A dinosaur crawled into my backyard last week. This reminded me that I live in a city where you don’t regularly see dinosaurs. Or even backyards. You see pavement. And now, apparently, you can see dinosaurs, too.
I stood looking out at the gray dawn of a Brooklyn morning towards our anomaly of an urban backyard. And suddenly I saw it: the dinosaur, emerging from our neighbor’s yard by way of a hole in the tattered fence that separates our two territories. I stepped back and thought about lying down and playing dead, because if a dinosaur is like anything in this current world, it is like a bear, and we all know that bears hate dead people, especially when they’re lying down. But I denied my natural instincts and stood frozen, in a sort of old-West showdown with the Jurassic Knickerbocker. I thought to myself: For he is a dinosaur, and I a human with a massive urge to Google “what to do in case you see a dinosaur.”
It wore a black and orange shell, a half-bowl on its back that was scattered with some sort of hieroglyphic pattern, like it was carrying with it some map or scroll of ancient tradition long forgotten by its present surveyors. There is no story I know of his. He is a relic. He stands stoic, wise, ancient, hopefully herbivorous. Probably herbivorous.
For he is a dinosaur.
And I a twenty-something white guy, who can’t imagine a world before cell phones.
He was small in stature and had a long neck and seemed confused. Perhaps an infant offshoot of the triceratops, I thought, or maybe some mentally handicapped dwarf version of the brontosaurus that decided to put a seashell on its back, like some adult-sized cape that he insisted on wearing outside the house much to the chagrin of his irritated mother. He paraded in costume across our stone path and held his nose in the air to determine which portion of our backyard to traverse next. I hoped he would eat the Allegheny spurge, which is ugly and weed-like. For he is a retarded dinosaur, and might like to eat weeds. And I a humble onlooker, fascinated by his disabled wisdom.
He crept along slowly, with patience, as if he had no train to catch or iPhone to monitor. I had forgotten, for a second, that a dinosaur would probably be unfamiliar with the pace of the world he has now returned to and thought of going up to him and teaching him how to use Twitter so that he could update us all when he eats a leaf or has a “sad day ‚òπ.” Or perhaps he would appreciate if I taught him the basics of social networking sites so he could post embarrassing pictures of his drunken friend, the stegosaurus, who totally got wasted at Sarah’s birthday party last week. He might like that. But then again, he might also just like a piece of lettuce. For he is a dinosaur. And I a great educator of useless cyber relationship sites.
It looked at me as if it wanted something. My urban conditioning urged me to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any change,” or, “No, I don’t like stand-up comedy,” or, “No, I don’t have a minute for the environment or dying children.” These were the things I normally said to strangers in the city. But he was a dinosaur. And I a speechless inhabitant of his once home.
After a moment of silence, I finally went inside and yelled out to my wife with childlike glee, “The dinosaurs are back! The dinosaurs are back!” She sardonically, distastefully looked up at me. I had to explain to her – “There is a dinosaur in our backyard, come look” – and she begrudgingly followed my beck and call like a mother responding to a child screaming for more toilet paper. She looked out and saw the midget beast. I said to her, with cathartic wisdom, “For he is a dinosaur.” She stared at the creature in an existential trance and, after a long silence, quietly replied, “No. For he is a box turtle. And you, you are an idiot.”
According to Wikipedia, box turtles can live for over 100 years. The one in our backyard has been alive for at least 30. Our neighbors explained to us that, some decades ago, a pebbled-toothed man was digging in his backyard and struck a shell that birthed a head and four legs and crawled out from the ground that it had been hibernating in for the past five months. It was as if the pebbled-toothed man had stumbled upon a mix of magic, some perfect mineral combination that conjures extinct residents and resurrects them from the dirt. The box turtle was fed tomatoes by the local neighbors and trekked through the backyards of four of the brownstones on our street, and has lived here ever since.
It has a name that no one can remember, which seems appropriate for a wild turtle living in an urban environment. New York can have a short memory at times.
I’d like to think that the turtle has been here for centuries, and was second lieutenant to George Washington during the Battle of Brooklyn, but stayed behind when Washington ferried his troops across the river in retreat – the first true American, who was too stubborn to let the Brits push him around. I can picture him brandishing a bayonet against a sea of Redcoats, like a character in a Disney movie. “Tell us who you are, you rogue!” the Brits would say. And he would reply, in a wry matter-of-fact way, “I am a turtle. And I don’t mess around.”
A few days after the sighting, my wife’s grandma regaled us with a story of when they found a box turtle some years ago and took it to the high school science class for it to be looked after. The class for some reason wanted to heat it up, and did so (perhaps in a microwave, I don’t know) and the turtle expanded and internally exploded and died. A cruel fate, to be sure, but a lesson to remember: Never microwave a turtle. Like a Ding Dong, it will explode. But perhaps that fate is apt in its irony; in that we have a propensity for crushing ancient, sacred things for convenience sake; in that we are addicted to microwaves and anything that can perform a task half as well in half the time.
A few days ago, I awoke to find the box turtle perched on a dirt mound staring at me through the window, like it was creepily watching me sleep. After the awkwardness subsided, I opened the back door and stared back at him a while. “Hey,” I said. “Hey,” he said back, in a slightly higher pitch, as if he had always known me, yet I could never fully know him. He waddled away with his wrinkled and rocky skin like some boulder come alive from the ground. A time capsule. And for the first time in a long time, I felt in touch with the softer places of this earth, where concrete had no reign and grass still grew. I knew I was privileged to be witnessing the ancient and forgotten nature of the city to which I belong. I take comfort in the fact that we still share this space with elderly reptiles. I hope we can sit down over a rotten tomato or head of lettuce, and they can tell me what it used to be like.