“No point to sound just like the other man. Don’t even try, ’cause you can’t. You got to sound like yourself, have your own style. That’s the way it’s supposed to be…It’s all creamed ‘taters, just fixed a little different.”

Benton Flippen

Tortuguero, Costa Rica

My family and I lived on the Caribbean lowland side of Costa Rica, where the jungle meets the sea, working as co-directors of a research station run by the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, now known as the Sea Turtle Conservancy. The following story describes one of my experiences from that remarkable time.

With wet, black sand under foot, dense jungle crowding the open beach and a heavily overcast sky, the surrounding darkness is nearly complete. Thunderstorms out over the Caribbean provide an occasional flash, illuminate the fullness of the tropical sky to the horizon, and then plunge it back into darkness, leaving white branches, etched in my eyes. I pull my hat brim further down, blocking the lightning from my eyes to protect my night vision and slowly pick my way along the beach

As my eyes re-adjust, vague forms take shape at the corners of my vision; the line between the western sky and the tops of the trees, where black meets blacker; the gleam of the bioluminescence riding the waves, lighting its own way through the night to crash with its host on the sand and fade into the darkness; a drift log a few steps in front of me, half buried in the sand that blends back into the darkness as I attempt focus on it. As a creature of the daylight my eyes fail me in this opposite world. I move along the beach leaning forward into the night with a wide eyed stare, concentrating on my peripheral vision, looking at nothing, yet struggling to observe. Similar to holding your breath to hear the smallest of sounds, here I find I must avoid a direct focus to observe the faint objects around me, it’s a matter of not looking, in order to see, of trusting the corner of my eye.

     I know this beach well from my daylight walks.   I know the danger of its many logs and trees swept out of the nearby river mouth and stranded here on the sand, sometimes with dangerous, broken branches and roots still attached.  I know of the powerful rip currents that force these trees onto the shore, shift enough sand to bury them and then leave the steep and changing sand berms scattered along the shore.   So, tonight in the blackness I move slowly and with care.   

     Along this shore the breezes blow in off the sea by day, then at some point during the night, stop for a while, change direction, and blow back out to sea.   The land, it seems, takes a deep breath, holds it, then lets it out.   I stand here in the stillness of the pre-dawn, at the end of one of these daily exhalations, waiting for a new breath from the sea, fresh and nourishing.   The air now is moist and warm, as if from the mouth of an animal, sticky and heavy, filled with the smell of flowers, earth and growing things, mold and rot, the smells of life and death in the rain forest.  

     I am walking a remote Costa Rican beach, 25 miles south of the Nicaraguan border near the village of Tortuguero, Spanish for “land of the turtle.”   It’s late August, the height of the turtle nesting season and I am looking for Chelonia Mydas, the beautiful, Atlantic Green Turtle.   The gentle, hard-shelled mother from the sea returning to lay eggs in her natal sand.  

     As the director of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation’s Biological Field Station in Tortuguero, I have walked this beach many times, found and watched green turtles nesting, either following others more experienced than myself, or later acted as a group leader.   The nesting ritual of sea turtles is ancient and as magical as the sea itself.   Tonight I wanted to experience it alone.  

     Walking up the beach, I see in front of me what appears to be another partially buried log.   A few steps closer, it becomes recognizable as a broad band of darker sand, churned up as a turtle pushed its way from the waters edge to find a place to nest, well above the highest tides.   When a turtle moves through the sand, her powerful front flippers push sand back behind her, making a track that is four to five feet wide, bordered on both sides with a series of angled ridges left from her front flippers, with a groove running down the center, the mark from her dragging tail.   One can determine her direction by these ridges at the sides of the track.   On nights with a partial moon or a little starlight, the direction of the turtle making the track is fairly easy to determine from a standing position.   Tonight however, it requires a closer inspection, so I stoop to investigate.   Feeling the sand ridges along the edge of the track I make this to be her inbound trail.   I continue up the beach another few minutes to check if she has already finished laying her eggs and returned to the sea.   I do find a second track, check its direction and verify that she has returned to the sea, so I continue on up the beach looking for another inbound track.

     With streamlined shells and water wings instead of feet, these three hundred-fifty pound animals glide through the Caribbean for many hundreds of miles to this twenty-mile section of beach to mate in March and April.   Females come ashore to nest in late May, and by August, the peak of the season, there can be thousands of them each night within this the largest green turtle rookery in the western hemisphere.  

