. On my first overnight stay with my pal my parents dropped me off at my friend’s trailer house. As I listened to the engine of my family car grow distant I recognized a dead snapping turtle in the driveway of my friend’s house. His stepfather, a large, shirtless, overall-festooned man named Homer emerged from the structure to inform me that the turtle had approached too close to the house and he had blasted its shell with a shotgun and left its dead, rotting carcass in the driveway as “a lesson to the others.”

I wish I could say that I was disgusted, but I was more relieved. Snapping turtles to a small child are very scary. This dead turtle was no threat. Not to me. Not to anyone.

Later that night Homer would blast off the caps to my cap gun with a knife he kept with him. The family’s bathroom had no door. My friend’s mom would ultimately steal my spare clothes and dress my friend in them for subsequent school days. My friend would soon lose a brother to a household accident and later disappear from my life.

So the question I am left with is what was so bad about that turtle? What did that turtle do to deserve its fate?

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at MinnesotaBrown.com. His book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.