Our household has taken on two new members. They are crime victims, of a sort, and we have been asked by Doug, a neighbor of ours who works for the state, to shelter them while the investigation proceeds.
"Maybe the lawyer will want to see them," he said. "I'm not sure."
Our neighbor is not a criminal investigator but a biologist with the state wildlife department. He is known around town as "the snake guy," because he is the fellow who shows up at school assemblies with cases of the things and tries to plant the idea that these creatures have an important role to play and maybe shouldn't be killed on sight.
Perhaps that's not an idea you have any trouble with but, based on my experience, it is one that could use amplification in this state. More than once since moving here ten years ago I have observed in consternation the reaction of, say, a crowd of fellow bathers at a swimming hole when, say, a non-venomous common water snake has had the temerity to try to pass through. These were small events in the scheme of things but evinced such ugly stupidity as to serve as yet another cautionary reminder about how little we can expect from most crowds.
Doug does more than work with snakes, though, and his visit several nights ago was not in his snake-guy capacity. He was dropping off two box turtles that had been seized during the investigation of an illegal collecting operation.
Natural resources officers, apprised of suspicious activity in the backyard of what appeared to be an unoccupied house, had found ten box turtles in a makeshift pen and parceled them out among Doug and his fellow biologists for safekeeping until the conclusion of the investigation and hoped-for trial.
Doug mentioned there might be a stakeout but didn't say what we should do if any rough characters turn up here looking to silence these two witnesses. Well, some things you don't need to spell out, I suppose.
Our guests comprise a male and a female and are in this sense a matched set with the two turtles who reside permanently in our backyard pen. All four have similar-looking shells mottled with the splotches of brown, black, yellow, and orange that render them nearly invisible when viewed from above in sun-dappled undergrowth and leaf litter. The new male is strikingly large, with perhaps a third more bulk to him compared to the rest, but what is really startling is the coloration of his neck and legs. Unlike the dusky dark shades of the other three turtles, his skin is mostly bright yellow, spiderwebbed with lines of black, a color scheme that calls leopards and cheetahs to mind and lends him a flamboyant air.
Did you know that turtles have personalities? One has only to assemble a small crowd of them to see how individual they can be. Our original female, Sori, is retiring and sedentary, preferring to spend most of her time hunkered in place under overhanging leaves. Our original male, Santa, is active and sporty, constantly on patrol and undaunted by obstacles. He is surprisingly adept not only at climbing—Axl had Santa out of the pen in the backyard and reported watching him shimmy up onto the two-brick-high border of a flowerbed—but also at getting down again, sliding off of logs and rocks onto the ground by using the belly of his shell as a sort of dry-land boogie board.
We haven't gotten to know the other two very well yet, but Petra discovered that the male is extremely curious about her camera, rushing over to investigate it whenever she held it at his level, which is the opposite of Santa, who more sensibly hightails away from the thing.
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Supposedly these turtles will only be staying with us temporarily, but then again I'm not sure they can be safely released into the wild. Under normal circumstances, box turtles range over only about twenty square miles in their lifetimes. One benefit of this lifestyle is that diseases have a hard time sweeping through the statewide turtle population—unless, of course, humans help by collecting turtles in one part of the state and releasing them somewhere else.
I won't be precious enough to try to twist these facts about turtle epidemiology into some kind of lesson for humans in our current struggle against a virus that has racked up so many millions of frequent flyer miles already. Humans can't now just stick to their home ranges and it's hard to look back and say that we should have been doing so all along. Sure, the spread of disease was sharply limited back when people never left their villages, but so was the spread of knowledge and tolerance.
It's amazing that something as small and slow as a box turtle can cover twenty square miles, even if it does have its whole lifetime in which to do so. It's even more amazing when you consider that twenty square miles is probably also the lifetime range of more than a few human residents of this state. West Virginia consistently finishes high on the list of states ranked by the proportion of residents who were born there. I can't seem to find this data broken down for sub-state geographies, but I suspect we might come out even closer to the top in a ranking of states with the highest proportion of people still living in the county where they were born.
Ours is the state with the most irregular boundary line, and on the whole our terrain is just as wrinkled. I once bought a panoramic landscape photograph showing a dramatic view across several lines of Appalachian mountain ranges, and a big part of what influenced me to make the purchase was the photographer's choice of words in his caption, which described our state having the visual texture of "a rumpled old quilt."
In the early days of European settlement of this state, the steep terrain made not only long-distance but even short-distance travel difficult. The terrain is less of a problem now, what with paved roads and V8 engines, but nonetheless the tendency to stick close to home seems to have remained engrained. Could this be part of what is helping hold infection rates down across so much of this state? (We still have two counties yet to detect a single case.) As if to prove the point, one of what passes for a hotspot in this state traces back to eight people who had recently vacationed in Myrtle Beach. Where is this state's reputed xenophobic provincialism when you actually need it?
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Here in Waldhurst, it feels as though people are done with the virus. It's not that everything is completely back to the way it was, but—from my admittedly secluded vantage point—I have the sense that people have little energy for consistent precautions anymore. In the same way that parents train their children to ignore them by constantly predicting calamities—"you'll shoot your eye out," etc.—that never come to pass, you can only keep people in a state of vigilance so long for a catastrophe that, for most of us, still hasn't arrived after months of warnings.
I even find myself questioning the various hard lines I've been trying to take. Then I read in the paper about the twenty-something whose "recovery" from the virus required a lung transplant and the other "recovered" who have been left disabled and unable to work, and I find my resolve firms up again.
One of the biggest questions is what to do with the children, or rather what to let them do. It still feels out of the question to send them to daycare. Will it feel impossible to send them to school in the fall, though? If it won't feel impossible for the kids to spend all day inside with other kids then, why does it feel so now? And if it will still feel impossible to send the kids to school, how will I ever get a full day's work done?
I am still working from home, you see, which is to say that I am still spending long stretches of each day in front of my shitty work-issued Dell laptop wishing the children would shut up so I can work. Other than the fact that working from home helps me shelter from a possibly life-changing-if-not-ending viral infection, there is really nothing to recommend it. It never fails to astound me how much psychological space Axl and Belle take up, such that even in between their frequent squabbles and screaming fits it is as though they are rattling around inside my very skull.
What I most wish I could do—what I would give anything to be able to do—would be to shove them out the door to play with all of the other similarly marooned children in the neighborhood. The problem is that you really can't find reputable sources of public-health information willing to say that this would be okay to do without various precautions that seem unlikely to be maintained in the absence of adult supervision, defeating the purpose I'd be after.
I am sure other parents are struggling with this decision, too. From time to time I notice small groups of children loose in the neighborhood, to all appearances mostly doing what they always did, which is to say not staying six feet apart and certainly not wearing masks. But do they need to be? The CDC does recommend mask wearing for children using playgrounds, but it is silent on the needed precautions for wandering a quiet neighborhood of detached houses or playing in the dirt at the edge of a city park.
I tried to start a conversation about this on the neighborhood Facebook group but got no takers, perhaps unsurprisingly. There may be a wall of denial and wishful thinking no one is in a hurry to puncture. When I encounter some of the neighborhood's parents on my daily walks, we all smilingly give each other wide berths, just like Fauci wants us to do. But later, there are their children, playing cheek by jowl out on the sidewalk. Sometimes ours are there, too.
I am starting to feel exhausted at the thought of walking out to remind everyone, again, to sit a little further apart—and that's even when I'm able to forget that, in theory, I'll need to keep doing so for at least another year.
