travel saved my life spent a couple nights in tortuguero across the canal from the island town where they spray the market for dengue fever while children play soccer in the street took a night tour of the beach which is also a national park where endangered green sea turtles crawl out from the atlantic ocean to lay hundreds of eggs in nests above high tide one of the guides passed around an egg destroyed by another turtle he took the baby out and it was still warm and pulsing in my hand the first desperate kicks of a swim ecologists call this frenzyswimming it died in my hands and we buried it there wanted to put it back in the earth but why the fuck did he have to take it out of its shell in the first place waited and watched lightning fill the sky with light across the ocean i wanted to cry but i did not cry watched a female turtle laboring over her pit above high tide spitting eggs out in rasping slimy piles it was silent on the beach and i think god was there