Last week, Ms. P and R went to the house to let the dogs out
only to discover that the dogs had killed one of our turtles on our bed. Ms. P
was traumatized; she sat at the top of the stairs and made R play 20 Questions
because she couldn’t bear to say straight out what happened. They both said
they were grateful I wasn’t with them; telling me, apparently, was worse than
cleaning up the gore.
The hardest part of the whole thing has been knowing
something I love killed something else I love. There’s no way to demonize
anything here, no way to separate into us-versus-them or good-versus-evil. For
the first time in four years, the dogs noticed a turtle, probably because he
was on a rock when they drank from the tank and he moved. They don’t know
they’ve done anything wrong.
I’d had Cage for nearly seven years, and I’d saved his
little turtle life more times than I can easily remember. I got him from a
rehabilitator; he couldn’t be released into the wild because he wasn’t native
to the area and he and his tank-mate had chronic shell rot. The first few years
I had them, I spent hours taking care of them, spent hundreds of dollars of a
graduate student salary on treatments we didn’t know would work. I scrubbed his
shell with betadine and a toothbrush to try to kill off the fungus. When he got
secondary infections because the shell rot compromised his immune system, I
gave him antibiotic shots every day for three weeks, which involved holding him
between my knees, gripping one slippery turtle leg and holding on while he
tried to pull it away, and sticking him with the other hand while depressing
the plunger, all while not getting bitten. I made him his own tank. I kept him
dry; I kept him wet. One memorable vet visit, when we were running out of options,
I let the vet take a blood sample to send away. He’d never taken a blood sample
from a turtle before; none of them had. He and his assistant held a book open
with their elbows while they fished around inside Cage with a needle, hoping to
hit a vein. When they did, finally, get a sample, it went to a bird
hematologist in California
because there aren’t any reptile hematologists.
Frohike died a few years ago; I’ve never been clear on
whether he just finished his life or whether he got caught under the filter and
drowned. It’s hard to drown a turtle, but it’s possible. I prefer to think he
was just finished.
But Cage wasn’t finished. You can’t reliably tell how old
turtles are unless you’ve had them as hatchlings, so I don’t know whether he
was near the end anyway. Something I love died, and something else I love
killed him.
I thought about this when the stories about Katrina came.
While the death of my turtle at the teeth of my dogs isn’t even remotely
comparable, not even slightly to scale, it resonates with me nonetheless.
Something I love died, and something else I love helped kill it. For those of
us who don’t have a personal connection to Katrina, who don’t know people who
died at the hands of the storm or at the neglect of the government afterwards,
who haven’t gotten a phone call that prompted us to load up two vans with every
bit of gasoline and water and cash and food we could find and drive to
Louisiana, the horror is remote even if we are overcome by the images. From
here, it is easy to slip into us-versus-them, into anger, into blame, and all
of that is legitimate. And while I will one day, I’m sure, rage at all of the
social and political forces that caused this disaster, right now I can only do
so half-heartedly.
I do not love George W. Bush or his cronies. In fact, I
fantasize that the entire Bush clan will have the experience of Isabelle in Dangerous
Liaisons or Katherine in Cruel Intentions: one day, secure in their power and
adoration, they will show up, and they will be booed, ruined forever, unable to
manipulate people’s lives any further. The comments the lot of them have gone
on record as making during this debacle should ruin them for politics, for
public life, forevermore.
But I do love this stupid country of ours, with all of its
grandiosity and posturing and cowardice and bullying. I love it the way I love
my dogs: with affection and ruefulness and sadness and irritation and knowingness
and openness and righteous anger. The fact that our government abandoned New
Orleans, knowingly left it prey to a storm of this magnitude, means that I am
hurt and angry and betrayed, mostly on behalf the people such things directly
affect, but also, just a little bit, for myself.
We can talk about blame and we can talk about racism and
classism and regionalism, and all of that is real and legitimate and true.
But right now, right this very minute, all I can feel is
that something I love killed something else I love, and I am sad down to my
bones.