I texted Jonathan to tell him that I would be late. I knew he’d immediately understand, and he did. He knows that I’m a man of my word, but that I’m also a man who thinks the shortest distance between two points is generally a shitty story.
There’s a house on the right as you drive north to Jonathan’s. I’ve driven past it for thirteen years, watching it go from an isolated farmhouse to one flanked with vinyl villages starting from the low $400s, eventually becoming that quaint ranch with the enormous front lawn kept up by a very old man on an undersized lawnmower. For a few years there was a sign offering fresh garden vegetables at the end of the long gravel driveway, with an honor system cashbox on a rickety school desk. I never carry cash, so I never stopped.
I looked to the right as I passed that house. I’ve done this thousands of times. Square in the middle of that predictably manicured lawn, fifty feet from the road, was a large mass, with a periscope.
A turtle. An absolutely colossal snapping turtle.
“Wow,” I said, slowing down to take in the size of the thing. And then I added “Oh no,” as I recognized the scene playing out.
This ancient reptilian Buick was scouting for a new pond. Of all the ills that come with plowing down nature to build indifferent mansions that wheelbarrows can barely roll between, it’s the dislocation of centenarian snapping turtles from the old farm ponds they’ve reigned over since God was young that really gets me. Too stupid to understand the risk, they traverse busy, deadly roads in the process to find new ponds over which to reign.Every week I see these dead giants on the side of ever busier roads, shells shattered. It breaks my heart every time.
I pulled off the road into the gravel driveway, considering how one might move a turtle that was many pounds past picking up to safely relocate. I texted Jonathan that I was going to be a little late. That a giant turtle had just jumped out in front of my attention, and I needed to go off script for a minute.
“Totally get it, man,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be here.”
When I got to the animal, out there in that freshly cut grass, cars whizzing by, I couldn’t help but laugh in shock. The turtle might as well have had a saddle. One of the biggest snappers I’ve ever seen. There was no way I could do more than what I was doing: standing there, pissing off the poor thing, stalemated.
So I gambled on the turtle’s slow speed and drove up to the house to knock on the door. Maybe these folks had a large sheet of cardboard I could slide the turtle on. Or a giant box. Or a crane. The woman who answered the door was twenty years my senior. This I would learn was Judy, the daughter of the elderly man who owns the home and cuts the grass. I explained the strange situation and my Franciscan intent.
“Oh how wonderful of you!”
Thanks Judy.
“Daddy,” the woman yelled into the house. The elderly man appeared. Steel-toe boots, blue Dickie coveralls. Said his name is Howard. In the ensuing half hour he would tell me that he’d retired decades ago, and his North Carolina farmland had long ago become other people’s neighborhood. Yet at three o’clock on a Friday, Howard still answers the door in steel-toes and coveralls. Like they say; be ready so you don’t have to get ready.
Howard was as impressed as Judy with my intent. He shook my hand, his skin thin and storied like the turtle’s, his grip impossibly firm. Howard produced a large plastic bin and told me to get in the little 4x4 Gator he kept parked in the garage. As we bounded across the property, we exchanged our mutual appreciation for the flora and fauna that has been, in recent years, on the ropes.
“Hoo boy,” Howard said when we got to the gigantic bump in that otherwise smooth lawn. “He is indeed a big’n!” Howard laughed, boyishly like I had. He was as excited about this interruption to the day as I was.
Howard and I slid the bin under the rear of the turtle. In turn the turtle reminded us why his species has “snap” in its name.. The old beast still had it, delivering a lightning flash attempt at our hands. Howard laughed. I counted my fingers.
Soon we had the turtle wedged into the plastic bin and were roaring through the back part of the property to an old pond much farther from the road. As we grabbed the edges of the bin, the turtle made another attempt at Howard’s thumb. Another lucky miss, and Howard laughed again. Just then, thunder grumbled overhead, and Howard got a surprised look.
“Say!” Howard said. “You ever heard that if a snapper clamps ‘hold of your finger he won’t let go till it thunders? I think if he gets us we’re gonna be alright,” Howard laughed.
As we coaxed the little dinosaur toward his new digs, I asked Howard about all the new houses, all the change. Then, I braced myself for negativity. But I was projecting.“Yep, seen a lot change. But, it don’t do no good to get upset about it. Everything changes.” Howard shrugged. That was the whole sermon.