        Green turtles are extremely cautious creatures, emerging only at night, to nest under the cover of darkness.   With the buoyancy of water behind them, they must pull themselves over the sand with enormous effort, before finally choosing a nesting site as far as a hundred yards from the water, all the while wary of danger and quick to abandon the partially prepared nest and return home to the sea.   It is for this reason that, even on this darkest of nights, I won’t use my small flashlight until I have located a turtle and she begins her final stages of nesting.

     A short distance down the beach, I discover another inbound track.   This time when I check for a return track, what I find is an inbound track.   After finding no evidence that either or these turtles have returned to the sea I assume that there must be two turtles nesting nearby.   With no idea how long either turtle has been at work, I follow the nearest track, inland towards the trees.   I have to move even slower now in the darkness, looking for where the track ends, a dark disturbance in the sand with a turtle in the middle of it.  

      Once a turtle chooses a suitable nesting site, she begins to throw sand with her long front flippers, digging a pit perhaps twice the diameter of her body and one or two feet deep.   Known as a body pit, this first stage of nesting is another one of the hazards of walking around in the darkness on this beach.   The last thing I want do is fall into one of these craters and land on a turtle.  

      Moving further away from the crashing surf, I can hear the sound of sand being thrown into the underbrush at the edge of the encroaching jungle.   Keeping low and walking softly, so as not to disturb her, I continue along until she comes into view.   Crouching in an old body pit a few feet away, I watch her for a while and determine that she is just beginning her body pit.   As digging her body pit can take as much as forty minutes, and what I enjoy watching most, is the next phase of nesting, I leave her and backtrack to the waters edge to see what the other turtle is up to.  

     I glance out to sea while walking back and notice a few stars peeking through gaps in the thinning clouds.   With the improved visibility on the beach, I can just make out the first track a short distance down the beach, and head off towards it.   The air, starting to move again, gives me the promise of some relief from the balmy heat and the sand flies that have been my constant companions.   Once again I move away from the water to look for the turtle and find her lying at the bottom of her own body pit.   She is resting, so I lie down in the sand behind her to wait, promptly get a face full of sand and so determine that she has not yet finished digging her pit.   She however is much farther along on her pit than her sister and I expect she will soon be switching from throwing sand with her front flippers digging her body pit, to scooping out the egg chamber with her hind flippers.   This is a completely different series of movements and is a wondrous thing to watch.

     I watch the stars and wait nearby in another pit for her to make the shift.   When she finally does, I move in to watch her hind flippers begin the difficult job of digging a two-foot deep hole in the sand below her.   These flippers until now, functioning as rudders, steered her away from this shore, forty or more years ago.   Now they have brought her here again, to begin a complex series of moves, never taught, always known, mother to daughter, from before the time of the dinosaurs.   I watch each flipper as it takes its turn, slowly and carefully, dipping, scraping, gathering, lifting and then placing a small pile of sand behind her at the edge of the hole.   The same flipper then takes a stance on its side of the hole to become a brace to support the turtle’s weight, while the other flipper readies itself for its descent into the slowly forming, vase-shaped chamber.   What happens next is a move that punctuates the flipper’s change from one role to the other, from brace to shovel, from yin to yang, that comes with a surprising burst of speed.   At the same moment that the shovel fin unloads and finds solid ground, the brace fin gives way, slashing at the sand piled at its side from its last scoop, sending it flying far up the side of the pit.   Instantly following this dramatic and powerful movement, the flipper reverts to slow motion and begins its decent into the chamber with the care and gentleness of a mother preparing her nest.   It is an ancient dance, every bit as mesmerizing as the licking flames of a wood fire or the twinkling of stars.  

       This phase of nesting lasts around ten minutes, perhaps longer if she runs into roots in the sand or other flotsam.   Often a turtle will give up the nesting site if she can’t extend the chamber to the reach of her flippers, for that is when she knows that she is done.   After a hundred or more of these cycles of, shovel-brace, shovel-brace, she stops, brings her flippers together over the hole like praying hands, breathes a great sigh and begins to fill the chamber with eggs.  

     Now concerned only with laying the eggs, she will be less disturbed by my presence.  This is the time that our researchers would tag her and record the length of her carapace, or shell, and gather other biometric data.    But I am not here tonight for science so I move in to a foot behind her and pull out my tiny flashlight to illuminate the chamber and watch the falling of over a hundred, white, leathery eggs, a bit larger than ping-pong balls.   Out they come in short bursts of up to four or five eggs over the next ten minutes or so, until the hole is nearly full.    

