Portrait of a Dinosaur
A few years back, my wife and I had this text exchange:
Wife: Do we want a Sulcata tortoise? A friend knows a lady looking to re-home one. Me: *Googling 'Sulcata tortoise'* How big is it? Wife: 80 pounds. Me: How big will it get? Wife: About the size of a bumper car. Me: Why is she getting rid of it? Wife: The lady who has him is getting old and can't handle him anymore. Me: What's his name? Wife: Crush. Me: Like the character from Finding Nemo? Wife: Yeah. Me: That's dumb. Wife: Yeah. Me: Can we rename him? Wife: Sure. Me: Hmmm... Wife: So do we want him? Me: Yes, I think we do.
My wife and kids returned home with the tortoise, which they had loaded into the back of our Hyundai Santa Fe. My kids spilled out of the car laughing uncontrollably. En route, the tortoise took a shit in the car (thankfully, my wife had the foresight to line the car with old beach towels and cardboard).
My kids' laughter was justified—Sulcata tortoise turds are a spectacle. First of all, the sheer size is hilarious. You could build a brick house with a month’s worth of tortoise Tush Twinkies. Second, and what I would learn all too soon, is that the sound made when a tortoise lets loose the caboose is straight out of a catalog for cartoon sound effects. It’s like the flushing sound of a prison toilet.
Once we calmed the kids down and cleaned up the back of the Santa Fe, I unloaded the tortoise and carried him into the yard. If you want to know what it’s like carrying an 80-pound tortoise, imagine carrying a sentient beach ball that’s filled with wet cement and an utter lack of regard for equilibrium.
Once I got to a place in the yard that seemed safe, I lowered him to the ground and he immediately sucked himself into his shell. This caused another disconcerting sound, a violent sort of hiss—it’s the exhalation of air from his lungs to make room for his avocado-sized head, his clawed, flipper-like forelimbs, and hind limbs that look like sun-dried sausage stumps.
We coaxed him out of his shell with raspberries. Tortoises love raspberries. It gets all over their faces, and they look adorable, like a really ugly baby being spoon-fed by an unsteady grandparent. Once we warmed him up with the raspberries, we wiped his face and scratched his chin—he loved him a good chin scratch.
Next, he started exploring the yard. He didn’t stop for several days, just kind of tooted around the perimeter, getting the lay of the land. Our brief internet searches told us this was normal, a territorial instinct to ensure he knew the boundaries of his new digs and understood who was on his team. He immediately clocked our dog, our chickens, the barn cats, and he was like, “All right, fam, let’s get shit done.”
While he acquainted himself with the yard, I brainstormed names and settled on the following: Sir Scooter Waddle-bottoms. Sir because many of our pets have titles—Captain Banjo Butterbuns, Miss Millie Butterbuns (Butterbuns is our canine surname), Sister Lightning Jenkins, Mr. Thunder Jones, Princess Peckerhead Dubois, Professor Cottonballs McGee, etc. Scooter because as soon as I said it, my wife came up with the nickname Scootz Matootz. And Waddle-bottoms because it was the literal equivalent of his physicality, similar to my father-in-law’s one-armed golf buddy who’s nicknamed Lefty.
Life with Scooter was fun. He was the definition of a conversation piece, and conversation pieces are among my favorite things. People would come over and marvel at his size or at the way he cruised all over the yard. Aesop must have had a pet tortoise because The Tortoise and the Hare folktale is spot on—this guy just scooted around the yard all day. I’m convinced he got more steps in than I did on any given day.
I especially liked it when messengers or leaf blowers naively wandered into our yard. I’ve seen at least a dozen men open our gate, see Sir Scooter Waddlebottoms walking towards them, and scream at Mariah Carey-level decibels. It can be upsetting coming face to face with a dinosaur.
Scooter’s prehistoric qualities truly revealed themselves as he got bigger. Providing food became more of a challenge. Collard greens, grasses, mulberry leaves, heads of romaine, the occasional fruit salad of bananas, strawberries, raspberries, and watermelon, prickly pear cactus pads, and whatever else I could find on sale at Trader Joe’s or in the hills behind our house.
I used to shave the cactus pads because it seemed like a bad idea to, ya know, eat cactus spines. One day, though, I was sitting on the steps of our deck, midlessly shaving a cactus pad for Sir Scooter when he waddled over and snatched the cactus from the barbecue tongs I was using to hold it. He ate the cactus, spines and all, as if it was a scoop of frozen yogurt. I mentioned as much to a neighbor who just shrugged. “He’s a goddamned dinosaur, what do you expect?”
