Summer in Kansas: Turtles All the Way Down

Consider the humble box turtle, Terrapene ornata ornata, a smallish reptile of the Great American Desert, a hapless creature prone to wander from the concealing roadside grasses onto highways.

Turtles are generally modest creatures, not given to bouts of ill temper, never petulant or neurotic, neither skulkers nor biters, never (like a gang of raccoons) strewing the contents of your trash can across a driveway like an FAA crash team reassembling airliner debris.

For all of these reasons, whenever I spot a box turtle wandering slowly across a stretch of Kansas highway, I pull over, walk back to the spot, remove the turtle to the grassy verges of the road, and aim it into the middle distance before I go on. I've found them, snub noses bloodied from a sidewall but still serviceable, stunned but able to churn their slow way into the neighboring ditch, or nonplussed by the quick whirr of tires around them. But then, turtles always appear haplessly nonplussed, somehow deserving of our basic sympathy and succor.

From 50 feet away at 65 mph, they're hard to spot on the roadway, bearing as they do an unfortunate resemblance to a dislodged chunk of pavement. Which of course reduces their chances of surviving the crossing. So it was, the other afternoon, coming along a country road that I did a U-turn to go back and retrieve one of my fellow creatures from an awful fate. The traffic was uncharacteristically heavy just at the moment and as I stood on the roadside, waiting for the last cars to pass so I could venture over on foot to retrieve the turtle, there was the predictable sound from beneath the final car, like a tire running over a full can of Bud Light. 

The irony of the situation was thick - me standing at the side of the road bent on a quick act of mercy, a whole line of autos save the very last missing the little critter, and in a moment my chances for kharmic enhancement and his chances in general erased before my eyes. In the heat of my chagrin I was perhaps ungenerous - it may not have been a moment of deliberate malevolence. Still, I can only hope that his own terrapine kharma may someday return the selfsame turtle to us as a right honorable Senator.

Terrapene ornata ornata (washingtonensis)

I'm not certain what it means to say that "life is sacred." I don't suppose a turtle's life is any more or less sacred than my own. I think all it can mean is that being human and self aware, we all take a particular interest in our own lives and, by extension, in the lives of those near to us and to all those who resemble us specifically, and perhaps by a further extension (in minds capable of extending themselves) to sentient, living creatures in general. Given a world of flourishing living things, it seems only a natural sentiment to wish them continuance, health, pleasure and a prosperity after their own kind. So long as a deer remains out of my immediate trajectory, or a raccoon out of my garbage can, or a skunk out of my parlor, I can wish them well and am to that extent able to consider their lives sacred.

Turtles, of course, are a special case, holding as they do a special place in our cosmology. The earth, it is thought, rests on the back of a great turtle, who presumably rests on the back of a fellow, and so on ad infinitum or ad absurdum (your choice).

The Infinite Turtle Regress

Hume remarks (somewhere) that this sympathy is based on resemblance - our sympathies are strongest for those of our own kind most familiar to us, related by blood or daily commerce or community; that it dwindles as our relations become more remote, or as our physical resemblance lessens, or in a degree as our species differs. So I may be elated to meet a fellow English speaker in the reaches of Outer Mongolia; and perhaps equally elated to encounter a fellow living creature such as a crustacean, were we both stranded on Mars. (A situation, you may have perceived, not unlike encountering a benign reptile in western Kansas.)

"Whither away shall I today -
Miami, Milwaukee, or Mandalay?"

It is for this reason I can regret the turtle's demise but clean the grasshoppers from my windscreen with resignation rather than regret. Many other creatures could never engage my sympathy - even on Mars. 

 Eric Cantor

The Rake's Progress

"Stay, Madam, it appears I importune you overmuch . . . ," I continued, gently - by a sly leg insinuating myself from the parlor into the conservatory - yet bating that withal, not without some heat.

"Whist!" she cried. "Silence, Sir, lest my brother overhear your urgency and, like a very Catamount, spring 'ponst us both."

"Didst mean to say Mountebank, my Dearest?"

"'Tis one or t'other," she murmured, "indeed, it had a '-mount' in it."

"I am of like mind, Madam," said I, "I know the very word you intend," and proceeded to close negotiations. "Fie, Sir, you are but a naughty dog," she whispered from behind a pomegranate tree. 

"Nay," quoth I, gently seizing an interposing limb, "only so far as mutual inclination may warrant and as Madam may permit." She fled to an hibiscus. "These exertions overwarm me," she said.

"Not a bit of it, Madam," I assured her. "They are most salutary, and put a fine flush to your countenance."  She fingered a leaf. "Would that I had my breviary," she sighed.

"Piety is no refuge," quoth I. "Only count love as the best of pieties."

"Love, Sir!" she expostulated. "Would I had my pug by me."

