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The Great Turtle Migration of ‘51 (short fiction)
by Linda FullerEvery time I haul out the old photo album, it automatically opens to the page where I am pictured as a babe in my father’s arms in front of our weather-beaten house in Kansas. The sky is alight with my favorite kind of light, sun streaming through storm clouds. Dad’s wearing those old yellow pants that Mother was constantly trying to throw out or give to charity; Dad always managed to rescue them. Four turtles can be seen finning their way across the sky, so I know the picture was taken in the Spring of ’51. I have no first-hand memory of the great turtle migration, as it came to be called, but I’ve seen the photograph and heard the story so many times it feels like a real memory.
Political uprisings were rife in the animal kingdom that year. Bald eagles were lobbying the Hair Club for Men to expand their operations into feather transplantation, possums were reasserting their right to be known as o’possums, kangaroos were starting to sport fanny packs (the marsupials had long considered themselves downtrodden), and the jackals were revolting. The turtles were particularly restive – it was not an unusual sight on the evening news to see bands of them loitering on street corners, cigarettes dangling from their lips, eyes glassy and crazed, shells tattooed with unspeakable graffiti.
As in any population, factions and schisms developed: the hermit turtles in their borrowed shells made of anything from neoprene to discarded (not necessarily willingly) armadillo husks, hanging out at children’s playgrounds; the grizzled desert rat tortoises, often high on meth, partying long and loud into the night; the Mulligatawnies, a suicidal sect of turtles congregating in New Orleans' French Quarter, flinging themselves into huge cauldrons of savory stock; the Yertles, quiet pond-dwelling turtles of the old school.
And it was the Yertles, these stodgy pond-lodgers from another era, who led the exodus. We never knew why they left or where they went, but for weeks in the Spring of ’51 the skies were often black with the paddling ovate forms of millions of turtles. The world is poorer without them.
07/15/2010 Author's Note: Written in 1999, inspired by a painting which, unfortunately, I can't identify.
Posted on 07/15/2010
Copyright © 2024 Linda Fuller
| Member Comments on this Poem |
| Posted by Elizabeth Jill on 07/18/10 at 06:06 PM mesmerizes me ♫ leaves weeping ♫ refreshing read |
| Posted by George Hoerner on 07/19/10 at 09:32 PM A wonderful write lady and maybe just maybe you had an fore warning of the oil spill in the gulf and its potential toll on the turtles. |
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