The Night Crawlers

Some warm night from late spring into the fall, long after the beach umbrellas are folded up and the crowds have gone home, this quiet dark shore hosts one of the oldest ceremonies on earth. The sea turtles come home to lay their eggs.

Mostly they're loggerheads — big sea turtles, three hundred pounds and more, that spend their whole lives out in the open ocean. But the females, when their time comes, do a remarkable thing: they navigate back across the whole Gulf to the very beach where they themselves hatched, decades before, and they haul themselves up out of the surf in the dark. It's slow, heavy work for a creature built for water. She drags herself up past the tide line, digs a deep nest in the sand with her back flippers, lays a hundred or so leathery eggs, covers them over, and crawls back to the sea, and she never sees them again.

Weeks later, usually at night, the hatchlings boil up out of the sand all at once — tiny things the size of a silver dollar — and scramble for the water, guided by the faint glow of the horizon over the sea.

And that's where we come in, for good or ill. A bright light — a porch light, a flashlight, a phone — can fool those hatchlings into crawling the wrong way, inland toward the road, to die in the dunes. So all along this coast, volunteers walk the beaches at dawn in nesting season, finding and protecting the nests, and the whole community is asked to keep it dark. Lights out for turtles. It's a small thing to ask — a dark beach on a summer night — so that a creature older than the dinosaurs can keep its appointment with this shore, the way it has for a hundred million years.