       When she is done she rests for a moment and then begins to cover the eggs.   First with her hind flippers until the chamber is even with the bottom of the pit.   Then her front flippers start pushing more sand to her back flippers, to further disguise the nest.   She will spend up to an hour working to camouflage the area.   Impossible to remove all signs of her activity, she will, in this hour, make it hard to tell where in this large area of disturbed sand the clutch lays hidden.  

     These eggs will remain in the sand for sixty days when they will hatch, all at nearly the same time.   The hatchlings don’t really climb out of the sand, as one might expect; it’s more of a group wiggle.   At each wiggle, particles of sand trickle down below the cluster of turtles.   In this way, the entire group slowly moves upward towards the surface, just as a pebble at the bottom of a bucket of sand floats to the top as the bucket is shaken.   After three days of this movement, they begin to feel the heat of the surface sand, stop their upward movement and wait for cooler times.   Emergence tends to occur in the early morning hours, just before sun up, or during a rainstorm when the surface sand temperature is safe.   Then the two ounce hatchlings set out on their next adventure, an adventure that for just a few will bring them back here to Tortuguero, to this sand forty or fifty years from now.

        I have seen enough for tonight, so as she continues to camouflage her nest I quietly take my leave, electing not to bother her sister turtle off to my right who is still thrashing amongst the sea grapes and morning glory vines.   Moving away from her pit and standing to stretch, I feel the strength of the new breeze and greet a low crescent moon breaking through the clouds just above the trees.   With the darkest part of the night chased away by the gathering moonlight, the crashing surf and much of the beach are now visible.    A short way up the beach I can see the wet and shining shell a turtle breaking through the pounding surf on her way to nest. 

I head home holding all the wonders of this night close in my heart; the pure darkness that surrounded me, the intermittent lightning, the mother turtles and their eggs below me in the sand even now beginning the transformation to baby turtles and the crescent moon breaking free to light my way home. Easily retracing the steps I struggled to make in the darkness only a few hours before, I see where my tracks weave between logs and piles of sea weed and then farther along where they cross the track of a sea turtle. As the sea mist condenses in my hair and the gathering drops begin to fall cool and fresh onto my neck and shoulders, I walk on to where the tracks cross, mine and hers.

Heather and I were married 40 years ago in the little white church along the Broad Brook, right in the center of East Barnard, Vt.

Nearly everyone in the village attended our wedding that day. The store, next door to the church, and the only business in the village, closed for the day and put a sign on the door that said, “Closed for Randy and Heather’s wedding, you come too.”

East Barnard was, and still is, a small community; our neighbors are all friends or relatives, many both. Heather and I grew up at opposite ends of the little village and played together as children. My family, the Leavitts, settled along the Broad Brook in the late 1700s.

Heather’s grandfather bought a farm down the brook from the village in 1938. We live on that farm now.

The wedding was a joyful day. As we joined hands and said our vows, officiated by both Heather’s grandfather and mine, we were the first couple to join our respective families together in all the years both families lived along the brook. The little church was standing-room-only. It seemed like everyone in the valley was there… except Heather’s brother Clive.

He was sailing to Alaska aboard a three-masted Barkentine schooner.

Clive was a tall-ship sailor. That’s the first thing I say to anyone interested, but unfamiliar with him, or his life. Those few words seem to set the stage for anything else I might say.

When he went to sea after high school on an old wooden sailboat, it seemed he couldn’t have found a better place, and fit, for himself. Although he sailed on different vessels, at the time of our wedding he was on the Regina Maris, Queen of the Sea, a 140-foot, three-masted barque, built in Denmark in 1908, ported in San Diego, Calif.

The Regina Maris was contracted to sail along the pacific coast from the Galapagos to Alaska carrying teams of oceanographic scientists studying humpback-whale migration patterns. Clive was the first mate on the Maris. He knew ropes and knots and how to work canvas into a sail. He learned smith-work and could forge and build with iron and steel. He was drawn to all these hard, gritty, fascinating, soulful things from older times, but tall-ships were tall-ships, and Clive loved them.

Along with being a seafarer, he was a storyteller, a singer, a guitar player, and he could make you laugh. We missed him at the wedding.

