Ontopoetic response
On rare and precious occasions, as Freya Mathews described in her account of living cosmos panpsychism, the cosmos may respond to our invocation with poetic gestures, communicating in a ‘language of things’: a poetic order, a meaningful configuration of circumstances that constellate as a result of intentional invocation on our part. Such gestures can thus be seen as ‘moments of grace’. While we can learn to be open to such blessings, they cannot be earned or striven for; we receive them through the spontaneous action of the universe as it increases its own self-meaning and self-existence.
Kathleen describes a longer journey through her ontopoetic inquiry, a journey that started with a horrible accident, an experience echoed by other members, which evolved into a ‘Pilgrimage to Turtle Island’ and ended with a blessing.
When I set out for my first engagement with Tah-kee-os-tee, commonly known as French Broad, North Carolina, I had the whole experience pre-planned in my mind. Tah-kee-os-tee and their[i] watershed has been heavily abused by white settlers in the region via damming, dumping of industrial waste, agricultural runoff, deforestation, etc. The City of Asheville’s sewage effluent continues to be discharged directly into Tah-kee-os-tee. Putting anything into the river as an offering seemed like further affront, so I decided on a gift of song instead. I headed out to a section of the River where the waters run clearer and where perceived remoteness would offer some ‘alone time’ for engagement.
Autumn had just arrived in the Southern Appalachians, and the creeping gradients of yellows, reds, and oranges had begun their migrations down the slopes from higher elevations. Leaves scattered across winding mountain roads, and the mist that gives the Smokey Mountains their name hung low in the valleys. The temperature lingered in that perfect zone for clothed human comfort in the mid-60’s Fahrenheit, and the Earthy smell of wet, decomposing leaves and forests of Trees perfumed the air.
Driving with windows down, carried away by the autumnal scene and songs playing on the radio, a loud “bam” and a bump, like a tire blowout, disrupted my reverie and demanded my attention. I quickly pulled over to the side of the road to discover a Box Turtle – Terrapene Carolina – their sturdy little shell, no match for the heft of my Toyota Highlander. Smashed beyond repair, immobilized, but painfully alive, they stared at me in agony.
Numbness and confusion gave way to horror, self-loathing, shame, and disgust for myself and the terror and violence the entire Human species inflicts on this precious world. I picked the broken, bleeding body off the road to save them at least from further suffering and disrespect.
The road ran parallel to the River, so I found a place to pull over, cried my apologies, and asked Tah-kee-os-tee to take my victim home. Then I sat. I had planned to bring a gift but instead arrived asking for something. I tried to clear my head, to come up with something to say, to do, to think, to blunt the abomination of my creation and make amends for my own careless humanity, but it all seemed too small, too meaningless, too much for my benefit rather than for the benefit of Turtle and River – typically anthropocentric Human. I sat some more, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Nothing. The River kept to their steadfast flow, carrying away the blood from my hands and the broken remains of Turtle.
Hundreds of miles away in Virginia, my co-inquirer Ezekiel, on his first encounter with River, looked down at his feet in the early morning light and saw a Box Turtle, crushed by another oblivious driver sometime during the night. He asks, “How could a car on this rough track, driving so slowly, run over this creature? How many lives are lost in this way, due to our complete obliviousness to the life around us?” Countess lives. And I was complicit. As we shared these accounts with our colleagues in the group, astounded by the synchronicity, we all realized how the weight of Western humanity’s traumatic, narcissistic, and dispassionate relationship with the more-than-human world crushes the back of Turtle Island—the traditional name for the North American Continent[ii]—and indeed the whole planet.
Following the Turtle incident, my engagement with Tah-kee-os-tee felt tainted. The blood on my hands seeped into the depths of my consciousness, marking me with a sense of unworthiness, an original sin of the stain of Western culture. I felt stunted, my time with Tah-kee-os-tee tainted by the urban smear of humanity seemingly contaminating the River from every angle.
Shortly after Turtle’s death at my hand, a synchronous gift of rare conservation research dollars flowed my way to allow me to undertake a quest to the remote, uninhabited island of East Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands to survey coastal vegetation and the nesting activities of endangered Green and critically endangered Hawksbill Sea Turtles.[iii] East Caicos and I have a relationship, which spans three decades, which culminated in 2015 when I conducted research there for my traditionally positivist master’s degree. Despite the “objective” counting and classifying of the Island’s more-than-human inhabitants required for my thesis research, my time there over the years has a relational quality for me. The seemingly endless expanses of ridge to reef ecosystems, barely tarnished by humans, speaks in a primordial language beyond words to the depths of my being.
Covid-19, scant funding, and other factors have kept me away for far too long, but as the small handmade boat, expertly navigated by Captain Timothy, a traditional artisanal fisherman from South Caicos, transported me and my research partner Amdeep through the meandering tidal creeks of the Caicos Banks towards East Caicos, my first glimpse of the Island since 2018 filled me with up with an unmistakable, visceral feeling of coming home.
