Why Tortoises?

I’ve been thinking about tortoises for most of my life.

There’s a photograph of me at about two years old, straddling a giant tortoise at the San Diego Zoo, in a white sweater, blue pants, and white baby shoes. There’s the hint of a smile on my face, and I’m gripping the edge of its shell as though I’m about to fall off. I don’t remember the encounter, but the photograph suggests that tortoises entered my life early.

My father had a much deeper connection to them — and this is the true origin of my tortoise story.

He grew up in Southern California in the 1950s, when orange groves still covered much of the landscape and the Mojave Desert lay just beyond the mountains. As a teenager, he kept desert tortoises in the backyard—animals that friends and acquaintances had brought home from the desert.

His best animal stories are the ones about his tortoise sanctuary, seeded first with a pair and then a dozen tortoises given by friends and neighbors who had picked them up in the desert and, when they got home, realized they had no clue what to do next. He constructed an enclosed pen in the yard, studied their life cycle, built tunnels for their winter brumation, provisioned them with clover and kitchen scraps, and guarded their eggs and the hatchlings that would come.

A few years ago, as we were packing for a trip together to the Galápagos Islands, the preparations began to give this trip a symbolic importance. Dad had always dreamed of visiting these islands. He was now in his mid-70s and starting to feel the hurt from Parkinson’s. This would turn out to be our last adventure together.

About halfway through the experience, while walking on Isabela Island, our group rounded a corner on the trail and found a giant tortoise almost waiting for us. One of the things to know about Parkinson’s is that even if a person’s symptoms are tamped by medication, certain things can set off tremors. For my father, any emotional experience could do it. When happy, his hands started shaking. So to see him sitting in the dirt beside the trail at Urbina Bay, on Isabela Island, trying to hold his camera level while a giant tortoise is headed straight toward him, at eye level — well, excitement consumed his whole body. Dad was vibrating from joy.

This was my father’s moment. The tortoise moved along the trail toward him. When it reached him, it stopped. Dad still swears it held his gaze for five seconds. “Hello, old friend?” Then the tortoise veered off the trail, pushed through some high grass, and was gone.

I believe my father’s guardian animal was settled before he was born. Like me, but for different reasons, he didn’t have a say in the matter. 

The tortoise chose him. 

Sometimes I think that tortoises chose me, too. But what began as an inheritance became something else: an almost unreasonable commitment to traveling around the planet to understand tortoises and tell their stories.