OPINION —
Jim was stuck. In the middle of the rural two-lane highway. Right there on the pavement. Not far from the solid yellow line. Tucked tightly in his shell. Scared to death.
Vehicles sped past little Jim, on both sides, shooting by with the deafening roars of F-16s.
All he could see were their tires from this angle. Big black wheels, flying past so quickly they looked like grayish blurs. Thick synthetic rubber treads, gripping the highway floor, making loud rubberized noises on the pavement, only inches from his tiny head.
Jim knew what these machines were, of course. Everyone knows. And, more importantly, he knew what they could do to a small creature like himself. He’d seen the aftermath before.
Squirrels. Possums. Raccoons. Even dogs. Fast and agile creatures, each one of them. But they were no match for the machines with tires. The unfortunate animals were struck. Their limp bodies often lay on the highway shoulder. Unattended. Forgotten. Picked clean by the turkey buzzards.
“What shall I do?” Jim was thinking to himself. “If these speedy machines can kill quick-moving creatures like dogs and cats and chipmunks, they can surely kill slow things like me.”
He had only been crossing the highway on his way to the pond. The pond where he was born. This was what his species did, each year. They returned to the old homeplace.
Year after year, all of Jim’s kind came from distant parts of the forest, following their internal compasses. They reunited at the old pond where they had hatched. They came here to nest. To mate. To lay eggs. They’d been doing this for hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Ever since the earth cooled.
Human scientists would call this behavior “site fidelity.” Scientists would marvel at this tortoise instinct. These creatures could follow thousands of miles of featureless oceans, skies, and terrain without a map, using only magnetoreception (magnetic fields) to find the place of their origin.
But it wasn’t instinct. It wasn’t magnetoreception. It was intuition, really.
Every creature knows the way. They are born with everything needed inside themselves to do what needs to be done. Nobody teaches a lizard how to be a lizard. Nor a fish to behave like a fish. Somehow, they just know.
But it’s easy to get lost. And it’s even easier to meet manmade obstacles like trafficky highways, parking lots, or mountainous hunks of speeding steel that block your path.
So Jim stayed put. Vehicles whizzed past. SUVs the size of national monuments, spewing exhaust. Massive trucks with chromium silhouettes of naked ladies on the mudflaps. Commercial vehicles with a few dozen tires, speeding right over the top of him.
When you’re caught in the middle of a busy highway, sometimes your only option is to stop moving. As looney as it sounds, your safest place is sometimes the yellow line.
The center of the hurricane.
After all, if Jim were to turn around and go back where he came from, he would die. Likewise, if he kept going forward, he would die. If he made a move in ANY direction, he would become a tortoise-flavored pancake.
So Jim sucked himself into his shell. And he waited.
He closed his little eyes and hoped. Maybe things would slow down eventually, he was thinking. Maybe the noisy, rumbly, gassy machines would stop, and he could keep waddling forward. Or, perhaps, he thought, this is the end for me. Maybe it’s just my time to go.
And even though, in this moment, Jim is terrified of the pain that lies ahead, he knows somehow, just like all animals know, this is how it’s intended to be.
Everything that happens must happen. And this has to be okay, because this is what is. No matter what we think about it, no matter how rigidly we try to control it, to resist it, to prevent it, to manipulate it, to alter it, to soften it, to divert it. What will be will be.
And that’s when Jim feels himself begin to float off the highway.