This observation, that we were living with a dinosaur, triggered other prehistoric behaviors. One summer morning, just before Scooter was readying himself for hibernation, my son screamed for my wife, “Mom! Scooter’s guts spilled out!”
My wife ran out into the yard to my writing shed, which had also become Scooter’s hibernation shack—the big bastard refused to use the tortoise house I made him that was the size of a VW Beetle. I still resent him for his rejection. Anyhow, my wife found my son standing to the side of Scooter who had mounted my writing shed. He was thrusting at about 2 BPM on the metronome. Not an aggressive lover, but a determined one. As for the object of Scooter’s affection—the heart wants what the heart wants, and to a prehistoric tortoise brain, my writing shed was seven kinds of sexy.
As for the spilled guts—let me defend my son: a tortoise penis is, without question, one of the most repugnant things I’ve ever seen. Which is saying something. I’ve been in my share of locker rooms, and I would have argued that the human penis was the pinnacle of repugnance, but this pornographic tortoise encounter made me rethink rating method. Nevertheless, my son was traumatized, and we were forced to have the talk—The Birds and the Bees and The Giant Sulcata Tortoise.
When Scooter woke from that hibernation, he emerged bigger and—somehow—more prehistoric. I’m a decent woodworker. I’ve built a treehouse, a chicken coop, a bed for my wife and me, a bunkbed for my son, tables, Adirondack chairs, and lots of other stuff. I know my way around 2x4s and deck screws. Still, Scooter broke three gates I had built in pursuit of some flowers he viewed as snacks. He would dig himself a little foothold and then push and push and push and slow-and-steady those gates until he turned them to kindling.
His dinosaur brain was maturing.
It took a hard turn when we brought home Captain Banjo Butterbuns. Banjo was not present when Scooter did his initial inventory of the perimeter. Banjo was decidedly not family. Big deal, you think. He’s a tortoise. What’s he going to do to a Basset Hound? Well, there was something about his eyes that made us reconsider. When Scooter’s gaze fell on Banjo, his eyes widened. They practically bulged. There was a look in his eyes—his lifeless dinosaur eyes—that said, “This is war, motherfuckers! Get some!” And then he marched incessantly toward Banjo. It was a deliberate movement, the locomotion of a monster in your nightmares that never stops coming for you. He looked like Ursula from The Little Mermaid when she crawls across the ship’s deck—weird, terrifying, and aggressively uncanny.
It was unsettling enough that we brought Banjo inside and fired up Google. What we found was the stuff of Stephen King. Yes, Sulcata tortoises are territorial. Yes, they are aggressive. Yes, they can kill you. Okay, maybe not me or you or a grizzly bear. But if you’re a toddler or a Basset Hound with big floppy ears and a Sulcata doesn’t take kindly to you on his turf, he can rush you, latch on to your skin with his beak-like mouth, and then march you to a boulder where he’ll dig in and slowly ram you against that hard place until all your bones break like a 2x4 gate, and you cease to be a living thing.
Dinosaurs, man. They don’t play.
This was the end of the road for Sir Scooter Waddle-bottoms. The choice between a dinosaur and a puppy is not much of a choice at all, especially when your puppy looks like this:
We re-homed Sir Scooter Waddle-bottoms with a family eager to have him. He spent a couple years with that family until their capacity for dinosaurs was spread thin, and now Scooter lives with a family better suited to his developing dinosaur tendencies, people who work in a pet store, take Scooter on walks (seriously), and don’t have puppy-shaped appetizers.
Never mind the chaos, the broken gates, the humped shed, the homicidal tendencies aimed at Basset Hound puppies. I’m grateful for my time with Scooter. I’m grateful to have seen and experienced firsthand an echo of the prehistoric, an embodiment of the ancient, a reminder to remain determined and resilient, to keep going, to live this life on my terms and take down any dogs, gate, or sheds that get in my way.
Wow. The things that happen to you. Why aren't you a movie, or at least a cartoon?
Aww I miss that determined old man. He was a good one. I do love your current feathered dinosaurs too though. Definitely easier to hold (even if they run from me).
What joy that he's found a forever home that indulges him with walks!