Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [80]
But the terrapin nest Marguerite is digging up is in anything but a natural, sandy shoreline. Marguerite, sometimes known as “the Turtle Lady” since budget cuts at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources prompted an early retirement and full-time dedication to terrapin restoration, has dumped ten tons of sand into a three-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long, ten-foot-wide oval in the center of an acre of Eastern Shore lawn. A quarter of Marguerite’s “beach” is fenced, a safe place for terrapins to nest. The remainder is planted with native marsh plants: spartina, bayberry, cordgrass.
This time my whole family (Eli, Erik, and our newborn daughter, Mio) has come with me. Eli grew up in Virginia—we met in archaeology grad school in Charlottesville—and of all the things we miss living in California, the greatest is the vibrant sense of a landscape alive: of puddles that harbor huddling frogs, vines overtaking gas stations, cicada screams and fireflies muddling humid summer air. When we walk down to the dock, within moments we’ll see tiny garfish, a pair of water snakes, crab moltings, jellyfish, gulls, and a bald eagle. Birdsong here is insistent and omnipresent. It’s a very different feeling from that of the drier, statelier lands out west, where lack of water means life has to spread and space itself. Near the Chesapeake a thousand things want to live; here oysters once piled so high as to become navigational threats, a Swiss visitor writing in 1701 that “there are whole banks of them so that the ships must avoid them. . . . [A sloop] struck an oyster bed, where we had to wait about two hours for the tide.” The shellfish grew so big, he recalled, that he had to cut them in two. This is a place that cries out to be crammed.
Near the house, flanked by containers where Marguerite grows tomatoes and basil, are three big plastic tanks of diamondbacks: ten-inch females, six-inch males, tiny hatchlings. The turtles are an odd combination of stoic and social, crawling slowly up to and over one another, bumping gently against the sides with a sound like the start of rain. When held they regard us calmly. Many have distinct “diamond” points along the midline of their upper carapace. Each scute plate is whorled, like the central few lines of a fingerprint, or the stretched view of the mission staircase in Vertigo.
When we boarded the plane, two small kids in tow, people eyed us as though we were guiding wolverines. But Mio is, at this stage of her life, basically a purse. And we were able to keep Erik happy by alternating chants of “We’re gonna see turtles, right, man? Turtles! Yeah, turtles!” with the funktastic colors and sounds of an Electric Company DVD. Now we’ve made it, and Erik is on all fours, completely absorbed by finding eggs buried in the fenced laying area. He peers so closely into the hole that I have to crane to see the eggs emerge from the sand. One, two, three . . . each egg is half the size of a Ping-Pong ball, each dented and somewhat squished (they’re hard as hens’ eggs now, but when first laid the shells were soft as leather). This clutch has ten in all, several fewer than average; amazingly, though laid all at once by a single female, it might have more than one father—a female can store sperm for up to four years. Carefully, keeping them upright, Marguerite places each egg into a bucket full of sand.
Though she started out leasing a small portion of a wildlife refuge along the South River in Annapolis, where she worked to protect terrapins from litter, campfires, and boats, Marguerite chose Neavitt deliberately. This part of the Eastern Shore, she says, has a strong conservation ethic, and there are still some large farms left