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One sunny Tuesday afternoon near the end of May about six years ago, which was, you may recall, a year before the obscenity “Donald J. Trump” began to be spoken aloud in the everyday speech of Americans, Celeste and I set out with our friends Jenny and Nick in their Ford automobile to have supper at Growler’s Resort, on the shore of the Wisconsin River, about thirteen miles straight out Highway B to the west of Fjord. Nick was driving; Jenny was in the passenger seat beside him.
We were in no rush, there was not much traffic, but Nick drives briskly except when he’s driving rapidly. As we crested a hill, he exclaimed, “Oh, no, look at that! A turtle!” He braked hard, rolled the right tires onto the soft shoulder of the road, stopped the car, and jumped out. He fetched the creature from the asphalt.
It was a good-sized turtle, wide, high-backed, hefty. I don’t know what kind it was, not a snapper, but it looked to me to be three, maybe four times the size of a typical grownup box turtle. Nick brought it to the right side of the Ford to let Jenny and Celeste and me have a look. Then he turned away and stepped out into the marshy grass, but in that very moment, a sedan arrived from behind us, swung around the Ford, and stopped a few feet ahead of us. The driver, a woman whom none of us had ever met before and whom I would describe as “slim and sort of youngish, sort of exotic, and sort of probably pregnant,” leaped out of her sedan, a dark, sporty Chrysler, and announced to Nick in an excited but not a belligerent way, “That’s my turtle!” They began to discuss it, the turtle, the ownership of the turtle, the turtle’s apparent travel plans. It had evidently hiked out of a pond a few yards to the south from where we sat, and it seemed to have in mind a destination somewhere to the north of the road. The woman pointed beyond the pond, to a house and several farm buildings that she said were hers. Celeste lifted her Canon camera, ever at the ready, and began to take pictures. I brought out my camera, too.
What first caught our notice, while the woman and Nick were talking, were two decals ornamenting the trunk lid of the Chrysler. One said, in blue-on-white, greater-than-two-inch lettering, in all caps, “I MASTURBATE.” Another sticker, smaller, darker, also in caps, and equally direct in its message, celebrated another accomplishment, “I POOPED / TODAY!” I took a picture and then got out of the car and greeted the woman. Now, I’ll mention what I may have told you before, that Nick and I have been pals since high school, for more than half a century, already, at the time of this turtle episode. Nick, I can assure you, is not a person easily shocked, but his mouth dropped open and his eyes widened when he heard me say to the exotic-looking farm lady, “Hello! Do you masturbate?” Then Nick looked like he might faint when she cheerily replied, “Every day!”
I did not ask about the other thing. I told Nick, “Look at the bumper stickers.” Straight out of high school he had served four years in the U.S. Navy, and his salty vocabulary reflects that service. So, when he read the back of the Chrysler, he muttered something a bit more emphatic than “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
This incident occured, as I said, nearly six years ago. I do not know what became of the turtle or the seemed-to-be-soon-to-be mom. Never saw either one of them again. But something in the nation’s news this past week reminded me of The Turtle Crossing the Road. On Friday, fifty-one United States Senators renounced the oath they had days before sworn, right hands raised, when Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you God?” Perhaps those fifty-one senators cleverly crossed the fingers of their left hands when they promised impartial justice; I do not know. But, by refusing to call witnesses in the president’s trial, those senators, in my opinion, closed their eyes and retracted their reptilian heads and muddy claws into their turtle-like shells. A photo of Senator McConnell showed him smiling as he raised a thumb in triumph after the votes were recorded. It seems to me, those senators might just as well have proclaimed to the American public the same two boasts that the exotic lady on the roadside mystifyingly proclaimed upon her trunk lid. Bless our lawmakers’ hearts, I say, if they indeed possess hearts as well as shells. I wish each of them a sweet and dark night’s sleep.
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