On a bright summer night, the door off the garage opens and Evan tells me he sees a turtle at the neighbor's house. "What do you think the dogs will do?" he asks.
I shrug, and settle on the bottom of our carpeted staircase to strap two enthusiastic dogs into their colorful harnesses. "Wanna go for a walk?" I taunt in my too-high dog voice.
Porter jumps and presses his paws into my shorts before flipping over backwards. Leinie wiggles and hops. When we move too slowly for her, she begins to whine.
Before they create any additional scratches in the hardwood floor, we hook the dogs into their leashes, and walk out the front door.
Michigan probably has a state mascot, but as a transplant, I was forced to remember a different state's defining characteristics during my elementary years. If I were to pick a Michigan state mascot, I would choose the pothole. I've seen no beast more prolific, and while plenty of things in this state - wolves, wolverines, clean water - are endangered, so long as we continue to have frozen, salty winters, potholes will never be among their number.
Directly past our driveway, there is an interconnected series of these pothole craters, which grows deeper and more treacherous with each cold season. During our seasonal monsoon rains, the potholes fill with water and become a bird-sized chain of lakes.
As the Baileys approach the section of potholes on our twelve combined legs, we see the turtle. This is not one of the baby turtles we typically spot during the warm weather months in our subdivision of forests and wetlands; this turtle is full-grown, and it measures at least fourteen inches from its rounded head to the tip of its long, spiked tail.
Leinie and I come the closest to the large reptile, and I anticipate its immediate retraction into its dirty shell. Instead, it maneuvers in a hefty waddle from the grass of one neighbor's home into the first large pothole in the series. Here, the water comes up to the turtle's shell, and the pothole's depth renders the animal nearly invisible from the unmolested segments of street.
Instinct makes me fear for this primitive-looking beast. My writing room looks out on this stretch of road, and the speed with which my neighbors tear through it tells me this is no safe place for a turtle, who would suffer a slow and painful demise if its shell were rent in two by speeding tires.
I examine the beast for a moment, coming closer to it to see if I can scare it into forward motion, but it remains seated in its impromptu jacuzzi. "How do I get this thing to move?" I whine in agitation. "It's giant. It's probably a snapping turtle or something."
Evan stares at me. "I don't know. Pick him up."
"I don't know," I said. "What about the germs?"
I look at all the things at my disposal - two dogs on leashes and two plastic poop bags - and decide to McGyver a solution. "Hold her," I say, handing Leinie's leash to Evan after untying the bags from around its handle.
I manipulate the thin plastic until both bags are open, and I shove a bag over each hand. Then, I stand astride the turtle, it's head strategically in front of me so that, if it does snap, it won't remove any of my digits. I take a deep breath before leaning down and placing my hands carefully below the beast's hard shell and lifting its considerable heft several inches into the air. The turtle's response is immediate. Four strong legs begin to kick and claw at my hands, and after two attempts to transport the creature, we've moved less than two inches, and the bags on my hands have been reduced to shreds. Quickly and carefully, I put the turtle down. Its head pops outward aggressively, making a sudden hollow noise that makes me squeal in terror. At its turtle-like pace, the thing turns and makes another head-pop in the direction of my feet before I jump out of the way and screech once more.
Evan would be finding this humorous, I know, except that one of our dogs has begun to spin itself into a frenzy over the strange reptilian creature fighting its mother. Porter is yipping and squeaking, making the most pathetic noises we've heard from him in all our four years of being his owners. While making his racket, he's alternately bucking back and lunging forward, trying to escape his leash and harness so that he can go one-on-one against this armored animal.
While Evan tries to calm Porter, my sympathies for the turtle are quickly waning. Still, I decide to make a few last-ditch efforts to move it towards our other neighbor's yard, where there is a pond that is too shallow for boats and swimmers, and thus perfect for unfriendly snapping turtles. I nudge the back of the turtle's shell softly with the toe of my sneaker, which elicits another quick snap from the turtle, and another resulting squeak from me. I run back to my dogs and husband, and quickly ambush the large reptile, hoping to scare it into forward motion. He stares at me with his tiny reptilian eyes set close together in his bald, round head, and I feel his radiating disgust and anger. Finally, I back away, checking for traffic in both directions, and the turtle ambles slowly into a larger pothole, where he sinks broodingly into a bath of dirt, motor oil, and the remains of our torrential afternoon rain.
