Turtle Blues

"Turtle Blues" is a classic 12-bar blues song written and sung by the great Janis Joplin, and this is a story about a turtle that had the blues but didn't bite.

This happened while fishing off the coast of New Zealand, up the top near North Cape, using long lines laid along the bottom with 500 hooks to a line. Sometimes sharks would get themselves tangled up in these lines and make a complete mess, but this time a turtle got himself caught up.

This was a big sea turtle, about four foot across the shell and heavy, but with surprisingly slender flippers. These flippers were covered in rings of armour, and a hook had got caught between two rings. He also had a long slender neck with a smallish head and a comparatively large mouth. There were no teeth, but there was a bony ridge instead and seemed plain to me that he could have taken my hand off with a single bite if he had wanted.

The boat I had then was low to the water, so I leaned out to see about untangling the line and removing the hook, while watching that mouth in case he thought I was his enemy - or maybe a lunch-time snack. But he must have realised that I was only trying to help because he just lay there and watched. The hook was lodged quite deeply and getting it out must have hurt, yet he continued to just watch with no attempt to bite my hand. Turtles don't have whales' eyes - nothing on this planet has the depth of soul you see in a whale's eye - and yet this completely wild animal had a look of trust that I remember to this day, a quarter of a century later. He simply stayed still and watched this human trying to help him out of a situation where he had absolutely no reason to trust a human. When two creatures put faith in each other, God and Spirit are able to engender a trust where there would otherwise be opposition.

Eventually the hook came out and the turtle slowly turned and swam away. No theatrics, no drama, just swam slowly off and faded away.

Yet the memory of the turtle that didn't bite will never fade away.

Lyn