“That’s a good way to see things,” I offered.
“Yep. Plus I got to meet all kinda new people. A lot of them Indians moved in to these neighborhoods.”
Uh oh. Here we go.
“Sweet people. They bought mosta my garden vegetables when I did the veggie stand out front. Best customers I had, everyday. Real sweet folks.”
The turtle had accepted his new pond by this point, so we climbed into the Gator and went back to the house. His wife, Beth Anne, echoed what their daughter had told me earlier; that I had done a good thing — the Lord’s work — because I took care of His creatures. This prompted Howard to ask Beth Anne about giving me some fresh picked green beans, as sort of an early jewel for my crown I guess. She clapped her little hands and squealed, then darted off through the creaky screen door into the house. A minute later she reemerged with a plastic bag so packed with fresh green beans it could’ve been reasonably confused for a lumpy beachball. In the midwest, we called this measure a mess of beans.
There were handshakes and genuine hoping that we’d talk again soon. I was headed north once more, back on the road to Jonathan’s, about 45 minutes later than we’d planned. But now with a mess of beans and a story.
~
I can’t stress enough how important it is to be where you say you’re gonna be, when you said you’d be. But let me also be heard stressing less than enough about how important it is to leave some openness on both sides of your plans, so you can pull off the road when asked to. When an unscheduled story invites you.
People keep telling me they're bored. So very bored. But they’re also so very unwilling to pull off the road they’ve been on because that road became more like a set of rails after a while. No one chooses this consciously, I don’t think. It just gradually happens and most people don’t even realize that it did. Like being handed a menu with dozens of great options on it, you forget after a while that what you really want isn’t on this menu, isn’t even served in this restaurant. After a while you believe you are ordering what you want and will even brag about the meal, your appetite firmly on rails now, too.
I’m not saying that we’ve merely come to lack spontaneity. And as I hope I’ve made clear, I’m all for having a plan and having the integrity to stay committed to it. But I am saying we’re bored and story-broke because we stopped valuing wonder and the parts of us that crave it. And when we stopped valuing wonder we stopped valuing wonder’s habitat; uninhibited availability. And that habitat is generally off road, and probably won’t fit the schedule as you currently have it written. Our commitments and our dignity and our mortgage make the hard-to-justify nearly impossible for us to choose. We’ve had to numb our sense that some things should be done for the very purpose of them not fitting our plans, for them not seeming perfectly rational, for them not providing assurances of some payoff. Many of us have forgotten that a good story is its own wage, but the work is unpredictable, and terrifying, and silly. So we get to work on time, plan our vacations down to the minute, and even get some of our Christmas shopping done by November.
But my God we’re getting bored. And the turtles are getting smashed. And the beans are going to someone else.
I know, some of us have our calendars packed to the corners with good things and have the unassailable momentum of a degree, and debt, and familial expectation that exempts us from doing anything other than what’s in the script. But maybe, whether it’s when you realize most of your stories are actually TV show plots or when all your relationships reveal themselves to be other people stuck with you on the rails, you’ll decide you want to get to the end of your life able to say you did more than everything you were expected to. Maybe it’s then that you’ll start putting yourself off script, off map, off balance. Maybe then you’ll get a few others in your life who love you and life so much that you can text them, “Change of plans. I’m saying yes to a silly, childish notion. Might be nothing. Might be everything,” and they say, “Oh good. I’ll be here. Hoping for a good story.”
~
Two nights later, my wife Kristi prepared the mess of beans with a garlic oyster sauce for our side dish. We, and our three kids, each had an obscene heap of them loaded onto our plates. I have no memory of what the entree was.
“So, kids,” I offered as we dug in, moaning in affirmation of Kristi’s work. “We have these beans because, despite not really knowing what I was gonna do, and despite it meaning I had to inconvenience Jonathan for some sorta bizarre reasons, I said yes to an unexpected invitation to help a turtle and got a new friend named Howard in the bargain.”
“You named a turtle Howard?”
Steve Daugherty is an ordained minister, award-winning storyteller, and author hailing from the Research Triangle NC with his wife Kristi and three children. Make his interests yours at stevedaugherty.net