"I can't do this," I exclaim.
"Honestly, it's Darwinism," Evan says, knowing full well that this statement will not change my course of action.
"You have to do something. It's your turn."
Evan looks at me incredulously. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Pick him up?"
In the silence that follows, I know that Evan is not going to pick this animal up to transport it to safety.
"Okay," I say slowly. "I am going to go get more poop bags for the walk. I'll be back. Please make sure no one drives over the turtle while I'm gone."
Evan surprises me. "Okay," he responds. "Bring me a stick."
I take the dogs, whose leashes have been shortened to keep them from getting too close to the turtle. We move towards the house, the dogs pulling me off balance so that I nearly trip and fall face first onto the blacktop. I lengthen the leashes and let the dogs lead the way back to the house, where I grab a whole roll of green poop bags. On my way back up the driveway, I assemble several small sticks, In the side yard, I spot a larger stick, and I reach around it, my fingers sinking into several cold and slimy, prune-like growths that surround the stick. I verbalize my frustration and wipe the disgusting purple goo off my hands.
"Do you still need sticks?" I ask loudly across the neighbor's lawn.
"No," Evan yells back.
I briefly clamp my eyes shut in frustration, and then tramp back to the street, which is now empty of snapping turtles. Evan tells me that, while I was gone, the angry reptile tromped across the entire street of his own accord. I see him wallowing in a section of muddy grass in the neighbor's culvert.
"Thank God," I sigh.
"Someone should tell the neighbors that there's a large snapping turtle in their yard," Evan says. "Or else their dog is going to go after it and get bitten."
"Go ahead," I said. "I'll stand with the dogs."
"No, you go."
"No, you."
We continue to walk several feet, debating who ought to do their neighborly duty. Suddenly, there is the noise of vehicles close by. Fortuitously, the neighbor's maroon truck is turning into the driveway. I turn and begin to wave my arms wildly in the air. Pulling Leinie with me, I make a dash for the driveway. Leinie does not want to be pulled, so she digs in her heels and sits back. Soon, I find that, rather than bringing my sixty-pound dog along for the walk, I am only pulling a lightweight pink harness toward our neighbor's driveway. I am torn between the dog and our neighbor's second-oldest daughter, who has jumped from the front seat of the truck and begun walking toward me. Evan kneels to reattach the harness, so I take off. We both notice that the maroon truck, which has no passengers, is still moving, rolling slowly down the driveway.
"Your truck is rolling," Evan says. I am the only one who hears him, so he says it again with similar results.
Now I start to scream, "Your truck is rolling!" Eventually, the neighbor's daughter hears me and rushes towards her vehicle, hopping in and stopping it just as its front tires roll onto the grass that precedes a 15-foot drop-off at the end of their driveway.
Just as the vehicle stops, I am running up the driveway. One of the daughter's shoes is flopped over in the center of the blacktop, exactly where it lost contact with its racing owner's foot. The neighbor's dog, sensing the excitement in the air, bounds over to me, jumps on my knees and begins to bounce around. While I pet the dog, I try to state my case to the neighbor's silent daughter. Clearly, she is addled. Probably, she expected to hear some life-threatening news update when I flagged her down like a wacky, waving, inflatable arm flailing tube man. She has nearly run the family vehicle off of a veritable grassy cliff, and now this crazy woman is stumbling over her words, telling her in fragmented order about a turtle in the yard, the danger it could pose to her curious and lively young dog. As I exclaim for the second time about how the reptilian beast "seriously tried to kill me," I decide to leave the wide-eyed girl in peace. Slowly, I begin to backtrack down the driveway. "I'm so sorry, I just thought you should know," I say. Then I turn and jog quickly back to my husband and dogs, both of whom are back in their harnesses and ready for us to hurry up and take them on their daily walk.
The damn turtle is still sitting in his mud pool, haughtily expressing his ownership of all the spaces he traverses. I stare at him with anger.
Shaking my head, I mutter, "All of this for a turtle."
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