Yes it's true...after three years-- THREE!-- of caring for him and feeding him and cleaning his tank it its entirety and sucking up the poo from his gravel and buying crickets...........
It's happened. We've let him go.
The turtle is free.
(sigh)
Although a gift to my son from his grandparents, he had ultimately become 'mine'. Not that D didn't love him, and he used to get loads of excitement from feeding him worms in front of his friends, watching their little bodies gush in the water as he sliced them neatly in two. The turtle, not D. Trying my best not to raise a serial killer, you know. Although from what I've heard of the mothers of serial killers, they have no idea how or why or when it started to happen, so perhaps it is something one is born with.
But I digress.
The only trouble with a five, six, seven-year-old keeping a turtle as a pet is that they cannot seem to help much with the upkeep. You have to ciphon off the water into a bucket that then has to be dumped into the sink, or you have to use a hose in which case you have to hold it firmly while it sucks up all the water, and then you have to take out all the big heavy rocks and faux rocks that the turtle climbs on and digs into and clean them with a brush within an inch of their lives, and you have to clean the filter, taking it apart bit by bit and scrubbing at all the mechanisms.
In the end, it was just easier if I did it. And so if it didn't get done, the tank would develop a smell akin to that of plant material staying in a vase for too long. Unpleasant. It took me an hour to clean his tank, sometimes one and a half if it needed to be done very thoroughly. And then there was the aspect of a living creature that was growing quite well being confined year after year in a twenty-nine gallon tank. Anything bigger and I wouldn't be able to manipulate it to clean. Not to mention the fact that I live in a townhouse, which are not known for their excessive counter space.
In the meantime, D had all but forgotten about the turtle, whose name is Trach. (Read as 'Track', for trachedermys-- or some such spelling-- which is their genus name.) I would watch him as the days would go by and he wouldn't even go up to the tank to greet the gently paddling amphibian. Even I had stopped holding him and wiping his shell and talking to him. Life happens and goes by so quickly.
A dog is under your feet right when you walk in the door. It's vying for your attentions every second it's not napping or eating. They are easy to cuddle and very easy to play with: tag, chase, tug-o-war, hide-n-seek, beast and knight. It's endless. The turtle? You watch him eat a cricket or two and he does that cute thing with his front feet........and that's about the extent of the excitement. I personally loved watching him swim around, when his water wasn't filthy. Writing a lot lately has really put a damper on my turtle gazing, and the smell in the tank was getting progressively worse.
This is an extravagant lead-up to us releasing him into a little pond behind our tiny city's library. The pond itself always has ducks and fish and other 'stuff' in it, so I know it's a working ecosystem. As far as I've seen, there doesn't seem to be any other turtles there either, so it's open season as far as territory goes. Now he is male, and there is a chance that he might go wandering for a female. But if he chooses to stay, it looks like it would make a nice home.
He rode in the front seat of the Isuzu, in a white plastic bowl with a red lid on it to keep the water from sloshing out. (Mama was driving, after all.) D kept asking me what was in the bowl, and I kept answering him with, 'you'll see.' He and I had been having the discussion about getting rid of Trach for about six months, and it had ended in tears and shaking bottom lips, (his, not mine.) and so I had put it off. But it was time. And I was going to allow him to face his sadness at Trach's departure, not just suddenly realize that the turtle was magically 'gone'.
It's painful, yes, but necessary to learn how to part with things, even if you love them and wish they could stay. At times it is just better for everyone, the keeper and the kept.
He blended in well with the leaf litter at the base of the pond and the mud. He looked like he really belonged there. He turned and gave us one last long look before turning his little red-eared self around and ducking beneath the water, heading out at a brisk paddle into the darker depths of the pond. A mama duck swam by with her ducklings. A few tadpoles wriggled by.
It is a good place for a turtle. My son was actually happy to see him go, and to know that he was so close to us. There were no tears, just a faint feeling of sadness and hope.
