Yael Fitzpatrick and her theater technician friends attempt to save a sea turtle.

Yael Fitzpatrick is an art director, publications designer, sometimes writer, and science communicator. She spent the first part of her life concentrating on math and the sciences, and then took an unexpected detour into the arts. She has since managed to come somewhat full circle. Currently she is the Manager of Design and Branding for the American Geophysical Union, and previously was Art Director for the Science family of journals. She has almost accepted the fact that she will never be a backup singer or dancer. Follow her at @GazelleInDminor.

This story originally aired on June 9, 2017.

Story Transcript

A lifetime ago, I worked in a theater world.  I was a stage manager and a scenic artist and I did a lot of work with lighting.  I loved lighting.  Lighting is tangible and mechanical and it’s ephemeral all at the same time.  There's something so compelling about the fact that you can’t see light until it hits something. 

To create or change an environment using light, it’s heady stuff.  It’s magical.  I once made it look like it was raining on stage using nothing but light.  That was cool.  I loved lighting. 

The summer of 1990, I did theatrical lighting work as an electrician at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.  Spoleto is this amazing festival of theater and dance and music and fine arts, and I had a blast. 

The following summer, I wasn’t working for the festival any longer, but I did go down during the season for a visit.  I stayed with friends in a beach house on the Atlantic Ocean.  I went for walks on the beach multiple times every day.  I lived in St. Louis at the time -- go Cards! -- so walks on any beach were a rarity.  I just couldn’t get enough of it.  Just walking on the sand, hearing the ocean.  It was always grounding and calming and restorative.  It was always magical. 

The night before I went back home, my friends threw me a party. It was really sweet of them.  It was utterly lovely.  But I did sneak out at one point for one last solo walk on the beach.  I headed out going north, the sound of the water to my right. 

Now, there was a new moon that night so it was really dark out.  It was almost pitch black.  I don’t think there was any other person out on that beach, and it felt like a dream.  You know how sometimes if you look into darkness and your eyes start to play tricks on you, it just feels kind of unreal.  You can’t really be sure if you’re really seeing what you think you're seeing or if it’s kind of a phantom.  So that night took on that unreal quality. 

I was just walking along, just lost in my thoughts, just in my own little bubble.  But the bubble burst quite a ways up the beach when, to my right, I heard a [makes sound].  I looked and I saw this dark, shadowy something coming up out of the water.  It scared the shit out of me. 

I wish I could say I'd been brave.  I wish I could say I stayed to check it out.  And who knows?  Maybe if this had happened today, maybe I would have stayed, maybe I would have been brave.  But all those years ago, I was not brave.  I turned and I ran as fast as I could back down to the beach, back to the party. 

I burst through the door panting for breath and I said, “Does anybody have a flashlight?”  This was a party full of theater technicians, so pretty much everybody pulled a Maglite off a holster on their belt and held it out. 

I tried to explain what had happened.  I don't know that I was making much sense.  I couldn’t make sense of what I had just seen.  It had all happened so quickly and it was so dark out there and I was so scared and I was so confused. 

A group of about half a dozen or so of us went back out, back up the beach.  We were half joking, half nervous, not sure what we were going to find.  I know there was at least one reference to bad horror movies. 

Eventually, quite a ways back up the beach, we came upon the large, dark, shadowy something that was still coming up out of the water and up onto the sand.  But now there were flashlights and I could see.  We could see.  It was a giant sea turtle. 

Now, one of our group, a woman named Missy, instantly took charge.  I'd only met Missy that night, but she seemed to know what she was talking about.  She seemed to at least be confident in her knowledge so I, and all of us, really, followed her lead. 

Missy said that, first of all, we could not have flashlights on the turtle, that it would freak this animal out.  Missy said that it didn’t make any sense that the turtle was out on the beach that night.  She said that sea turtles come out of the water to lay their eggs but they do it when there's a full moon, and there was a new moon that night.  Missy said that if the turtle laid her eggs at the wrong time that all of the babies would die. 

So we stood there watching this turtle trying to figure out why she was out in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we realized that she was making a beeline, as much as turtles can make a beeline, for this one particular sand dune or, more precisely, for a streetlight that was behind the dune.  She must have mistaken the streetlight for the moon. 

But the streetlight was on the other side of a busy road that lay behind the dune.  We realized that she would keep moving towards that streetlight with singular purpose and most likely get hit by a car on that road and die. 

No problem, we said.  There's plenty of us here.  We can get around her, we can pick her up, we can put her back in the water.  But Missy, and to this day I don't know how Missy had all this information about giant sea turtles or how much of it was even true, but Missy said that we could not touch the turtle.  That if we did, she would panic, she would drop all of her eggs and all of the babies would die. 

So we all just stood there feeling utterly helpless just watching this resolute, determined turtle just move further up the beach, move further towards that sand dune and further towards that streetlight, toward the road, toward almost certain death.  We just stood there feeling utterly helpless for quite some time. 

Then, after we’d been standing there for quite some time, we realized that it seemed like the turtle was turning, just a littlest bit.  And that she was turning toward me, and toward my friend Steve who was standing right next to me.  And we all had this same crazy thought, almost without saying it. 

You see, I was wearing a white jean jacket.  Now, don’t judge me.  It was the nineties and white jean jackets were cool.  You would have done the same. 

So I was wearing a white jean jacket and my friend Steve was wearing a white button-down shirt.  So we all had the same crazy thought and we realized we needed to see if it might work. 

So Steve and I huddled as close to one another as we could, and everybody else shined all of the flashlights right onto us.  The turtle turned a little bit more, and we realized it was working.  Holy shit, it was working!  We didn’t know if it was that we were closer or looked larger or brighter, but it was working. 

Steve and I made a long, slow, wide, gentle, illuminated arc back down the beach.  And the turtle made a long, slow, wide, gentle, dark, shadowy arc following us.  Took a good long while, but Steve and I ended up in the water.  We were in the waves, we were slowly moving deeper out.  Darned if that turtle didn’t follow us into the water, follow us deeper out until she was swimming.  She swam back out to sea and we didn’t see her again. 

As scared as I had been when I first saw that turtle, my feelings were now completely turned upside down.  I was euphoric.  I was tingling.  I felt like I was floating above the water. 

That was more than twenty-five years ago.  And, to this day, saving a giant sea turtle by accidentally impersonating the moon is one of my favorite, most magical moments of my life.  It’s definitely the most meaningful lighting work I ever did by a long shot. 

Thank you.