IT’S been a long hot day on the beach. Just two days away from a full moon. It’s an almost perfect evening, the sun is dipping over the mountains in the west and the moon is rising, casting a pathway of silver across the face of the sea. For a few days now, we have been watching the volunteers from Archelon build a complicated corrugated cardboard runway through sunbeds, from the loggerhead nest near the bar to the blue of the Med, in this small corner of the Peloponnese. It is now 53 days since the eggs were laid, the pretty volunteer from France says she thinks tonight is the night.
We are a motley bunch of nationalities and ages gathering in the twilight. A French family bronzed and wind beaten off a moored catamaran; some Dutch backpackers from the campsite who light a joint in fading light; and a group of Athenian teenagers with mobile phones and constant banter. A spaniel is tied by its Italian owner to a tree and whines constantly to come and help dig.
The French volunteer is looking alarmed at the gathering numbers. “No flash, please,” she pleads, as we hold up our cameras like the paparazzi at the Oscars. There is a jostling for position towards the nest; the seaweed and sand that cover it are starting to heave like the first contractions of a birth. It’s just after 8pm, there are excited anticipated shouts. “Please, be quiet,” begs the volunteer. Like naughty school children we all respond, some of the toddlers lean too far and knock over the cardboard walls; “Right, you must sit down,” she says primly. Reluctantly, we all squat. There must be 30 of us by now. For the next 20 minutes we stare intently at the nest, nothing happens, maybe it is a false alarm, time to unpack the hospital night bag and go home.
Then just as the sun dips completely, and the bats start their Spitfire acrobatics above us, the nest begins to simmer and boil like a pan of water. Suddenly, small dark flippers, barely half an inch long, emerge through the debris. The first baby loggerhead is out and heading in totally the wrong direction. It is achingly painful to watch its frail two inches struggle out of the nest and head away from the sea. Now the beach is only illuminated by the light of the moon, the gentle lap of waves is an agonising 15 metres away. Slowly, the small creature fixes on the moon and laboriously starts to drag itself, inch by inch, to the sea.
So involved are we all with its plight that we hardly notice the small dark shadow inside the cardboard run. A kitten, making its way curiously, claws out, to the bubbling nest. In the nick of time it is spotted, and hands compete to grab it and fling it out of the way. Then in the dark, another 12 turtles emerge, they seem clearer now, as the moon brightens, of their destiny. They look like a line of tarantulas in the gloom moving at speed towards the water. The French volunteer desperately tries to stop children jumping and playing in the surf at the shore line, worried they will step on the hatchlings.
We all sigh with relief as a wave picks up the first turtle and sails it to sea, but our optimism is premature, on the return tide it is unceremoniously deposited back on the wet sand upside down.
By now, we are all quiet. The sheer scale of their fight for survival: sobering us to silence. These tiny animals and this vast ocean; it seems an almost impossible task that any will make it to adulthood. Our volunteer tells us that only about one in a hundred will live to maturity. As the last hatchling, barely visible now in the dark of the night, is finally engulfed by the water, I look across the shimmering line of light illuminating the sea. I think of the beaches of Lebanon, of the baby turtles emerging there tonight, of their same struggle to the shoreline, drawn by the same moon, and of the thick black slick of oil that will greet them. Of the whole generation wiped out. And I remember as I look to the horizon of the children, not just in Beirut but beyond, in all the war zones and poverty stricken places, whose lives too will never happen because of our actions. I catch the eye of the young volunteer, a silver tear on her cheek reflecting the moon, she smiles at me as she brushes it away, “C’est difficile,” she whispers. It is.
