AUREOLE

 

The great sea turtle surfaced about fifty yards from the shore. With only her beak and the crest of her shell exposed, she inhaled deeply. The tropical and familiar air filled her lungs, accompanied by the faint sound of music from a beachside bar.

 

It was evening. The smells and sounds seemed indistinguishable from almost any other point on her journey near the coast. But something deep inside her brain, something that reached back through thousands of generations of sea turtles, something that was connected to the earth’s gravity and to static electricity and old pheromones and tides and ions and divine magic inexplicable to both man and beast, told her that this was the place. 

 

She submerged and then swam toward the darkened beach. The incoming tide helped propel her to the water’s edge, but then could aid her no further. Her beautiful and buoyant body, so perfectly designed for aquatic travel and protection from predators, defied her on land. With tremendous effort and the same motion she used in the ocean, her giant flippers pulled and pushed her unyielding mass across the wet sand. Inch-by-difficult-inch, her flat belly dredged a deep channel.

 

Just beyond the farthest reaches of the water, the great sea turtle stopped crawling and started digging. She alternated swiping her rear flippers away from her body, launching broad sheets of sand into the breeze. When the hole was deep enough, she deposited her eggs and immediately began the slow reversal of her evening’s efforts.

 

About two months later, a man and a woman emerged from the beachside bar. Exiting on a gentle wave of alcohol and flirtation, neither wanted the evening to end. So as they walked toward her car, she invited him inside to enjoy each other’s company just a bit longer.

 

In the openness of the bar, their conversation was light and cheerful, punctuated with his belly laughs and her quiet snickers and eye rolls. However, in the isolation of the car, the dialogue, like the air itself, became heavier. She shared her sadness about her failed marriage. And he revealed his desperation; how he felt like he was drowning in a shallow pool and didn’t possess the resolve to simply stand up to save himself.

 

In her past, those exchanges would have abruptly and awkwardly ended the evening. But rather than giving up on the night, she continued to speak. Positively. Optimistically. And instead of falling deeper into their wells, they began to climb out. Her words replaced the wine and whiskey as the tonic of hope and possibility. 

 

She continued. Faster, louder, more emphatically. Now her hands were moving in dramatic circles. Now she was smiling. Now her eyes were shining. Now she was the one making the belly laughs. Now she was glowing.

 

For a moment, the man closed his eyes. He remembered, what seemed like a lifetime ago, entering a Tennessee forest at dusk. Along with four busloads of people, he had been dropped off at the edge of the woods to witness a miracle.

 

Deep in the forest darkness comes quickly. When it did that night, a hundred million fireflies synchronized their lights. First it was pitch black, and then for a split second, as bright as a Broadway stage. And then nothing. And then everything. Over and over. The master of each abdominal lantern strove to flash first, an impossibility that created a gorgeous display of bioluminescence he believed he’d never see again. Until now.

 

The woman was not metaphorically glowing. She was actually glowing, and the man was not the only one who noticed.

 

In the sand, the same forces that compelled the great sea turtle to swim a thousand miles, to find the right beach, to exit her natural environment, to crawl across the sand, and to deposit her eggs in a hole, were now acting upon her babies; compelling them. Go forth! Find the sea!

 

Following their invisible instructions, the baby turtles burst out of their leathery eggs and clambered from the shallow nest to the open air. An army of palm-sized shells and flippers bumbled this way and that, seeking direction. Direction that came from the light.

 

Hatchlings find their way to the sea and to safety by crawling toward the brightest horizon. So without hesitation, they submitted to their instinct and hurried toward the woman’s car instead of the moonlit ocean.

 

As the woman’s light shined brighter, the hatchlings quickened their pace. Meanwhile, the man grew afraid. Not afraid of the woman nor the light, for those were the most beautiful and comforting things he’d ever seen, but afraid of himself. He became afraid of his will, or lack of it. And in his fear, he grabbed for the safety and comfort of his own cowardice.

 

The arc of every coward’s life is drawn by inaction. So as she leaned in toward him, to share her light with him, to allow him to taste that tonic of hope and possibility, he leaned back.

 

Devoid of fear, the baby turtles pressed on.

 

She was kind as he fumbled through an overwrought explanation of his spinelessness. As he coughed out his words, her light dimmed. Not instantly like the fireflies in Tennessee, but gradually like the beach bar’s music whose repeated escape attempts were stifled by the eternally closing door. As her light faded, they sat where they started… in the dark.

 

Just outside the car, one hundred hatchlings stopped in their tracks. Their brightest horizon was gone.

 

Moments later, the man gracelessly emerged from the vehicle. Ossified by the weight of his self-repudiation, he struggled to take a single step forward, barely able to turn his head to see the last of her taillights in the distance.

 

Inevitably, he, and the turtles, made their way back to the water.