A few months after our wedding, Clive returned home to Vermont for Christmas. It was great having him around again between his sailing adventures. Then, late one night, in early January, driving home from town, he wrapped his car around a tree. He didn’t survive. He was 25.

•

There is no extra space on board a tall ship. You get a bunk, and a tiny space for your kit, that’s it. Being a man of few possessions, Clive was comfortable with that. He could fit everything he owned, most of which came from a thrift shop, into a backpack … except his guitar. The guitar was slung over his shoulder, stuffed into a sailcloth bag made by a friend at the Friday Harbor Sail Company. We don’t know just when or where Clive got his guitar, or from whom, but once it showed up in his hands, it was ever present. He would make up a song for you right on the spot, with rhyming, coherent lyrics drawn from anything that came to mind: your name, the color of your shirt, what you were eating, or the fact you were laughing at his previous verse. Everything was fodder for the current verse and his guitar was the music behind it all.

When Clive died that heartbreaking night in January, aside from his kit and a cruise journal written during his last voyage, his guitar was the only physical object he left behind.

The guitar, a 1965 Guild F-30, grew in importance to us over the years of missing Clive. Back in the early days after his death, we gave the guitar to George, one of Clive’s good friends, a guitar player and oftentimes housemate who never lived far from the docks along the Northeast coast. We thought it was a good place for Clive’s guitar, in the hands of one of his friends. No one in the family needed the guitar, it was kind of beat-up what with all those hard years of shipboard life, and most significantly, we were so devastated by Clive’s departure that making a gift of his favored possession to one of his dear friends was something we actually could do, in a time that felt like there was nothing we could do.

It made us feel better to help someone else feel better.

Heather and I went back to college later that January. Time passed, and, years later, we built our own home on the farm and started a family. Our two boys, Asa and Simon, grew up there, the eighth generation in the Broad Brook valley. Our friend George kept the guitar for quite a few years, but eventually brought it back to us when he heard Asa, by then in his mid-teens, was interested in learning to play guitar. George told us when he delivered it to us that he had just been keeping it safe for us, until we needed it back. By then, we were very glad to have Clive’s guitar back with us.

Asa used the guitar for a few years, but eventually his teacher convinced him it was in such rough shape that it was very difficult to play, that it would inhibit his further learning and, he feared the guitar might actually fall apart. It was heavily worn, with lots and lots of obvious cracks on the top and sides, you could hear the internal braces rattle if you gave it a good shake, and worse, the neck had moved out of alignment. Not long after learning all this we bought Asa a new guitar for his high school graduation and Clive’s guitar came back to our house again, this time, cherished more than ever, beautiful in it’s way, what with its salty patina, but by now, basically unplayable.

We moved it around the house over the next 20 years. For a while it hung from a hook on the living room wall, until we repainted. Then it took up residence in a hallway corner, then a closet. One time, for Heather’s birthday a friend carefully tuned it up to a low pitch and played a song … but it seemed risky to leave it with any tension on the strings so we let the strings go slack and it went back to its corner.

Really, just having it in our house was enough.

Then, last spring, nearly 40 years after Clive died, during a spring cleaning episode, I convinced myself I should try to get the guitar fixed or at least find out if that was even possible. I didn’t mention it to Heather. I didn’t think she would notice it was gone and if it was fixable I thought it might be a nice surprise.

I called a new acquaintance, Jake Wildwood, a local, luthier legend, who calls himself “The Country Guitar Doctor.” I made an appointment with the Doc and eventually drove the guitar to his workshop. He works in the back of an old country store, now an antique shop, owned by his family. It doesn’t look like a guitar shop … until you go out back.

Jake agreed the Guild was in terrible shape … nearly destroyed is what he said. But he also said it was fixable and might be a good sounding guitar. He agreed to have a go at it. I told him there was no hurry…it had been unplayable for 40 years, I said he could just take his time.

But, I thought about it all summer, and by August, I called him again.

I told him more about Clive’s story and the approaching 40-year mark of his sad departure. I asked if it might be possible to get the guitar restored by Christmas. He agreed.

•

With no word by mid-December I had given up on the guitar as a surprise under the tree. I knew Jake was very busy, and I had originally told him timing was not an issue. I was prepared to honor that, and wait. But then I got a call—Heather happened to be in the same room.

Jake told me the repairs took more work than he expected, but the Guild was ready. Forty years after Clive brought himself, and his guitar, home from the sea for the last time, the guitar was ready to be played again. And, Jake told me, “it sounded fantastic.”

