One day on my bakery route, I saw a turtle trying to cross busy Route 10 in Morris County. I picked him up and put him in the wire basket along with the outdated goods going back to the garage. He was well-behaved as I finished my route, except for peeing on the cardboard basket liner.
Back at the garage, I didn’t say anything to the worker whose job it was to unload each truck’s returns. The turtle had withdrawn into its shell and the worker almost grabbed it, thinking it was a stale loaf of pumpernickel.
I brought it home for my kids to play with, to the extent that you can “play with” a turtle. We made a sort of low-walled pen in the backyard out of loose bricks. He liked lettuce and earthworms, and apple and banana slices, and we all co-existed peacefully until one day he escaped and wandered over into a neighbor’s yard. We heard her screaming and went to her rescue. We decided wild turtles would rather be free, and next day I took him for another ride.
One of my customers was Dalrymple’s General Store and Ice House, in rural Randolph Township. The store was next to Dalrymple Pond, where in winter crews sawed the pond ice into blocks to stock the ice house. I asked Mr. Dalrymple if it would be okay to set the turtle free near his pond. Kids swam in the pond in summertime, so he came out to the truck to double-check that our former pet was indeed a box, not snapping, turtle, and it passed inspection. The pond was only a mile or so from the spot where I had rescued him, and he’d been heading in the general direction, so I considered it a sort of homecoming.
