Title: Turtle Diary
Author(s): Russel Hoban
Release year: 1975
Publisher: Cape
Why in Database: As title itself may suggest, this book is full of turtles, they appears through the story and as the motivation of the two main characters. Below are some of the many fragments from the book that mention turtles. It is also worth mentioning that film adaptation was also created, which we have described in the database.
The first piece is a reflection about the living conditions of captive turtles:
Sea turtles. Two or three hundred pounds the big ones must have weighed. Looping and swinging, flying in golden-green silty water in a grotty little tank no bigger than my room. Soaring, dipping and curving with flippers like wings in a glass box of second-hand ocean. Their eyes said nothing, the thousands of miles of ocean couldn’t be said.
The second selected fragment is about the admiration of the turtles navigational skills:
There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: ‘The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup…’ I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that’s a lot of soup walking about.
The third fragment focuses on the relationship between turtles and sharks:
How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can’t shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.
The next fragment again IS ABOUT the issue of the narrowness of their tank, the turtle’s navigation skills, and how people exploited this animals:
I’d been aware of the turtles for some time before I went to look at them. I knew I’d have to do it but I kept putting it off. When I did go to see them I didn’t know how to cope with it. Untenable propositions assembled themselves in my mind. If these were what they were then why were buildings, buses, streets? The sign said that green turtles were the source of turtle soup and hawksbills provided the tortoise-shell of commerce. But why soup, why spectacles?
Relative to her size my beetle has more than twice as much swimmingroom as the turtles. And in that little tank the turtles were flying, flying in the water, submarine albatrosses. I’ve read about them, they navigate hundreds of miles of ocean. I imagined a sledge-hammer smashing the thick glass, letting out the turtles and their little bit of ocean, but then they’d only be flopping about on the wet floor.
I’m always afraid of being lost, the secret navigational art of the turtles seems a sacred thing to me. I thought of the little port of Polperro in Cornwall where they sell sea-urchin lamps, then I felt very sad and went home.
The next selected fragment is a large piece of conversation/planning the release of the turtles:
One had to go up a few steps and climb through a hole in the wall, then there were planks across the back of the tank. It was brightly lit, had a backstage feeling. The turtles looked different seen from above.
‘That’s not the colour they’d be in natural light,’ the keeper said. ‘Their colour fades here.’
‘Would it be a big job moving them out of here?’ I said.
‘We do it sometimes when we clean the tank,’ he said. ‘Put them in the filters. Bit awkward getting them through the hole, you have to mind their jaws. But it’s not too difficult.’
‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘some sort of turtle freak decided to steal the turtles and put them back in the ocean. What would he need for the job?’
‘You’re talking about me,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve told them we ought to let the big ones go, replace them with little ones. We go fishing off Southampton for specimens two or three times a year, and I’ve said why don’t we take the big turtles along and put them into the Channel.
Apart from wanting them to go free I’m tired of cleaning up after them. But they don’t want to know, they’re not interested in the turtles here.’
‘Wouldn’t transport be a problem?’ I said. ‘Don’t they have to be kept from drying out? And isn’t the Channel too cold for them?’
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You’re the second this week that’s asked me about turtle transport. A lady was chatting to me about the turtles the other day. Sometimes no one asks about them for six months at a stretch. Drying out’s no problem on a trip as short as from here to Southampton. Put them on wet sacks, they’d even be all right without anything for that distance. I don’t think the water’d bother them. Cold water makes them a little sluggish but I think they’d backtrack up the North Atlantic Current till they hit the Canary Current or the Gulf Stream. I bet they’d be in home waters in three months.’
‘The lady,’ I said, ‘was she rather arty-intellectual looking? Husky voice?’
‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Friend of yours?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Then there isn’t all that much to it, is there? Just a matter of hiring a van and taking along a trolley or something. But the place must be guarded at night?’ I wondered when he’d start looking at me hard and ask me about the questions I was asking.
‘Securicor,’ he said. ‘But they make their rounds on a regular schedule. That’s no problem.’
Was he inviting me to have a go at it? I liked the look of him, he seemed a right sort of man. Suddenly it all seemed hugely possible, I began to go trembly. ‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ I said, and got his name and telephone number. George Fairbairn. He’s the Head Keeper. It seemed almost too much to think about at the moment, almost as if it were thrusting itself upon me. And what had she in mind for the turtles? Probably the same sort of lark or at least the same sort of Fantasy. Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts.
The next three passages again tells about what defines turtles in this book, their pursuit and finding of a goal:
I’ve seen films of newly hatched turtles racing to the sea, whole fleets of them almost flying over the sand in their rush to the water. These three lay on their backs ponderous with the finding in them, passively waiting. Looking at them I couldn’t think there was any expectation in them. When they felt themselves once more in ocean they would simply do what turtles do in ocean, their readiness was whole and undiminished in them. If permitted to live they would navigate by the sun, by chemical traces in the water, by the imprint in their genes of an ancient continent now sundered. They were compacted of finding, finding was embodied in them.
The turtles would be well on their way now, following whatever track they followed. Just doing it. Not thinking about it, just doing it.
Thinking about the turtles I could feel the action of their swimming, the muscle contractions that drove the flippers through the green water. All they had was themselves but they would keep going until they found what was in them to find. In them was the place they were swimming to, and at the end of their swimming it would loom up out of the sea, real, solid, no illusion. They could be stopped of course, they might be killed by sharks or fishermen but they would die on the way to where they wanted to be. I’d never know if they’d got there or not, for me they would always be swimming.
Author: XYuriTT
