There’s a beautiful and well-known line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five that I’ve been muttering to myself since I first read that particular book way back in high school.
It’s a catch-all phrase that can be used to summarize most any moment in which you care to utter it, whether it’s a moment of beauty or a moment of bewilderment.
I’ve had quite a few of both—in both life and bird hunting—and this line, which I’m sure you’ve seen (probably misquoted, misattributed, or both) has kept me grounded.
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
How true. There is no why, indeed. When those moments—good or bad—occur, all you can do is admire them or endure them, and I’ve both admired and endured any number of these Billy Pilgrim moments in my wanderings across the plains in pursuit of feathers and meaning over the years.
Some involved dogs, some involved birds, some involved good friends, some involved moments of superlative beauty, and some involved...turtles.
Yep, turtles. Turtle shells, specifically.
I am apparently a turtle shell whisperer, because I always seem to find weathered old box turtle shells on my long, rambling armed nature walks with the dogs. It doesn’t seem to matter where I am: Eventually I will look down and find the shell of a long-dead turtle at my feet.
I don’t know why. I just accept that it is my fate to find just as many (and often more...) old turtle shells while quail hunting as I do quail.
Invariably I will stop, pick up the shell, and ponder, as I am always wont to do.
And I sometimes wonder if life is trying to tell me something in these frequent turtle shell discoveries, perhaps a lesson about transformation, and the futility of resisting it.
Like all of us, what I once thought I was and what I once thought I would someday be has gradually fallen away over the years, like the scutes on a long-dead turtle’s shell now slowly bleaching to bone under the prairie sun.
What remains—of the shell and of myself—is weathered and fragile and stark and no longer vibrant or beautiful. But it’s honest. And it’s truth—perhaps uncomfortable and ugly—but truth nonetheless — laid bare by the astringents of time and elements both physical and figurative.
But of course we are all laid bare in the end, parsed down to the bones of who we really are after life eats away at the surface camouflage of who we desire and struggle to be.
Now admittedly, that’s a helluva lot of metaphysical divination to be inferred from the chance discovery of a desiccated reptile carcass while out hunting, but these days metaphysical divination, personal realizations, and other such philosophical musings are what I’m really hunting for on these solitary walks in lonely country, so it works for me.
Your mileage, as they say, may vary, but next time you find a cracked, crumbling turtle shell lying in the prairie grass, pick it up. Take a moment to ponder it. Imagine what it once was and what it now is. You just might see something of your own transformation in that weathered old shell.
In bird hunting, sometimes the most beautiful, mysterious, and interesting things don’t have wings, and sometimes the most wondrous, trapped-in-amber moments are found in the spaces in between.
Nice picture. Apparently your dog infers nothing from the turtle shell, just that it is not a snack and, feeling but a fleeting, mild disappointment, sprints back into the wind for something at which to point.