The regularly scheduled Ominous News Of The Day -- new movement by The Ships, as we'd all come to call them -- was all over the newswebs once again, and there were probably a lot of frightened people who thought staying home and hiding under the covers was the best way to respond to this latest crisis.

But my brother and I had more important things to worry about. After all, ten times in the year since they'd arrived those ships had moved, and ten times it hadn't meant a thing. So on this bright Tuesday morning Tommy and I sat, unworried, on small canvas folding chairs tucked into a gap between a pair of sand dunes up past the high-tide line on Egmont Key while we waited for the first of the Kemp's ridleys sea turtles to arrive. Our only concession to the events of the day was the newsvue my editor made me wear, one of those fancy new ones with all the bells and whistles including, of course, a real-time stream of updates on news, sports and weather. If this was the day the Earth stood still, we'd know. Meanwhile, a cruise ship, the Sensation, passed by in the distance, filled with tourists heading out through the mouth of Tampa Bay toward Grand Cayman and Cozumel: business as usual. Tommy and I weren't the only ones who'd quit worrying about the intentions of whatever it was up there in The Ships that circled our little dot of a planet.

Given enough time, people get used to anything. All the craziness of those first few months -- the religious nuts on all sides, the politicians blustering, the scientists changing their minds every day on What It All Was About -- had calmed down, as the months passed, to a wait-and-see punctuated by the regular frenzy each time the ships moved around.

Here, it was nine in the morning and already the temperature was in the low eighties. Florida in the summer takes its heat seriously, but we were comfortable enough, with a light breeze coming in off the water, enough sunblock slathered on us to stop a nova, and a big jug of ice-water to keep things cool. I had until about noon, and then I'd have to take the boat back to the Fort DeSoto pier and drive over to the Times to get my column done. I was hoping for some action before I left, so I'd have something to write about

Really, it was about as nice a morning as you can get in Florida in the summer. Later, things would change. The price we pay for our mornings here is the afternoon clamor, when the breeze dies down to a deathly calm just before the daily thunderheads crackle with lightning as blinding sheets of rain pour down.

But I wasn't going to worry about what might happen later. I'd done plenty enough of that lately. Instead, right now I was excusing myself from all the damn guilt I'd earned for myself and just enjoying the perfection of the morning while my brother and I awaited for the Kemp's ridleys to arrive and bring Tommy the fame he'd earned.

This little gathering of turtles would be big news. Until now, all the Kemp's ridleys in the world had always laid their eggs on a single stretch of beach in Mexico, Rancho Nuevo. In the old days, thousands of females would arrive nearly at once: an arribada they called in Spanish. In the 1940s, one local with an eight-millimeter film camera caught footage of some forty-thousand of the turtles crawling ashore on the same day, pushing and shoving and climbing over each other to find a spot where they could dig, lay, bury and scoot.

But that one little home movie damned the Kemp's ridleys to likely extinction. There had always been raccoons and bobcats along that beach to snatch the eggs. Once that film got out there were ambitious locals looking for a free meal, and then, when they realized the value of the shells and the eggs, a lot of others, too, looking to make a good living off those turtles. For awhile, they did, all those earnest egg-laying mamas were awfully easy pickings. But it couldn't last with all that pressure on one site: best guess was that by the turn of the millennium there were maybe two-hundred of the turtles left.

Over the years, there'd been any number of efforts to get the turtles to change that nesting behavior and spread things out to other, safer beaches, but the Kemp's ridleys were having none of it. One group of scientists on the Texas Gulf Coast had spent millions on a site at Padre Island and managed to coax a total of eight turtles into nesting there. None of their eggs hatched. By the time Tommy was in college and got started on his project, the experts thought the Kemp's ridleys were gone in the wild and everyone had pretty much given up on the turtles.

But not my little brother Tommy. He'd succeeded, he hoped, where no one else had. Almost a decade ago Tommy, a doctoral student then working on his dissertation, offered fishermen in the Bay of Campeche a reward if they found any Kemp's ridleys. The fishermen, over the course of six months, found five.

Two of them were females. Tommy opened them up, took somatic cells from the ovaries of both turtles and fused them with enucleated eggs -- eggs with the DNA removed -- from leatherback turtles, then grew those eggs in the lab where he had all the substrates and environmental parameters required. Tommy's mitochondrial DNA analysis said it ought to work; but it was out there, very edgy, doing something like that for turtles. Kemp's ridleys aren't sheep and the cloning didn't come easy.

But it worked. The process resulted in nearly one-hundred viable eggs total from the greens. Tommy and his team had buried them -- no mean feat there, getting that done just right, he told me -- into nests here on Egmont, and then watched with joy as ninety-four of those genetically clean Kemp's ridley hatchlings boiled out of the nests sixty days later and headed for the water.

Question was, how many would survive and would those survivors return? Had they imprinted on this beach or were they lost forever, artificial creations that would never find their way home?

Tommy tracked as many as he could, attaching the latest in transponders just inside the lateral scutes, up near the head. The batteries were meant to last for five years. Problem was, it takes ten for the turtles to mature, mate and return. That meant Tommy had a year or so at the midway point to try and capture as many of them as he could, put in new transponders, and start the tracking all over again.

It had kept him busy, catching dozens of them from all around the Gulf of Mexico and even on up the East Coast as far as Cape Cod. Two turtles, in fact, drifted with the Gulf Stream all the way to the coast of Ireland.

