Guide to New York

She was just fifteen as she drifted offshore in the warm, tropical eastern Pacific off the small beach called Ostional in a country that, about 500 years earlier, Christopher Columbus had discovered and named "Costa Rica", the "rich coast." She was an olive ridley sea turtle.

The nearly daily afternoon tropical rains of December had slipped away as the marine turtle waited expectantly. The moon was in its final quarter and, though she did not know why, it was having an effect on her.

As it has done for unimaginable epochs, the moon was silently passing through its seemingly everlasting phases. Though she could not know it, it was drawing this olive ridley turtle ashore. She was not alone. At first, a few yards away, another Pacific sea turtle joined her, then a third, followed by a dozen, then hundreds, thousands, now tens of thousands of marine sea turtles. For more than one hundred million years it had been thus: vast migrations of ancient creatures, culminating when the moon was in this phase.

There is something magical about life. A few months earlier, this marine turtle and the tens of thousands now alongside her were scattered across the Pacific Ocean, some more than 2500 miles away.

Though food was plentiful far out in the Pacific, something was stirring inside her. She and hundreds of thousands like her felt the same inexorable pull to return to Ostional Beach. They had to go back to where they had hatched.

Now, months later, she waited in the soft moonlight just a few hundred meters from her destination. She was ready. Over the thousands of miles she had swum, she had come across several different male olive ridley sea turtles in the clear tropical waters and bred with them in the deep ocean. Like her, they too were being affected by something unseen, a force nearly as old as life itself. It was something so compelling that her race had been going back to the same Costa Rica beach since the days of dinosaurs.

The marine turtle was somehow returning to the very beach where had hatched in 1995. No one knows how a Pacific marine turtle finds the exact beach where she started life. Ostional Beach is only a few hundred meters long. Now part of Costa Rica's Ostional National Wildlife Refuge, it is probably the most important olive ridley marine turtle nesting site on earth. Wonderfully, the year this turtle hatched, about half a million females had nested here in massive "arribadas."

Unfortunately, our sea turtle's mother will not nest at Ostional this year. For twenty years, her mother had joined massive Ostional arribadas annually and she would have done so again except that she drowned in a shrimping net not fitted with an internationally required turtle escape device. Long-line fishermen killed thousands more in what is euphemistically called "incidental catch" almost completely avoidable simply by using larger fishing hooks. Untold thousands died needlessly by eating plastic bags.

Of course, the tens of thousands of olive ridleys just offshore know none of this. As we look out over the water in the pale moonlight, there are now so many that it almost seems one could walk on their backs for at least a mile. We look in awe at the sheer numbers of God's creation. They don't know or comprehend that they were on earth long before there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They don't know that we are waiting for them to come ashore so that when they lay their eggs on this tiny wildlife refuge, men, women, and children will legally dig up nests and take one million eggs in return for protecting the rest of the clutches and preserving the species. They only know that this is where they are meant to be.

Then, as quietly as they first appeared beyond the surf, as silently as they gathered, as patiently as they waited, they begin to come ashore. One turtle, a second, dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands---even more than that--lumber onto the beach and nest. All night, all day, day after day in a spectacular display of life. As timeless as the moon itself. Arribada.