
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 30, 1993                   TAG: 9309290302
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TURTLES AND TRAVELERS

A FEW SUMMERS back, I saw a box turtle in the grass too late and mowed over it, wounding it severely, probably mortally. When I went back to find it again, to relieve its misery, it had disappeared into the woods. Since then I've been more careful.

This summer I've seen several turtles. Or, more likely, I've seen the same one several times. I've successfully avoided it (or them) each time; and each time, when I've come around again to the turtle's place in the grass, the turtle has disappeared. Plodded away, deliberately, inevitably, completely: Slow and steady wins the race.

Our most recent box turtle, which we saw just a week ago, was as brilliantly colored as any I've ever seen. His spots were a radiant gold-orange; his black a pure ebony. He looked as though he'd just been hand-waxed and detailed at the finest body shop in the land.

And he was heading south. Or maybe west. It's hard to say, one step at a time. But he was heading somewhere, surely. As surely as step-by-step would take him.

Only once have I seen a box turtle who wasn't traveling alone, and that was the time I happened upon a couple thoroughly involved in the throes of passion. Turtle passion is fearsome. And I was a child when I witnessed it, so it took me some minutes to understand the exact nature of what I saw. Then, of course, I giggled nervously and skittered away.

I suppose, when you think about it, it's no wonder that turtles travel alone. For what other creature has such splendid cause for singularity - a shell into which he can completely withdraw, a shell that gives him the genuine ability to make the world go away? Quiet, close to the ground, traveling alone, turtles seem to slip up on us. Their peculiar visits always come as a surprise.

The other week, while my nephews were visiting, a man I didn't know came to call. I don't get many visitors here at all, let alone strangers. "May I help you?" I asked, perhaps a little nervously, my hand still on the door. Inside the house, the boys in my charge played cards.

"Well, now, you do look like someone who grew up in Fincastle and went to Hollins College!" this man said. He was as neat and pressed and shaved as if he'd just got himself up for Sunday school, but I didn't know him. He gazed with a pair of intense blue eyes that no one who'd met him could ever forget. And I didn't know him.

"Who are you?" I asked, trying to keep the smile on my face.

He explained, then, that he was just someone who liked what I'd been writing for the newspaper all these years; that he liked it well enough to search me out. "I've met Ben Beagle, too," he said.

Then he stood chatting for a while. We talked long enough to identify a few people we know in common. It was drizzling and he teased me: "Now, you're what, about 32 are you?" I laughed.

As he left he asked a favor: "Mention me sometime in the paper. Just give a word to 'Ole Bear.' That's what my mother used to call me." And then he told me the best advice his mother had ever given him: "'Down to Gehenna, up the throne; he travels best who travels alone'."

We writers, sitting in our quiet rooms, think we travel alone. We don't; we live most public lives. But there are those in the world who do: surprising, unusual creatures, who arrive, step by step, at the most astonishing destinations.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB