An Interruption¹

Editorial Comment. — This poem describes the author’s reflections on seeing a student stop his car on the road to help a snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, off into the underbrush. The geographic setting for the scenario is particularly poignant for me, as the incident occurred close to Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, where I was an undergraduate student over 40 years ago and first developed my own fascination for turtles, and the author, like me, is a medical doctor, and currently on staff at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I contacted him in order to ask permission to reprint this poem and it turned out we had also both spent time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, not many years apart. It’s a small world and full of close personal interconnections and small degrees of separation that help to bind many of us together...