Turning a Turtle

It doesn’t take much to drive slowly on a backroad to nowhere, just a beautiful day, some great farm scenery , green hills, ( yes there are some in Central Florida ) , and a turtle struggling to cross it.

He was big, couldn’t miss him. He strained to push and pull his way as fast as he could, as a cars and trucks swerved around him. A carload of kids, pulled alongside to watch him strugggle…must have been lost tourists curious by seeing something wild, not from Disney nor in some small zoo , but in real life, a bigger zoo where the animals roam free, or at least they think they do.

I had to stop, right in the middle of the road, flashers on, doors open, arms waving like a bird in flight, to stop the next car or two. I had found a mission, to save this turtle. He was a little too big to lift and he looked frantic when I approached him. I tried to ask him where he was going, but he shrugged me off picking up speed, at least one mile an hour.

I tried to herd him away form the middle of the road, as another family stopped to watch through their car windows as though they were watching some TikToc episode, and for all I know I might be starring in it, thanks to one of the kids in the back seat. Then I started pushing him, until he finally made it to side of road and back into the woods. By this time, a line of very patient cars swung around us and I got back into mine.

Tada…A life saved, mission accomplished. I put away my super hero cape and returned to civilian life.

It was a few miles later, while I was enjoying the serenity that long drives on country roads bring, that a thought came to mind. What if that turtle was trying to go the other way ?

Isn’t life like that at times ? You head out one way and get turned to another? How often do we set out with a great idea, a goal, a project, when something or someone alters our path and we find ourselves going in an opposite direction?

Photography has those moments…you set out to photograph a given subject, maybe a place, then your original heading and goal gets altered. Now you’re on a new course and you discover something totally different, not your original plan, not what you had in mind, maybe even opposite from your initial intent. Something unexpected is revealed to you, a new road to pursue, a new subject so discover, that wouldn’t have happened had you not started going out in the first place and that’s what’s important….getting started.

Even if you don’t get to where you were going, going there is what counts. It becomes your point of departure and that is a necessary ingredient in finding something new.

As for the turtle, who knows whichever direction he was heading to, hopefully it became to be the right one.