Another American Adventure: turtle

Thursday, September 16, 2010

turtle

I wasn't even going to take my camera with me today. It is a wonderfully dark and rainy morning (balm for the soul of us introverts). But then I would have not gotten a photo of this turtle! He didn't venture his head out once he knew that Jubilee was around. His markings remind me of something from South American Indian art.

These morning walks through the woods are changing Jubilee. Running freely and exploring wherever she wants is making her bolder, more cocky. Harder to walk on a leash. Maybe it's all those wild smells.

2 comments:

Sally ClaySeptember 16, 2010 at 6:31 PM
Cool picture. Was that one of the wild smells?
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beth cioffolettiSeptember 16, 2010 at 8:08 PM
Most definitely. Jubilee, by nature, is skittish and cautious. She was curious, but didn't pursue when I called her off.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.