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Included in our food budget is a dinner on the town at a gracious old plantation, the oldest greathouse in the Virgin Islands and the only French plantation still intact. We climb a gentle slope lush with frangipani, banyan trees, and plumeria, and horses grazing by the white fences of the riding stables. In a room with settees and antiques, we take our rum punch from a mahogany bar. Windows open out on verandas, and banana bunches hang from ceiling pulleys. Dinner is elegant, made and served by a family that has owned the greathouse for generations. Then, on mental alert, Team VI rises, flees the plantation, doffs party duds and dons mosquito jackets and backpacks, and within thirty minutes of having dined on homemade melon ice cream and apricot pie, is jouncing around the back of the pickup again for the dusk-to-dawn patrol.

Our third night out brings paydirt. We are now able to keep up the rapid pace our principal investigators have set for the nights, and we are no longer overwhelmed by their stop-dead scientific terms or the weighty facts in their repertoire. We are starting to ask the right questions, know the terrain well enough to be divided into small patrol groups, and have even begun to acquire anecdotal material for our return to civilization.

This kind of confidence comes, to be sure, from not yet having to “work a turtle.” I have begun to think of the expedition as a 10-hour exercise class in which I will never be required to do tummy crunches, but merely 15 or 16 miles of fast walking in the dark. This is probably what I was thinking about when my patrol of three fell over a turtle.

Suddenly, the 8-foot calipers on my shoulder seems too heavy; I will actually have to stretch across the carapace with it to measure notch-to-tip. So I quickly trade it for the more familiar writer’s tools and become keeper of the data sheets. When you’ve never touched a giant leatherback, even though you’ve heard she won’t snap or bite like her endangered cousins, all you can remember is that if you stuffed your arm down her unusually constructed throat, you’d stand as much chance of getting it back whole as you would your tires from one of those “Treadles Damage Tires” parking lots.

Holding my arm close to my body, then, I begin to fill in the data sheets. Our turtle has already body-pitted and is rhythmically digging her nest. With her sensitive hind flippers, and not a glance backwards, she forms a clean nest, and then, with eyes tearing and moans and sighs all too human, she deposits 142 shiny, white eggs into her nest. Still using her flippers, she flings sand madly in great arcs to cover her nest, tamps down the sand, disguises her site, and proudly returns to the sea -- a great lady, a great lay.   

If I think I’ve covered the territory by drawing flawless diagrams on the data sheets and using words like “sixikanti” to describe the number of ridges on the carapace, or by distinguishing viable from non-viable eggs, I have yet to learn humility. A turtle that had plagued us one night by her all-crawl, no-lay antics finally decides to drop her eggs but does it perversely just inches below the high-water mark, and more perversely, just minutes before dawn. This means that we will have to stay on the beach well into morning to catch her eggs as she lays them, then move them to safer ground by simulating her nest well above the high-water mark.

We are perpetually exhausted by now, and I surmise that a good place for this extended obstetrical rendezvous is lying down, so I volunteer to catch the eggs as the turtle lays them, before they fall into her two-and-a-half-foot-deep nest. Lying down in the sand is easy. Lying down in wet sand with sand fleas is stupid. But lying down in wet sand with sand fleas under 1,600 pounds of turtle is madness. Contorted partially beneath the turtle to catch her eggs, I know that if I disturb her nest with its perfect narrow neck and bulbous base, she will stop laying. And if she moves, I will be pinned underneath. I am caught between self-preservation and the preservation of an endangered species; if I am any kind of witness to evolution, then the turtle should outlast man.

Every four or five seconds, another mucous-covered ball drops into my hand, a glare of white from a flashlight making it glisten as I hand it up into the darkness. 107 eggs later, I realize that I have to get out from under before her mighty flipper tosses me out. She has one brief moment, a bridge in her musical score, before she begins to cover the nest, and I do not want to be covered, but I am stiff. I feel that panic I’d felt under the poison manchineel but no psychic concession to inevitability as I maneuver to safety.

Eventually, neophyte turtles blur in our minds with tagged turtles, nests on the southeast point blur with nests on the west side, and the phrase “moonlit beach” will never again bring to mind romance. Unless my wooing of a leatherback up a four foot embankment counts.

