a sea turtle drown. The Red-ear, perhaps the chelonian analogue of Lü Dongbin, the immortal leader of that famous gang of eight, informed me that the lessons I would experience would be unique and challenging. Be that as it may, I can think of few things I would rather do than watch this magnificent creature drown.
“Is there no way for me to help?”
“You can try,” she says.
I swim over to the offending fishing line. The water is dense and cold. I ask the turtle where we are.
“In the plastic deathtrap of the North Pacific Gyre,” she says. “Halfway between California and Hawaii.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Hawaii,” I say, trying to get my fingers between the flipper and the line. “The volcanoes are getting angry at all that pollution and overpopulation. It’s not as nice a place to be as it once was.”
“The islanders call the volcanoes by their goddess name, Pele,” says the turtle. “Of course, she’s seeking her revenge, though we Daoists would call it returning to wuji, to balance. Equilibrium. Humans have run amok.”
“It’s not just the eruptions,” I say after clearing a gulp of salty water. I find I can’t break the line with my fingers or gnaw through it with my teeth. “The island spirit of aloha is hard to find among the transplants, and there’s a lot of racism and intolerance and traffic. Violence, too.”
The turtle spins around in the water so she can see what I’m doing. “You’re not going to get through it,” she says. “If it’s too strong for me and shark and tuna, it’s too strong for your little fingers. The only way is spiraling. It’s what galaxies do. It’s nature’s way of dealing with conflict.”
I follow her instructions and by swimming around her trapped fin, begin to loosen the line.
“Speaking of conflict,” the turtle continues, “Violence is one of nature’s favorite ways to cull humans. Everyone knows she uses volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, typhoons, mudslides, droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes, but many people don’t recognize that all those terrible diseases are her work as well, as are religions that make you fight and kill each other, gender variations that reduce your reproductive rate, and, of course, the automobile, which takes so many human lives. She is the mistress of hate as well as the mother of great beauty, this ruler of ours, and mistress, too, of what you call war. Believe me, Monk, nature is ruthless in her campaign to survive you.”
“You see all this from beneath the waves?” I ask, a bit incredulous.
“Oh yes,” she says as I continue to unwind the line. “I see a great deal from the open water and from beachheads I have climbed, but of course I also hear from other turtles. Turtle Immortals band together, you know, and we’ve been watching humans for a long time. My cousins speak to me of your doings from their homes across the globe. We watch you from forests and jungles and rivers and streams, from deserts and mountaintops, too.”
“I never knew,” I say.
Her beak will not curve to her mood, but in the faint crinkling of the skin around her eyes, I detect an indulgent smile. I continue unwinding the countless layers of line that trap her, but she’s made the problem worse with her own spiraling, and I worry she will run out of air before I can get free her.
“I’ve paddled to the Atlantic from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the North Sea, from the Cape of Good Hope to Labrador, she says dreamily. “I’ve greeted young of my kind off the beaches of Suriname and Guyana, Antigua, Barbuda, Tobago, and Gandoca and Parismina in Costa Rica. I’ve crossed to the Pacific and rested on the sands of Papua New Guinea and Gabon. Movie stars have watched me in California. I’ve been churned in the wake of a freighter off Malaysia, where once thousands of my kind gathered at the beach of Rantau Abang before the locals dug our eggs for soup, and kayakers have brushed past me in British Columbia. Once, years ago, I visited kin off the Nicobar Islands, but I never went back because I saw a ghost on a dune and beheld so many young of my kind fall to birds.”
“Do your friends know you’re stuck?” I ask, pushing away the cloud of tangled line I’ve thus far managed to remove.
“Of course. That’s why they sent you.”
As I kick my way around her with the line in my hand, I notice a graveyard of bones on the seafloor beneath me—remains of air-breathing creatures who could not reach the surface to save themselves—primarily the long spines, broad tails, cavernous ribs, bristles, and teeth of whales. Evidently cleaned by scavenger fishes and the scouring of the constant current, they glow white.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“I was 204 last year.”
“You’re so experienced. How could you get caught in this line?”
“The multitude of new challenges in this world tire me, Monk. The search for food in this raped ocean, the drift nets, the long lines, the hooks, satellite tracking, harpoons. All of my kind struggle to survive and meet and mate and breed and survive, but there are only so many times any one of us can escape life’s traps and pitfalls.”
“Weren’t all those bones down there a clue?”
“I dove deep hunting jellyfish because I love the sting of their tentacles on my flesh and the satisfaction as they slide down my gullet. I got caught on the way back up. I indulged my desire as your kind does, and I paid the price as all of us do. In the end it is always our mistakes that kill us.”
“Still,” I say, as my work finally reveals her scaled limb, free of line, “you’re so brilliant and this seems such an amateur’s error.”
“Brilliant,” she scoffs. “Why do humans have such a romance with exceptionalism? The one thing you fear most is to be normal, to be regular, to be just another shell in the crowd. There is so much to celebrate in the very fact that life exists. Why focus on our differences rather than the marvel we share?”
“I see the similarities and differences of expressions of Dao,” I say. “A flexible spine for me, a shell for you; a brain like a cat’s in my belly, a sphincter that keeps out salt water in yours; a pelvic girdle that lets me stand and run, shoulders inside a shell for you; my brain for plotting books, your thousand-meter-dive lungs; smartphones for me, geo-positioning head magnets for you.”
I finally free the line. All that’s left is one of the hooks. I work it out slowly, seeing the pink and white of her flesh as I do, very much aware of how much what I’m doing must hurt her. “Now you don’t have to worry about the killer whale,” I say.
She turns to me, her giant beak not inches from my face. “What do you know of killer whales?” she asks, her voice unfriendly for the first time.
“I saw one chasing you right as you appeared to me,” I say. “I saw his jaw open and I saw you flee in desperation into the nets. I saw him veer off before he, too, became entangled. I saw you choose a lingering death over a quick one.”
She exhales a cloud of bubbles and heads slowly to the surface, her great flippers beating in tandem, the injured one not quite as strong, rendering her progress less than direct. “I refused to be food for him,” she tells me. “I couldn’t let him win after two centuries of eluding his kind in all their warm-blooded, arrogant cunning. They are like humans with tails, thinking they rule the underwater realm, seeking to supersede those of us who were here first, who have seen and understand things