With Jake’s enthusiasm on the phone, I quickly dismissed any notion of sneaking off to get the guitar as a Christmas surprise for Heather.

By the time I hung up, I knew she needed to come with me to meet Jake in person, to see his shop and hear about the work he did on her brother’s guitar. And, I wanted Jake to play a tune for Heather. So when she asked me who was on the phone, I told her we were off on an adventure, no questions allowed, and that she should just breathe whenever she felt overly curious.

She went along with this riddle until an hour later when we pulled up to the old country store, now called The Wildwood Flower. We walked onto the porch, along the rail where horses would have tied up back in an earlier time. At the door, I turned to Heather and asked if she had any idea why we were here.

“No,” she said, “you’ve got me. I have no idea.” I laughed, turned the knob and pushed open the door. Jake was just inside the door, sitting behind a low counter.

“Hi Jake,” I said, “this is my wife Heather. She has no idea why we’re here.”

Jake says, “Oh, hi Heather,” reached off to his left, came up with the guitar, which was all tuned and leaning against the counter, waiting for this moment.

“This is why you’re here” he said. He began to play. The years melted away.

As Jake played, he talked about the work he did and how much he liked the feel and the sound. To get the guitar back into playing shape Jake removed and reset the neck, dressed the frets, glued and cleated many small cracks on the top and the sides, replaced, or reglued, much of the interior bracing, replaced the saddle and the bone nut at the top of the fretboard. He cleaned it inside and out, got rid of the dust and grime, but left the patina just as it had developed over time at sea and then, that very day, strung it up. It was a lot of work, but it looked happy, and it sounded great. We brought it home. As there was no reliable, hard case to protect the Guild, I stopped by Hanover Strings, our local guitar store across the river, without the guitar, and purchased a simple, black case that the sales guys felt would, most likely, fit an F-30. When I got home and tried it I found the case was too big for the Guild, so I returned to the store a few days later. This time I brought the Guild with me, protected, but slipping around a bit inside the shiny new case.

The sales guys had heard some of my story about the guitar a few days earlier when I purchased the case; they were all anxious to see it. While they were looking it over and debating the proper case size, one of the guys came from out back.

“Look what I found,” he said and presented a vintage, 1965, Guild F-30 guitar case. I was astonished and thrilled. Clive’s guitar just floated, gently, down into the fluffy interior of that old case … just like it was made for it. Home at last.

That perfect, old Guild case has a small, metal, shield-shaped, logo-emblem mounted on it that says, “Guild, Made to be Played.”

As it turns out, and a surprise to me, I am playing it.

When it occurred to me last spring to call Jake to see if it was possible to repair the guitar, I was thinking mostly of making the beautiful aesthetic of this family heirloom and its importance to our lives even more present by making it a functional instrument again. I thought that it would return to its corners around the house, as before, and that I might play it once in a while.

At that moment, I considered myself a fiddler, not a guitar picker. Oh, I had a guitar once, a long time ago, an uninspiring 12-string I played with only six strings, which I thought might make it easier. I did some self-taught, elementary guitar work, slowly teaching my fingers to make basic chords. I even strummed along and sang songs with Clive back when he was in town between adventures, but I was too busy with other things then and never found the enthusiasm to keep after it, and so didn’t develop any real skills or repertoire. But now, the reality is I have opened that case, and played Clive’s guitar, every-single-day since it came home to us last Christmas, often for hours at a time.

The Guild F-30 has its own storied history. Mississippi John Hurt played one, as did Paul Simon when he and Art Garfunkle recorded “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” It turns out the F-30, up until the late ‘60s when the factory made some design changes to the guitar that significantly changed the sound, was a highly regarded guitar for folk music, acoustic blues, and the like. This particular F-30 has all that behind it, and its own unique history, such as I have recounted here.

They may all have a certain tendency to be great guitars, but for me, playing Clive’s guitar produces such rich, shimmering overtones that I find myself looking around sometimes, or stopping short in the middle of a song to see where that extra sound is coming from. I have often thought I heard someone else singing along behind me while I am playing. It has enchanted me.

•

I played a tune for Clive, on his own guitar, on January 10, 40 years after the tragic night he sailed away from us forever, and I think about him, his life, and our friendship, every time I play.

The beginning

of something new,

starts in the middle

of everything else.

FiddlerJoeBob 2020