An Interruption1
A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth—
This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.
I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he’d stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.
Editorial Comment. — This poem describes the author’s reflections on seeing a student stop his car on the road to help a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, off into the underbrush. The geographic setting for the scenario is particularly poignant for me, as the incident occurred close to Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, where I was an undergraduate student over 40 years ago and first developed my own fascination for turtles, and the author, like me, is a medical doctor, and currently on staff at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I contacted him in order to ask permission to reprint this poem and it turned out we had also both spent time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, not many years apart. It’s a small world and full of close personal interconnections and small degrees of separation that help to bind many of us together in our perceptions and concerns for turtles and their need for preservation and protection. When asked about the incident, he answered: “I think the scene I described is a pretty common one, and in this particular case it seemed clear to me that there was something much more profound going on in the situation than first met the eye.” Would that we would all recognize this profound importance of letting life live and the parallel importance of doing no harm—guiding principles both in medicine and conservation. How similar these two disciplines are in their missions—one focused on saving and improving our human lives and caring for the health of our species, the other focused on saving and preserving our environment and all species and caring for the health of our planet. May we all recognize how critically important both these disciplines are.