My love for East Caicos does not obscure the harsh realities of this place where the more-than-human world retains a fragile dominance. Every visit to East Caicos manifests as a kind of self-flagellation. Thorny vegetation tears at the flesh as one navigates the Island’s interior, while along the coastline precarious rocky shores conspire to dash brains, and the entire place teems with scorpions, mosquitoes, sandflies, and unrelenting heat. I have the impression the Island actively despises human intruders, while tolerating some for brief periods of time only. Far removed from the gently flowing waters of Asheville’s Tah-kee-os-tee, Atlantic shapes and forms every aspect of this place. The land, the lore, and everything about East Caicos screams that it is not a force to be trifled with. Countless human lives have been torn to pieces on the treacherous fringing reefs that protect the Island from the incessant swells of the Western Atlantic, and every attempt to colonize here has been met with utter failure. Timothy attests to the locally held belief that East Caicos is haunted and has many fantastic stories to tell, which he cites as supporting evidence.
Our task at East Caicos over five days was to survey a shoreline that stretches approximately 15 miles. Along five miles of eastern shoreline, oceanic swells, unimpeded by any offshore reefs, crash relentlessly along a dramatic shoreline characterized by stretches of beach with intermittent lengths of treacherous and sharp rocky outcroppings. The northern shoreline, protectively framed by one of the best-preserved fringing coral reefs in the West Indian region, is tame by comparison, with pink-tinged white-sand beaches stretching unimpeded for approximately ten miles. The western and southern shorelines of East Caicos are a tangle of Mangrove estuary – critical foraging habitat for Turtles and a wide variety of other marine organisms, but not suitable nesting and therefore not included with this trip’s adventures.
We landed at the north-easternmost beach known as Drum Point. We bid our farewells to Timothy, who would pick us up at Lorimers Point, the northwesternmost tip, in five days. As evening fell, Amdeep and I headed south along the east coast with everything we would need for the journey carried on our backs. In pre-Covid times, a quest of this magnitude wouldn’t have phased me, but my post-Covid body, with its significantly reduced lung capacity, intolerance for heat, brain fog, and general lack of energy was daunted. The task ahead would challenge me in ways I hadn’t been challenged in more than two years. Previously, walking a hundred miles in the heat was what my animal body loved. Now, the task was taking on an air of contrition.
Next morning, we awoke with the sun rising from the across the abyss of the 7,000-foot-deep Columbus Passage and an unusually tame light ocean swell, lapping on the shoreline. From these Waters, Turtles have come and gone for more than one-hundred million years to lay their eggs on suitable beaches, far longer than the meager 200,000 years or so of evolutionary history since the emergence of Homo sapiens. Sea Turtles’ pelagic sojourns trace spatially as well as temporally, with each Turtle life beginning on a beach they will venture from to explore the vastness of thousands of miles of Ocean. Of those who hatch, only one in a thousand will survive to return 20-30 years later to the beach of their birth to mate and ensure the perpetuation of their species. And so Amdeep and I began our pilgrimage in pursuit of nests and hope.
On day one, after offering East Caicos a gift of a shiny Mica bespeckled Rock from French Broad, we had beginner’s luck. A probable Hawksbill nest with fresh, discernable tracks leading to and from the Atlantic greeted us almost as soon as we set off. East Caicos’ east coast beaches are recognized as critical nesting habitats for Green, Hawksbill, and potentially Loggerhead[iv] turtles. The lack of a shallow barrier reef offers Turtles easy beach access, and in years past, I have counted as many as 10 probable nests during surveys here in a single day. In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria battered these shores in rapid succession. Since then, warming ocean temperatures and increased eutrophication of ocean waters caused by human wastes has resulted in abnormal growth of the Algae Sargassum spp. which now piles up on windward beaches all over the West Indian region. As Amdeep and I trudged along under unrelenting sun and 90° Fahrenheit plus temperatures, we found no additional nests on that day or for the next two days. One hundred million years of Turtle evolution was proving to be no match for anthropogenic climate change.
Days were spent trudging along the coastline looking for any signs of Turtle activities and stopping periodically to survey and describe coastal vegetation. As soon as the sun went down, we huddled in our tent against the inevitable onslaught of mosquitoes and no-see-ums. I developed the biggest blister I have ever seen on my right big toe, and my back seemed like it was in a state of constant spasm. But the only way out of the pain was through it, so we kept on plodding. As our outlooks turned towards pessimism and our bodies began to protest, the more-than-human world challenged every ounce of our determination.