Tommy was a bookworm, god knows, and no adventurer. He was the most cautious guy I knew. But he'd done what he had to do with those turtles, and I was proud of him for that. He didn't like to travel, hated being on the sea, was scared to death to snorkel or scuba. But he'd gone to those Kemp ridleys, brought them home to the Gulf, put in new transponders, and wished them well as he released them.

It was a hugely ambitious, and expensive, effort; all the lab work, all the tracking and re-tagging. It became his life's work. It defined him, made him who he was. Sitting here in the sand dunes waiting for the payoff, I figured he'd sure as hell earned the headlines I could already picture in my mind: Dr. Thomas Holman, Savior of the Kemp's Ridleys; or better still, Dr. Thomas Holman, the Architect of Change for a Doomed Species.

If it worked. Now, today, we'd find out how worthwhile all that work had been. He hoped a dozen or more mothers might show and start laying their eggs.

•  •  •

We all pay a price for what success we find. When Tommy had started his research, ten years before, I'd been sitting on the bench at the University of Florida, a fifth-string quarterback hoping to get a few minutes of playing time for the football Gators. Sitting on the bench is hell, and when the Gators wanted to move me to a blocking back I'd jumped at the chance. The move cost me a lot, including all the cartilage in my right knee; but I could always claim I'd played big-time football. Hell, I even played professionally for a couple of years after that, banged up knee and all, in the NFL's European League, playing for the Claymores in Scotland. I liked it there, living in Edinburgh.

But the docs told me finally that it was time to quit or start thinking of knee replacements, and that wasn't a price I was willing to pay, so I hung them up and came back to writing, the only other thing I knew how to do. I was a Creative Writing major at Florida; there was a time I'd thought of myself as destined for literary greatness. I won the undergraduate prize in poetry, and even had a pair of poems published in Kenyon. The poet/running back made pretty good copy there for awhile for the university's sports information guys.

But at about the same time I figured out I wasn't destined for the NFL I realized, too, that my poetry didn't seem to be getting much interest from the New Yorker, other than that scribbled "Sorry," at the bottom of the form rejection. In poetry like in football, I didn't really have the legs for it.

So I faced reality and quit the poetry and left Scotland to come home and be a sportswriter, the perfect blend of talents for someone with my level of ambition. Over the next few years I worked my way up through the ranks of smaller papers to bigger and better ones -- from the Ocala Star Banner to the Birmingham News to the Orlando Sentinel and then, a few years later, to the St. Petersburg Times, where I finally made the move from sports to real news, and eventually wound up with my own column.

I loved the work and got paid pretty well for it. I cared about what I did. Maybe too much.

It's easy to get caught up in newspapering. When I started out, the papers were at the end of their print era; back then the newsroom's computers tied you into the world in a way that was special. I'd feel, as I cruised through the wire services, like I knew things no one else did. When I was editing and writing, I knew that whatever anyone read in my paper was because I thought it was worth their reading. That's a heady sense of power. Even a few years later, when the Internet came in and anyone sitting at their computer at home who wanted to know the world's news could, I still loved the business.

Early on, as a sportswriter, I learned there's no feeling in the world like digging into the stench of a corrupt college athletic department, finding the poison deep in the center of it all, and telling the world. I got two very popular coaches fired and I was hated for it by some people both times. Now, on the news side, I did the same sort of legwork on local politicians and religious leaders. One recent story on the financial scams of a local preacher had a congregation in a huge uproar. They thought I was the devil himself, come to torment their leader.

But I was right about what I found and what I said, and that matters.

That passion cost me: two marriages, an admittance by age thirty that alcohol and I got along too well altogether, and the certain knowledge that I had too many enemies and not enough friends. I figured those things were the price you paid for finding the truth and saying it out-loud.

In the last couple of years I'd even gone into broadcasting, showing my ugly mug via the paper's converged website. There I was, in all my splendor, talking about the news instead of just writing it.

I wasn't particularly proud of sliding over into broadcast news like that, even over the web, but there seemed no way to avoid it as print news fell into its death throes.

To my mind, broadcast types weren't journalists, they were "talent" -- actors, really -- with perfect hair and teeth and not a news-bone in their bodies. I told myself that maybe my scraggly, thinning hair and the chipped front tooth that I refused to have capped would be good a good dose of reality for the medium. My boss, an older newspaper person herself, seemed to agree, and my ratings shares were good, so I got plenty of airtime.

For Tommy, it had been a quieter progression. He'd been waiting and tracking and publishing a few things while he built a career as a teacher and waited for those turtles to confirm his research skills. He'd started this all as a brilliant eighteen-year-old, knowing it would take a decade while he worked on other research projects, studying cow-nose rays and jellyfish larvae and doing some shark cartilage debunking. All the while he'd bided his time, waiting for the Big One, the Kemp's ridleys, to come to fruition. Waiting and tracking and trapping and tracking some more; and patient all the while, really patient, while the data came in.

•  •  •

And now the payoff. I looked over at him and he was fidgety, squirming on his folding chair as he used his binoculars to scan the water offshore. I smiled. You didn't get to see Tommy be fidgety very often. He was always the calm one, the focused one.

My newsvue beeped at me: a discreet little tone. I glanced at it. The anchor, a chipper young blonde named Salli who I'd had been out with a few times, said with a serious expression that The Ships had disappeared. That couldn't be a good thing. I looked over to Tommy and caught his eye.

"They've lost track of The Ships," I said.

He stared back. "This might be it, then."

"Or not," I said. "Maybe they've left."

"Not too damn likely, Pete." He turned away to look out toward the water. "Well, hell. I hope the turtles make it in soon, then."

Copyright © 2000 by Rick Wilber