The four of us recently took a fabulous five-day Florida vacation at a bargain price. Some life-long friends let us stay at their townhouse, and I cashed in some frequent flyer miles. The result was a memorable family vacation for pennies on the dollar.
The ocean, beach, pool, and a football were our primary entertainment. As we watched our kids romp in the surf, their bodies tossed and jangled about like corks in a hot-tub and their laughter carried to us on the the salt-laden spray, I was reminded for the hundredth time that the best fun for kids comes when they are in nature and disconnected from technology. We managed to get in some activities of educational interest as well. We climbed a one-hundred foot high lighthouse that was built in 1860, one year before the Civil War began. We spent a half day hob-nobbing in the super-high rent district, walking down Worth Avenue and South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, our mouths agape at the sheer accumulation of wealth. We window shopped a three million dollar necklace, and toured the old-world beauty of The Breakers Hotel. Built in the waning days of the nineteenth century, its original clients were the titans of America's industrial age. Today it is a playground and retreat for the world's wealthy; its art work and appointments alone worth tens of millions.
But of all our activities, the one I will remember most is our tour of the small marine center at Loggerhead Beach in Jupiter, named after and dedicated to the loggerhead turtles that nest there each year. Twenty-five years ago Barb and I were hiking up the Leelanau Peninsula in northern Michigan, and came upon a river where the salmon were making their annual up-stream trek. I was mesmerized by the sight and wrote a poem that night called Falls Run to commemorate it. And as we toured the marine center, I learned that sea turtles have much in common with salmon.
A female sea turtle comes ashore to the same beach she was hatched on, and digs holes about two feet deep, laying several "batches" of eggs, with each batch holding 80-100. Insulated and protected by the sand, the eggs hatch in the summertime. Once hatched, the tiny turtles - not much more than a few inches long, dig and push their way to the surface of the beach, where predators of the air await to devour them. Only 1 in 100 will succeed in their mad scramble to the water. For those that do it is twenty years before they reach sexual maturity and are able to reproduce. In that time they grow to enormous size (up to 2,000 pounds) and power (able to dive up to 1,000 meters). They traverse thousands of miles in the great deep that is their home, the very definition of an ancient mariner. Ultimately, the same force that drives the salmon somehow draws them back to the shallows of their origin to mate, and to come ashore on the same beach from whence their journey began.
These creatures are so ugly they are cute, and I'll never forget the one they had at the center named Jonah. The manager of the center so named him because a fish he had caught off the nearby pier actually coughed him up as a not yet digested meal. He sprinted over to the lab at the center and managed to nurture Jonah to survival. Jonah will be released in a few weeks, and our friends said they will try and get a picture of that event for us.
It's always fun to learn new things. And now the four of us know a lot more about the epic journeis of the great sea turtles.
I used the title of the book Beach Music by Pat Conroy to help form the title of this blog.
