Interspecies Communications

Unami 101

I woke up before dawn free of electionyearing exhaustion. It was 87° here in Lakehurst yesterday, but eight miles away at the beach it wasn’t 70°. The southeasterly wind over still cold ocean water cooled the air and added a pleasing briny smell; the one believed to be the cure for miasma, back in the day.

I had this half hour of blissful thinking about giant sea turtle and interspecies communications. I thought of the squirrel that comes to the back deck for a peanut when I open the sliding glass door. This squirrel comes down from a nest halfway up a near dead oak tree when the door opens. Who trained who is another question.

I worked for a decade on the beaches, bluffs, and the piers of the California coast. I saw all kinds of creatures, but there were no turtles. Whales came right to the surf line, and sea lions gathered in vast numbers to gorge on massive balls of bait, with tens of thousands of seabirds circling around them, like a living cyclone.

There was never a turtle, not one.

The turtle was Unami, in Lenape, the totem for a disappeared people that had inhabited the degraded and mostly filled estuary I grew up on. I recall going to a birthday party at the end of Sailors Way, then in the fourth or fifth grade.

Some of the kids had drifted off into the wetlands, and as I came upon them, I could see them throwing rocks at the turtles. I turned and went back to the house. I do not recall exactly what happened; if I told them or just sulked. I wanted no part of them for quite a long time.

I have worked on my own for most of my lifetime, in sales, as an engineering inspector, photographer, and finally writer and researcher. Not directly for any government agency, ever.

I see this giant repaired sea turtle, surfacing from crystal clear water, and I feel better, stronger, and I want to linger here, just below the surface forever.