Hatchling Season

Hatchling season has arrived along the coast of Florida. 

With climate change, one can never be certain. Rising sea levels make tides ever higher and rising temperatures heat the sand on which this ancient ritual depends. I was disturbed to read recently that overheating can both kill nesting turtles and skew sex ratios to produce mostly female hatchlings.

One can never be certain these days. Most years, I am reminded of hatchling season by my stepmother, a devotee of the moonlit kingdom that swells each month near her home. She is among the earliest of risers, awake in the navy hours to meditate or send a message to us, her adult children dispersed around the country — or, between March and October, to commune with the thousand-pound pilgrim mothers who entrust their children to this seashore. 

But this year I was there to see it. On a morning when thick clouds bustled the sky, when I was walking through tidal pools, fine-boned birds balancing on the wind, I came upon a cratered mound with a massive, rippling tail tucked beneath the water’s edge. Such a teardrop wingspan could belong only to a Leatherback, among the most elusive and endangered species to bless this place. It was an ordinary morning except that a beloved great-aunt had disappeared into the stars, so naturally I received the nest as a nod from beyond. She must have lumbered to shore on the previous night’s full moon tide — the same, harnessed to an eclipse, into which my aunt receded. 

Watchful guardians had already ribboned the area with orange netting. After sixty days of vigil, a miracle will happen here: a hundred caruncled darlings will muscle their way upward from silent earth toward moonlight, toward ocean, and salvation. Puhpowee, ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’, wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. It is a word translated from Anishinaabe, an indigenous language concentrated around the Great Lakes. 

Puhpowee is the word I borrow and pray. Most will not survive. They will be picked off by birds or crabs or seek false refuge and never find the ocean. Puhpowee. It is forbidden to help them along; and this, too, is a teaching. 

“In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English had no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer

It is a comfort to remember the unseen energies of resurrection – to know the one in a thousand who does survive, if granted the conditions, may live a long life, the 150 million years of DNA that came before her awakened in her black eyes. She may travel more than ten thousand miles between nesting and foraging grounds, dive to unseen depths, then rise and return to this place of her unearthing. 

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