The Oldest Mariners

There's a stretch of dark sand just west of us where something older than every ship ever launched is happening right now, quietly, mostly after midnight.

The loggerheads are running.

All summer, the mother turtles have been hauling themselves up our Gulf beaches in the dark. Big, slow, older than they have any right to be. They dig their nests up past the tide line, drop a hundred or more eggs, and slip back into the black water before the sun catches them. One female might leave three or four nests behind her over a season, sometimes as many as eight. That was May, June, July. Now it runs the other way. The eggs are hatching.

A nest keeps its secret for about two months. Then one warm night, somewhere between now and the end of October, the sand starts to move and a whole handful of hatchlings comes up at once. Each one is small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, and each one has to answer the same question its kind has been answering for more than a hundred million years. Which way is the sea?

They can't smell it and they don't remember it. They read the light. Out on a wild beach the brightest thing in the world is the sky over open water, moonlight and starlight spread across the Gulf, so the little ones run toward it. That's the whole plan. Find the bright edge, find the water, and disappear for the next thirty years.

It was never good odds. Roughly one in a thousand of them makes it to grown, which is why every single nest counts for so much.

What undoes them isn't a storm or a shark or a gull. It's a porch light. A bright window. A parking lot glowing behind the dunes. Put the wrong light on near the beach and the hatchlings turn the wrong way, up toward the road instead of down toward the water, away from every chance they had. So the most useful thing a person can do for a sea turtle this time of year is honestly close to nothing at all. Leave the beach dark. Let the moon do the work.

We take that one personally, down here on Darkwater Alley. We keep our own room low and warm on purpose. In our experience, the good nights are the dark ones.

So if you find yourself near the Gulf after sundown while the season's still on, do the small things. Pull the curtains on the windows that face the water. Leave the flashlight in the drawer and skip the flash on your phone. If you come across a nest roped off in the sand, give it a wide berth and let it be. Somebody walked that beach before sunrise to mark it so it would still be there when the little ones came up. And if you ever get lucky enough to catch a hatchling headed the right way, just stand back and let it run.

Then come see us when you're done. We'll pour you something dark and light you something slow, and you can tell us all about it.