What a Beautiful World

 

Last week I was with my daughter in Costa Rica.

This week I am home. It is Friday night, and it is raining, but there is a Blizzard Warning for my area. The snow is supposed to start soon and last through the day Saturday into Sunday. We might get more than a foot. I cancelled all the massage appointments that I had scheduled for tomorrow, stopped at the market on my way home to buy celery (in case I decide to make chicken salad. Strange, the things you think you must stock up on if a snowstorm is on the way), parked my AWD car up the street out of the way of the snow plow, and am happily staying inside for the rest of the weekend. Right now, the ground is just very wet. The water is pooling in front of my house. The stream that pops up after heavy rainfall is running through the backyard.

Also? The power just went out.

I am kind of missing Costa Rica right now.

Last week I walked with my daughter on the beach for hours one night. Beach walking is part of her job, one of her duties as an intern with the Leatherback Trust organization. It sounds idyllic.

“Your job is to walk the beach? Tough life!” people say to her.

That’s what I thought, too. Until I actually did it with her. It’s harder than it seems.

We started around 8:00 pm and finished past 2:00 am. Up the beach to the end marker. Back to the start. Again. All this purposeful walking in the middle of the night can make you a little tired (especially if you just arrived in the country and woke up at 4:15 am to make the 5:00 am hotel shuttle to the airport for your 7:30 am international flight).

But for me, last week? It was worth it. It’s been worth it for her, too. Through the months of the nesting season, there’s been a lot of turtley action. Nesting season is just about finished, though, and her team will be packing up and going their separate ways soon. The chances of me seeing a turtle with her that night weren’t great.

Except as we approached the end of the beach, she stopped. She looked down.

I said, “What? What?”

I was already tired and not sure that I would be able to keep walking and walking for another few hours. I didn’t see anything.

(I am not a skilled turtle tracker.)

But she saw tracks. Not crab tracks (she had already shown me lots of those). Turtle tracks. She followed the line up the beach to where they stopped, underneath a big sticker bush. She peered underneath it, and found the turtle.

A green turtle had already dug out a nest in the sand. She was getting ready to lay her eggs.

My daughter proceeded with her scientific duties, things like measuring the turtle, determining if she had been tagged by scanning her front right flipper, and then carefully inserting a tracker since she hadn’t been. I got to help a little, by finding a stick to pull the sticker bush’s branches away from the turtle’s back, so my daughter could work with her a little easier. We both got poked; that bush was brutal. I’m thinking that was a good move by the turtle, a way to protect her nest, since she wasn’t bothered by the stickers at all, being covered by her hard shell.

It was a gift for me to watch my daughter’s process, to see how much she has learned, to be awed by her scientific skillset.

It was also a gift to come across this turtle, lay down in the sand near her, and watch as she made her nest, laid her eggs, and then covered them again, her flippers tossing sand all over the place. I had to move back, to keep the sand from getting on me.

After the turtle covered her eggs, she moved off to the side and dug up the sand near where they were buried (because turtles often will dig out an area close to their nests as decoys for predators, my daughter told me). Then we watched her make her way back to the ocean.

It was magic, I tell you: watching her slow, laborious journey to the sea. Front flippers, back flippers, moving together: a turtle sand dance.

Last week, I saw a green turtle lay her eggs. I also saw monkeys making their way through the tree canopy that ran between the restaurant where we were enjoying happy hour and the sea. I saw one solitary monkey, but then as we watched, an entire tribe passed by, maybe thirty in all. There were juveniles, mothers with babies, older males, all swinging from the branches a few feet in front of us. Later, I saw a crocodile with its mouth wide open on the boat tour that we took through a nearby estuary.

Last week, I went swimming in the ocean, and the water was cool but comfortable, just the right temperature for a swim on a hot day. My daughter and I walked to her team’s favorite swimming beach, in a secluded cove that keeps the waves from breaking too roughly. We got there at low tide after finishing her morning walk duties, where her task was to patrol the beach from 5:00 am to 7:00 am, just to see if anything had happened after the night walking teams turned in for the day.

Last week, I saw a sea turtle nesting. Today, Saturday, there is still a Blizzard Warning. A little snow did fall last night, maybe an inch or so. So far, not the torrent they were predicting. The power was out, but then it came back. It’s on as I write this. The snow is falling again, heavier now. I am hopeful the power will stay on, but will get this posted soon, just in case.

Grateful for electricity. Grateful that we have a world with sea turtles and monkeys, with March snowfall and daffodils that bloom through the flurries. Grateful that I get to be here for all of it.

What a beautiful week.

What a beautiful world.