Snapping Turtles and Volleyball Courts

Kristina Silvia

            The creation story, Skywoman Falling, is about how the earth came to be. The story tells of a woman falling from the skyworld into the ocean where all the animals live. Scared that she will drown, the birds catch her and then she stands on a turtle’s back while they figure out what to do. The animals decide to grab mud from the bottom of the ocean. None except for the muskrat are strong enough divers to get it. The muskrat dies while grabbing the mud. Because of his gracious gift for the skywomen she can turn the mud into the entire world. Robin Walker Kimmerer tells this story in chapter one of her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She also discussed this story at her Ted Talk. While there she spoke on how important animals are and how important it is that we listen to them. She tells a story of snapping turtles laying eggs in a volleyball court at her camp because the sand near the beach was too dry. She said once her students took what the turtles were doing as a message they discover the real cause as to why the turtles were laying eggs on the volleyball court. I can relate to this because I had a similar thing happen to me at a camp I used to work at. One day when a couple other counselors and I were doing a trash walk around camp we found a baby snapping turtle in our volleyball court. We knew about the big snapping turtle in the pond, so we figure that this turtle belonged there too. We grab a bucket of water and brought the turtle to the pond. The next day we found another turtle near the volleyball court, so we did the same thing. For the next couple of days, we kept finding turtles in that same area of the camp. We never knew why or how they got there but after hearing Kimmerer’s story I think maybe it was a similar reason and that if we had listened to the turtles we could have actually helped them.