CNF: Golfina
by Sarah Dunphy-Lelii
When you gently shake a box of baby turtles onto the sand in the moonlight they make a tumble of wills to live, each two inches long, faces already ancient. The goal is the ocean, forty feet away and slightly downhill, roaring gently as it does, offering future. How to chase it, there are many ways. Some lay on their backs, paddling hardly at all as they breathe sea air, and wait. Some right themselves and head off a bit sideways, lurching five or six paces and pausing to rest, swaying their tiny heads. One was running when she hit the sand, paddling already in free fall, ploughing a beeline at a pace that exhausted even us to watch, murmuring cheers as we hurried to brush away the flotsam in her path. One tiny baby had emerged from the egg with only three flippers and, though his heart was strong and his eyes clear, could not pursue a straight path. Greatly moved, we finally placed him on the wet sand, and then again, when an arriving wave pushed him back the way he’d come. We would not hear of a gull’s likely arrival, or a watery predator from beneath, and hoped for him with our eyes closed.
These little ones must chart their own course, travel their own path with their own body, so that they learn this place. If she is a she, she will return to this beach for the rest of her life, to struggle ashore in the dark over and over, carve in the sand a deep nest to fill with eggs, and then sink again into the sea, unseen. She puts down roots in this very first moonlight sprint, these brief harrowing moments, and without roots she would always be adrift. For both shes and hes it is this journey that strengthens their limbs and prepares them for the roughness of the surf, where they gulp the air as they toss and flail, but may never rest their feet on the ground.
Males have no reason ever again to touch the beach, but some still do. Some arrive by moonlight and, like their mothers and sisters, scoop a nest, which will remain empty, then another, and another. After these, they return to the ocean. It is their way of asking who they really are, says a beautiful young person on my left. I turn to see his face and he smiles slightly to himself, then moves his eyes to the horizon. We stand together, with twenty other strangers, long after all but one of the babies has found the water. This last one is weak with exhaustion and especially small, pushed back again and again by the waves and covered in sand, motionless until at last, each time, one tiny flipper waves and a cheer goes round the crowd. A last wave throws him into the air and he cartwheels into the backward suck of sea water and is finally gone, and more than one of us cries.
We trail back barefoot, our arms full of boxes much lighter than they had been, and imagine these souls now adrift, that the children had named for what they love best, their cats and their mothers and their sweets. And they will be back, at least one will come back surely, and nod her wizened head through sixty years of our plastics and our oils and our fervent hope.
Sarah Dunphy-Lelii has been teaching psychology at Bard College for 16 years, working with undergraduates (in upstate New York), preschool-aged children (in her research), and wild chimpanzees (in Kibale, Uganda). Her academic writing has appeared in journals including the Journal of Cognition and Development and Folia Primatologica; her creative nonfiction writing appears in places including Plume, The Common, Dogwood, CutBank, Unbroken, and Passages North. Check out her writing here: sarahdunphylelii.me
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Golfina”? I came to the western coast of Mexico on sabbatical and, not knowing a soul, connected with a local turtle conservation project. Each evening at sunset a large crowd of barefooted beach wanderers must be kept out of the cordoned-off area by us few volunteers. Within a day I found myself talking to people from all over the world about the olive ridley sea turtle (“golfina” in Spanish), which I’d myself only heard of hours before. The determined and ridiculous paddly hustle of the little ones toward the ocean is touching beyond words. “golfina” is the coming together of three weeks of small observations, conversations, and the magical heartbreak of praying that the 1 in 5000 who makes it to adulthood will be the one you’ve just tipped onto the sand. You can learn more by searching sayulitaturtlecamp.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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