The Sad Tale of the Loggerhead

My phone rang sometime before eleven. My roommate, Bird, had been walking along the beach collecting shells and sea glass, and was told by one of the neighbors that a sea turtle had washed up near one of the jetties. I broke out of the house and made my way to the scene, the eastern jetty that borders our beach at 6th View. There, swirling around in the shorebreak was a fully grown loggerhead sea turtle, and it was very much dead.

Its eyes were bugged out of their sockets, with blood and other bodily fluids seeping out, the body bloated and swollen considerably. A neighbor called the police and I called the Virginia Marine Science Center. They said they'd send people from the stranding team to take care of the corpse.

It was nearly two hours after the call that these two volunteers showed up with little more than a beach wheelbarrow and rubber gloves, with no plan nor idea of how they were going to move this poor dead turtle who weighed some hundred and fifty pounds.

That's when Bird and I decided to take over the operation. I had a fishing net at the house and we lifted it enough to slide the net under the carcass and that gave us the ability to lift it cleanly into the wheelbarrow. During this process, the bulging eyeballs squirted some nasty juice on my face which really freaked me out...and man, did that thing stink!!!

The trek from the shoreline and across the dunes was a little more challenging and the volunteers were more in the way than helpful in this evolution causing the body to fall out of the wheelbarrow several times. We got within a few feet of the street and the "expert" dumped the turtle one last time. That was it...enough of the wheelbarrow which was too small for the huge turtle. We put the net under his body and made the last leg under our own strength, carried it to the pickup, tossing him in the back and it was then that it was no longer our problem. I would have loved to have seen these two geniuses get it out of the truck once they got back to the center for the necropsy. It would have been very entertaining.

So we got to play marine biologists today on an otherwise mellow Sunday afternoon. Swimming, the barbecue, and dead loggerhead disposal.

Sadly, however, down at 12th View, some six blocks west, a 15-year-old boy disappeared in the Bay while swimming with friends. Police, ambulances, and fire trucks screamed past the house, along with a few police helicopters and boats who are even now still searching for the lost swimmer. He'll be the fifth one the Bay has taken this summer and likely not the last.

For us though, the day has been simpler. Beach chairs lined on the dune, hamburgers and hot dogs digesting in our bellies, and pretty much the end to a perfect day with my kids, my neighbors, and the Birdman. A perfect day.

Except, of course, for the loggerhead.