"But a dog provides surety to his Mistress," said I, "only so far as his own interests extend. And in the present case, my interests extend much farther."

She fondled a pineapple, albeit, as I noted, distraitly. "Vexing creature," she murmured. "You - or I, Madam?" I ventured. "The dog," she answered.

"Most emphatically," I said.

* * * * * 

So it chances that Miguel and the maitresse of Chateau de Montaigne are marrying on the east lawn after a scant 13 years of romance, cohabitation and shared financial shenanigans. Wonder is that she should marry me at all, having never herself had any inclination to sample the blandishments of that institution, and knowing me as she does by now. I, on the other hand, have essayed it several times (the last nearly a quarter-century ago) - the first time stunned and nonplussed, the second time reckless of the clear and inevitable disaster awaiting, the last time with a reasonable optimism which, in the event, left me at least with a good friend. Probably as much as I could ever have bargained for, given the paucity of forethought with which I generally entered the lists. 

Hume (Treatise, Bk. III, sec. xii, "Of chastity and modesty") offers an admittedly partial account of marriage as a relation between the sexes based on the "trivial and anatomical observation" that "in order to induce the men to impose on themselves this restraint [of rearing and educating children], and undergo chearfully all the fatigues and expences to which it subjects them, they must believe that the children are their own and that their natural instinct is not directed to a wrong object . . . . 

(Wasn't counting)

"Now if we examine the structure of the human body, we shall find that this security is very difficult to be attain'd on our part; and that since, in the copulation of the sexes, the principle of generation goes from the man to the woman, an error may easily take place on the side of the former, tho' it be utterly impossible with regard to the latter." 

In short, a man can always claim that the kids aren't his, but a woman, never.

 (Wandered over from the neighbors.)

Admittedly only a partial account ("Were a philosopher to examine the matter a priori, he wou'd reason after the following manner.") But a posteriori, as there are plainly no children to enter into the calculation, and we're getting married anyway, the strict economic view fails to account for the palpable joy and excitement surrounding the event - the heartfelt wishes of friends and family, the sense of rectitude and satisfaction prevailing here at the chateau, the anticipation of - well, of more of the same, I suppose.Yep, I've been saving those red Ray-Bans for this day.

So the mail arrives daily, filled with notes of benediction, good wishes, and offers for discount hearing aid batteries (for which, as I've noted before, I have no use). No matter, I never thought I'd consider the prospect again. But what with the anticipation of our friends drinking our health on the lawn, having attained an age at which we can marry free-form, without ceremony, we can remain friends joined by the blessings of friends. The only thing I need to figure out now is where to throw 75 rented champagne glasses when there's no fireplace in the place.

Descartes Among the Beasties

"Next to the ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant."

       - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Bk. I, Sect. xvi, "Of the reason of animals")

I have just now returned from a sojourn in the Colorado hinterlands, where I spent most of a week living in my camper truck . . . 

My camper

. . . and riding my bicycle in the mountains . . .

 My bicycle (and my pink cycling cap)

. . . taking a much-needed respite from the duties of a semi-professional blogister. But, as much of the cultural and anthropological elucidation, assorted lucubrations, exfoliations, verbal excrescences, imbroglios, farragoes, broadsides, bastinadoes and general high jinks in which I engage myself take their source from the foibles of my fellow humans, I was left pretty much with my own thoughts for dinner, and what company I could find among the woodland denizens. I generally avoid the unsuspecting people who happen to be camped at whatever campground I wander into, not wishing to drive over whatever sofas, gasoline powered recreational accoutrements, or semi-detached auto parts they may have brought from home . . . 

. . . not much interested in their attempts to ignite fireworks purchased with hard-won food stamps on their latest trip to Arkansas, wishing only to applaud from a tasteful distance their heartfelt attempts to either decapitate or abandon their offspring, and possessed as I am of an intense foreboding where more than two or three dogs are gathered together . . .

And so it was in a feeling of tribal affection, and as the animals I encountered were noticeably making a study of me, I decided to make a study of them. For my own part, at least, it proved a congenial and enlightening exchange. 

My first inkling that I was being observed with any interest came on my first bicycle outing. I had ridden one morning down the mountain to the nearest town and was on the return side of a loop, riding along a quiet dirt road that led back up the mountain. A few miles into the forest, I noticed movement in a small creek drainage running along a meadow beside the road, stopped to investigate, and noticed a full spread of antlers and the haunches of an elk retreating quietly into the trees. I watched, and a second set of antlers followed the first up the slope. After a moment, the first bull peeked out from behind the tree he had just circled, then the second one peered around, both intent on what I was doing. 