The flat beach on the south side of the island had lost nearly 200 feet of sand between April, when the turtles begin to lay, and June, when they are finishing their maternity season, and much of the area has been cut by waves into four- and five-foot erosion bluffs. A turtle is lucky if she comes up on a gentle slope. Now a tagged turtle that has tried to come ashore several times during the night emerges for her fifth and last attempt to put her eggs into a nest, only she emerges at a high bluff. She makes several attempts to get up, and nearly perpendicular, simply stops. Like the others who have come to this wall before her, she will give up and drop her eggs in the sea.

Remembering my own long labor and giving birth in the hospital hallway, I am moved to help her, though my teammates think it futile and stand well back. I approach slowly, and lie flat on the upper level of sand, my face within inches of hers. A leatherback inspires neither cuddling nor petting, but her eyes spill great salty tears (actually, to rid themselves of sand and excess salt), and each time she sighs, I feel intense kinship and soon lose all consciousness of time and space.

I promise her a birthing place and talk quietly to her as I slowly shift and angle the heavy, wet sand. I encourage, I cajole. I nod. I praise. And soon I am telling her all my stories and the stories of the planet whose underbelly she knows so well, she who waited 35 years and more to lay eggs, she who swam 3,000 miles from Nova Scotia to fulfill her destiny as species mother on this beach, on this night.

She stays, immobile for what my teammates, standing 40 yards back, will later tell me amounted to two hours. When I have finally cleared enough sand, I gently pat the earth and tell her, perhaps because I have spent enough time on Pueblo Indian reservations with the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, and the wingeds to put aside my principal investigators’ identification of leatherbacks as purely instinctual creatures, that we are ready. I tell her that I will lift my arm and place it on the sand, and if she understands my motion, she should lift her flipper and place it near my hand, and mirabile dictu, she does it! Waiting patiently for me to clear and pat, she follows and follows again, and who can tell the dancer from the dance.

On our last night, someone from another patrol spots a flurry of scratch marks made by the last of a clutch of hatchlings off to Nova Scotia. The team follows the marks and manages to catch one of the newborns, and they race it down the beach for our inspection and adoration, then return it to the original nesting site should it need to imprint its full seaward trek. Those 65 days between the time a round wet egg the size of a tennis ball drops into the nest and this night when it brings forth a live miracle seem like a long journey indeed. But it is only the beginning. If this hatchling survives, it can live for perhaps 125 years. What an ironic counterpoint to the message we have been receiving at 28-second intervals from the shrill blips of the nuclear submarine in the Frederiksted harbor.   

Holding piña coladas and shading our eyes from the strong Caribbean sun on the day of departure, I ask one of the repeat Earthwatchers, who had lured her husband along on this expedition, if she would do it again. In her offhand style, she says, “Sure! But I wouldn’t do this one.” “Why not? I query, certain to hear about the eroded beach, the buggy, sweaty, soggy, sleepless nights. “Why not? Because I’ve already done it! I’ll come back and learn something else next year.” And so will I.

In retrospect, it was a bit of a physical ordeal. For the same money, I could have spent a week at a luxury spa where I would have been pampered into tranquility and rubbed with scented oils. Instead, I rubbed my own tired feet. But I did it on a beautiful island, and in an atmosphere of teamwork and camaraderie fostered by two incredible principal investigators. And as the primal moments mounted, so did our sense of harmony and balance and delight, and for some, a sense of larger purpose and meaning.

On a morning last week, my mind’s eye grazed the remembered carapace of the leatherback, with her barnacles and ectoparasites and occasional marks left during mating. As I recalled her emergence, her nesting, and that timeless return to the sea, I realized how much I want this ancient, gentle creature to survive. Surely the lady in the William James anecdote was wrong about her turtle theory in the scientific sense. But in a Faulknerian sense, she was right. It is “turtles all the way down.” In a world of uncertainty and confused morality, where destruction threatens, the creative force of an ancient species lumbering up on a sandy beach in the dark to put her mark on the future makes all the spas in the world mere decoration.

Happy to report that…

The Earthwatch Institute leatherback turtle project on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, at what is now the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, is one of the longest running sea turtle research and conservation projects of its kind in the world. Here, after two decades, nesting leatherbacks, the world’s largest reptiles, are beginning to make a recovery, with numbers recently doubling those of two decades ago, though the rest of the global population is in freefall. Scott and Karen Eckert, the principal investigators then in their late twenties, are today among the world’s leading herpetologists. Today, field research involves the use of ultrasound, microwave ID tags, and satellite tracking which has followed leatherbacks over 16,000 kilometers a year – or the distance from New York to Athens and back.

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More stories by Dea Adria Mallin