Salutations, fiction-lovers.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you Julie Gabrielli.
Julie is the author of Building Hope, where she shares deep dives into architecture, literature, and the climate crisis. Her singing dog Brody also makes the occasional appearance. Julie is awesome, her substack is awesome — all I can say is that you should subscribe!
Here, Julie shares with us a beautiful little short story about a snapping turtle. Enjoy!
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Not possessing the most cheerful disposition, the snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina doesn’t fully appreciate her luck in making it across the new road. Chelydra has just buried 47 eggs in her sandy nest, and she is famished. This is a rich hunting ground for snakes and birds.
The turtle descends from a long line of freshwater reptiles going back about 220 million years. She lives in a shallow pond tucked into a tiny sliver of tallgrass prairie outside Cedar Falls, Iowa. The soil of the prairie contains parent material that was distributed in the area 110,000 years ago. Its canvas of grasses and wildflowers was painted over tens of thousands of years by glaciers, bison, elk, rain, snow, seasons, and fire.
The road is two years old—an improvement made necessary by a new visitors’ center and research station at the ninety-acre Refuge. An award-winning showcase of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Healthy Green Buildings program, its walls are bales of straw, stacked and plastered by volunteers during a hands-on workshop with mud and lime. Solar panels power the lights, air conditioning, and alarm system.
A middle-aged man drives his distracted wife down the new road mere moments after Chelydra’s crossing, oblivious to the ancient songlines of reptiles and ungulates. It is early June, two days after a full moon that neither of them noticed, and before the heat of summer thickens. They are hoping to see a pileated woodpecker, though the lone trees and swath of forest are far from the visitors’ center. These armchair ornithologists will take no notice the less showy northern harrier or the sedge wren or the Henslow’s sparrow.
The gift shop has a grass roof to harmonize with the landscape. At the checkout desk, visitors can buy seeds to plant prairie violet, pale purple coneflower, false sunflower, and stiff goldenrod in their own suburban gardens. The head buyer in Washington D.C. insists on sending tiger lily bulbs, because people always ask about the flowers lining the new road. An Asian transplant, they intermingle in expanses of open prairie and there’s nothing the rangers can do about it.
The rangers tell visitors that, when chewed to a paste, the flower of the tiger lily is a folk remedy for spider bite, though spiders are elusive on the Refuge. The gift shop’s bestseller is the stuffed snapping turtles that are made at a training program in Des Moines by special needs adults.
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My friend and I visited Ramsey Canyon in southeastern Arizona on Monday which is a Mecca for bird watchers apparently because 2 migratory flyways intersect there. As we sat by the window in the Ramsey Canyon Inn eating home made pie and sipping tea while watching numerous colorful and rare hummingbirds feed at the feeder outside the window I couldn’t help but think about how for many, birding is only about collecting memories of sightings in a bucket list with little regard for the impact on the environment from all the driving to destinations and tromping around to scratch another trophy off the list. Of course we were guilty to having done the same just to eat their delicious pie.
I really enjoyed this story.