As we peered at one another, a third set of antlers, then a fourth and a fifth came up out of the creekbed, circled the tree and gathered behind the first pair to inspect me. After that, antlers kept rising from the undergrowth, circling the tree, filing up behind one another to stare. The various antlers were by now indistinguishable as belonging to separate animals - an indistinct tangle among the tree branches. In an instant the lead bull had seen enough and moved on up the slope into deep woods, followed in single file by seven others, each with a full spread of antler.

I realized then that they had all been riveted, as I was, the same helpless curiosity that killed the cat. The following night I camped at a solitary spot in the montane desert at a campsite which also, I discovered the next morning, was the favorite haunt of a little fringe-toed lizard who lived in the rocks around the fire ring. For the most part of a morning he was content to keep an eye on me and a safe distance, sunning himself on a rock and dodging a gaggle of insistent magpies whose lack of breeding and general want of discretion compensated for the absence of other campers. 

I generally do not pay much attention to lizards, figuring that any attachment on my part will be dashed by an errant roadrunner or the constitutionally dispassionate nature of the reptilian mind. As it was, the heat of the day made me content to sit in the shade of a nearby juniper and watch the lizard as the lizard watched for incautious flies and kept the occasionally back-turned eyesocket trained on me. As it turned out, the juniper as well as the fire ring was evidently his territory, for at some point, overcome by some tender emotion, the overflowing of a generous mind, a territorial yearning, the joy of discovery or the unaccountable wish for a frantic sortie across a lizard-esque no-man's-land, he made a mad dash for the juniper whose shade I was enjoying, stopped in his tracks and abruptly turned toward my nearby foot, made a cursory investigation, and dashed up the juniper trunk at the near approach of a magpie. 

Lizards, leaving aside for the moment those employed in the insurance industry, are neither particularly cute nor endearing . . .

. . . still, I couldn't help but feel a fleeting affection for having the acknowledgement of one living thing to another. 

The next day I moved up into the montane pine woods where the felonious golden mantled ground squirrel (better known as the chipmunk) holds fearsome sway. This species is the scourge of campsites, tents, and food supplies; undeserving of succor or quarter, the clear winner in any evolutionary contest, the eventual victor in the struggle for survival. They are unrelenting beggars, unwittingly encouraged by edible handouts from witless campers.  This picture should hang in every post office in the land:

Having just now cursed the race of them, there I was, sitting in my chair amongst the ponderosas, watching one of them at a distance, dreading the moment when it would decide to beg for a handout. No such moment came - the creature went about his business, which seemed to consist mainly of running from one rock to another, perching on it, studying me, rummaging in a brushpile, returning to the same two or three perches, sitting and studying me some more - a monotonous life, it seemed to me, although I felt no pity nor twinge of fellow feeling for the little varmint, knowing it would soon enough try something on me.

It dawned on me, however, that it was eyeing me in the same abstract and studying manner in which I was watching it. It seemed to have no ulterior motives, never made a bid for my potato chips, and seemed with its evident academic interest to be fundamentally pure of heart. I softened toward the little fellow, admitted to myself that I may have misjudged it, silently made my apologies, and that was the end of the matter. Until, that is, it made the same mad dash across no-man's-land that the lizard had made a day earlier, circled around behind my chair, inspected me from a closer vantage, and apparently either satisfied with new information or having formed an adverse judgment, scampered back to its brush pile for a good professional rummage. 

"We are conscious, continues Hume in the same chapter, "that we ourselves, in adapting means to ends, are guided by reason and design, and that 'tis not ignorantly nor casually we perform those actions, which tend to self-preservation, to the obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain. When therefore we see other creatures, in millions of instances, perform like actions, and direct them to the ends, all our principles of reason and probability carry us with an invincible force to believe the existence of a like cause [i.e., reason]."

It was Descartes who, needing to prove for considerations of religion the exceptionalism of humans, gave animals a bad name by denying them the capacity for reason. If the mind, he reasoned, is the seat of cognitive faculties like thinking and judging and perceiving; and if it is the mind that makes humans human; then it follows that the mind is the immortal soul. (Apparently the brain in this scenario is, like a tourist on a space shuttle, only along for the ride.)

It also followed for Descartes' dualism that animals don't have immortal souls (only people do) and therefore can't reason, can't think, can't make judgments (even about what is good and bad for them, or what will cause pleasure or pain), and can't perceive - can't even feel pain or pleasure. In fact, generations of natural scientists who subscribed to this view performed gruesome experiments in animal vivisection, secure in the mistaken belief that they were causing no pain.  

But the animals who observed me this week were clearly exercising the basic intellectual functions that have enabled their survival for the last few million years (and in the lizard's case it's anyone's guess how old that biological genome might be). They gather information by way of experience (as do we) and accumulate it in a catalog of what is good or bad (for them), what is to be sought or avoided, what is useful or not. They are, in their way, as studious and as curious as are the best of us humans. 

For the rest, fireworks will have to do.

As good as it gets (probably).