Michael J. Fox and the magical sea turtle

Several years ago I was awake in a Mexico City hotel room, in town for some official meetings regarding sea turtles. Couldn't sleep. Turned on the news. On CNN Larry King was interviewing Michael J. Fox who had announced an abrupt career change, related to the disclosure that he suffered from Parkinson's disease. Just as I tuned in, he began to tell a gripping story about following a sea turtle in the ocean, and how while under the sea turtle's spell he'd had the breakthrough. Best that I let him tell the story in his own words, as it appears in his book "Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist":

"My decision to leave Spin City was the right call at the right time.

By then, making a decision about what to commit my time and energy to came down to how I felt about something as opposed to what I thought about it. Certainly, my decision to retire from Spin City in the spring of 2000, effective at the end of the fourth season, was all "feel."

The decision happened late in the afternoon on the last day of the twentieth century. My family and I were snorkeling in the pristine waters of St. John's in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We'd been visiting this beach for years, and had never seen a sea turtle. Having finally spotted one gliding through the sea grass just inside the coral reef, I swam slowly behind it, keeping a respectful distance. When I finally emerged from the water, I kicked off my flippers, walked over to where Tracy was toweling off the kids, grabbed a towel for myself, and informed her that I was leaving the show. It may have been a bone-deep exhaustion from battling symptoms every day just to do my job, or maybe it was just the sublime indifference of that turtle, but a switch had flipped, and depending on how I chose to accept it, a light either just turned on or just turned off. If the perfunctory nature of my announcement startled Tracy, she covered it well. Certainly it was her moment to fill. She could have laughed it off like a weak throwaway joke or just pretended to ignore it, tacitly offering me the space to reconsider. Or she could have said, "Are you out of your fucking mind?" After all, what I was so casually proposing would bring about sweeping changes in each of our lives, as well as the kids'. I didn't even mention the turtle, fearing that she would think I was only consulting her for a second opinion. Whatever rough patches there had been in our marriage had usually arisen when one of us—okay, me—acted unilaterally. Bottom line, she could have reacted in any of a number of ways. But what she did was look me in the eye, utter a single word, "Good," and pull me into a wet, sandy embrace.

For the few remaining days of the vacation, we didn't talk about it much. If I was waiting for her to talk me out of it, that wasn't happening.

But could the break really have been that simple, that clean? This was a momentous decision, easily one of the most important in my life, and I was just blurting it out.

Well, yes—in a sense. Never once after my encounter with the sea turtle have I wavered in my conviction that it was the right thing for me to do and the right time for me to do it. But it was hard too. Not a hard decision to make, but a hard decision to havemade. As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and old one forsaken, there are consequences. Here it was, New Year's Eve, the cusp of not only a new year, but a new millennium, and my resolution was to leave behind everything that I had resolved to achieve, acquire, and accumulate over the previous twenty years. I knew I wouldn't just be leaving the show—I would be putting aside my life as an actor. While I always had difficulty thinking of myself as an artist, I took pride in being a craftsman. I think I understood that even though, officially, my retirement was from Spin City and not my career as a whole, I couldn’t just tweak the schedule or the working conditions and expect to take on another leading role in a television series or film. This was it. I was essentially pulling the plug. Adios. Bye-bye."

There's something about about being with wild nature on its terms that is transformative, clarifying. Mr. Fox isn't the only person I know with a story like that, not by a long shot. And he's not even unique among celebrities with SEA TURTLE stories (Andre Benjamin and Charlize Theron both told me similar stories about their turtle connections).

The fact is that sea turtles will just do that to you, when you least expect it. They'll grab hold of your life and tug it in a different direction, just like that. I guess that's what happens when you're a 150 million year old species.

Thanks to everyone who tells their sea turtle stories, eloquently, fearlessly and publicly. People need to hear that protecting endangered species isn't only about their commercial value, their role in the ecosystem, their contribution to biodiversity or some potential medical discovery. It's all those things. And so very much more.

-Wallace J. Nichols