On day three, just as the sun was going down, we arrived at the midpoint of our journey at Breezy Point. In the small sheltered bay formed by the point, small golf ball-sized heads started poking up one after the other, peeking out of the water to assess us. At least 20 adolescent Green Turtles were thriving here, foraging on abundant seagrasses while simultaneously enjoying some protection from the voracious predators awaiting just outside the fringing Reef. As we sat on the beach watching the sun go down, the bobbing of curious little heads left us no doubt that as we observe the more-than-human world, even as ‘objective’ scientists, they also observe us.
The next morning, as we huddled in our tent, trying to build up the fortitude needed to face the masses of mosquitoes and no-see-ums buzzing around the bug screens, a pair of Cuban Crows,[v] a species found only in Cuba and the Turks and Caicos Islands, perched in the Tree directly above our tent and began an unusual serenade of squawking and shrieking, the likes of which I have never experienced in all my years of knowing them. The commotion went on for several minutes, with several intermittent gestures of the Birds perching on nearby branches and peering into the tent while continuing with their urgent message. If the more-than-human world is sometimes indecipherable, this was not one of those times. They left no doubt that they were attempting to interact, but without any nests nearby or any other obvious reason for their clearly deliberate engagement, I suppose we will never completely know what they wanted to communicate. I was simply, profoundly grateful that they decided to do so.
The Cuban Crow incident, coupled with the discovery of the exemplary juvenile Turtle habitat at Breezy Point, enlivened and motivated us to persevere. I told Amdeep about our panpsychism group, and he was sympathetic to and enlisted in the cause. That same morning, exhausted, bug-bitten, blistered, and sunburnt from the preceding three days, we asked Atlantic and East Caicos for clouds to shade us from the sun and a cool breeze to keep our spirits high – lo and behold, they responded in kind. We plodded on for a fourth day without discovering any nests.
If we thought it couldn’t get any worse bug-wise, we were mistaken. As the sun went down, the swarms came out, covering us despite ample applications of bug repellant. As Timothy once proclaimed, “the bugs on East Caicos eat bug repellant for breakfast.” As desperation began to set in, Timothy’s boat appeared on the horizon. As he anchored up and joined our misery party, he explained that he was worried about us and the bugs and thought we might want to call it a day. Joy upon joys he brought cold beers, and we lit a big smoky campfire, applied copious amounts of Off and stayed up relatively late until 9:00 pm, as Timothy enthralled us with tales of East Caicos ghost stories. The next morning, day five, we set out trailing a swarm of biting insects, not expecting much, but maintaining determination to complete the task at hand.
Almost immediately we spotted one, two, three, four depressions in succession along the line of vegetation, but with a seasonally extra-high tide, all traces of tracks or other information that might hint at the age of the nests or species involved had been washed away. Our attempts to excavate the nests failed to yield any answers to their mysteries. We carefully replaced the sand as we had found it in case the eggs were still somewhere inside and continued down the beach. Throughout the day, we passed several more similar depressions. Each one was carefully marked with GPS and photographed, but we decided that we would not excavate any more nests unless we saw signs of emergence.
Then, a mere ¼ mile from our final destination, we came on a nest with a flurry of tiny tracks leading out of it heading toward the sea. We started digging. First an empty shell, then another, and another—107 in all. At the very bottom, almost two feet below the surface of the sand, a tiny Green Turtle hatchling, batting tiny flippers, had been left behind - their only remaining sibling, an unhatched stillborn.
The stillborn and the eggshells of their 107 peers were returned to the nest, which was then carefully filled in. The lone straggler was allowed to walk a few times to the water’s edge, a process which imprints the geographic location of their birth, so they will know where to return if the fates allow twenty years hence. But daytime is no time to release a baby Turtle to Atlantic. As we went through the imprinting process, a pair of Lemon Sharks[vi] lurked in the nearshore waters. We packed the little straggler in a container with some cool, moist sand and carried them with us as we bid farewell to East Caicos for now. That night, back at South Caicos under a threequarters moon, we went out to the open Atlantic with Timothy where, with the hope of one in a thousand odds, we set the little Turtle free to their fate.
Poet Mary Oliver says, “You do not have to walk on your knees, for a hundred miles through the desert repenting”.[vii] But I did, carrying the sins of my oblivious and destructive humanity on my back. My back for one broken Turtle. My blisters, sunburn, and sore feet are for all the countless others who will no longer be born on East Caicos beaches, and one tiny spark of hope to atone for all.
[i] Tah-kee-os-tee is the Cherokee name for the French Broad.
[ii] Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the traditional oral story of the origin of Turtle Island. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, pp.3-5.
[iii] Respectively Chelonia mydas and Eretmochelys imbricata.
[iv] Caretta caretta
[v] Corvus nasicus
[vi] Negaprion brevirostris
[vii] Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. In Oliver, M. (1992). New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press, p.110.