R.I.P. Cameron Sanders

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In the spring of 2009, Vodnie, a friend and former LanguageCorps student of ours, stopped by the house on her motorbike. She was leaving in two days to study abroad in Australia and wanted to drop something off to leave in our care while she was away.

Walking up the stairs, she held a plastic red cup, the sort arranged in V-formation on a table at any collegiate function, and covered the top with her hand. Then, outside Kate’s room, kneeling down, she freed the opening and gently tipped the cup to reveal its content.

I remember I was first struck by his hue, an overwhelming green, all sorts and shades, so many greens, with two wicked orange stripes running behind each eye. And his size, or, lack thereof. No more the width of one’s palm, maybe an inch tall, he exposed his delicate limbs and shy head to us only after permitted a moment’s peace, with us a step back, looming overhead. To put it one way, the turtle was the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen. And it was on that day our house of seven became eight.

In spite of harsh predictions that he wouldn’t last two weeks, our reptilian roommate Cameron adapted to and flourished in his new environment, bestowing us his company for almost a full year and overseeing the comings and goings of more than 10 different occupants in the house. Looking back, he was, in a sense, our rock (sometimes taking on the appearance of such), a constant presence amidst a revolving door of personalities. Cameron typically exhibited two mood sets, alternating between absurdly lethargic and insatiably nosy. He would oftentimes spend hours exploring every corner of a room, every wrinkle in a bed cover, every unturned stone. Other times he wouldn’t move for entire afternoons, only stirring at the concerned prod of a finger. He seemed to swing shifts between Cameron the Curious and Cameron the Catatonic.

Nine days ago, it was first noticed that Cameron was missing. In the case of a dog, cat, or similarly-abled animal friend, it might be fair to infer the disappearance an escape, that the individual simply ran away in a moment of free will. The fact that Cameron was contained in a plastic tub with quite unbreachable walls suggests that he was taken by an assailant, a rat, perhaps, maybe our maid, or a somehow fouler creature. In any case, days of searching have yielded only shell tracings under the sofa, frustratingly little evidence yet enough to realize an unavoidable truth: Cameron Sanders, missing and presumed eaten.

To help celebrate his life, some facts and memories of our roommate and friend, over the course of his year spent in the house with us:

- Vodnie told us she had named the turtle Cam Rùa, meaning, “Orange Turtle” in Vietnamese, presumably for the coloring behind his eyes. To our ears, “Cam Rùa” sounded an awful lot like “Cameron”, so the name stuck. I tasseled with Kate for hyphenated custody in name but, after finally admitting that Sanders-Armitage was a ridiculous moniker, even for a turtle, his name was finalized as Cameron Sanders.

- Cameron’s assumed gender was a product of his name and nothing more. If indeed male, he was one in possession of a very very tiny turtle penis and seemingly no qualms regarding such.

- The entirety of Cameron’s days in the house were lived out in a medium-sized orange plastic tub, filled halfway with water and decorated with rocks of varying size in an effort to replicate his natural environment, though of course nobody in the house had any idea what composes the natural environment of a Vietnamese turtle. If it constitutes anything additional to water and rocks, I imagine Cameron was bitterly disappointed with the home we provided him.

- Vodnie also dropped off two canisters of small green pellets, each apparently packed with vital turtle nutrients since they were all Cameron’s diet consisted of. For eating nothing but food pellets, Cameron produced an enormous amount of excrement, which, when fresh and floating in water, bared a strange and uncanny resemblance to the pellets themselves. I cannot begin to imagine the number of times Cameron mistakenly ate his own poop and, if and when he did, whether he was immediately aware of the mixup or instead chewed it over for a while.

- Cameron was either stupid or fearless, for he never met a ledge untempting, no matter the height. Despite nearly wandering off the house roof twice and once coming within a few inches of plummeting down the stairwell, Cameron suffered only two nasty bumps in his time with us, one time hurling himself off Emily’s bed while a Sopranos plot twist diverted our attention, and another time urinating into my cupped hand that held him, swiftly finding his way to the ground below.

- It was discovered one night that Cameron held a strange affection for the band Snow Patrol. During a late night showing on television of the band’s recent concert, he awoke from sleeping on my lap and turned to face the screen, eyes refraining from their usual steady blink. I tried changing the channel and upon doing so, Cameron blinked twice and turned his head, disinterested. Returning to the concert, so did the turtle return his attention to the screen in seeming fascination. Only a casual fan myself, the show put me to sleep and I awoke at five in the morning to find Cameron asleep on my chest, marking the only night our turtle spent outside his orange tub.

Cameron spent the first half of his life in the house in Kate’s room, with his tub placed either next to her bed or in the bathroom when he was stinky. After Kate moved home in September, he switched into my room on the bottom floor. It would be a fateful move. With much less natural light entering the basement room than those above, Cameron spent many of his afternoons in near darkness, with hour-long reprieves of sunlight on ventures to the roof once a day. It was reasoned that he would benefit from the peace and quiet of the darker environment and catch up on any sleep he should need from a busy day of wandering around and nearly falling off things. In actuality, the only thing his move to the basement room did was remind us that we knew absolutely nothing about taking care of a turtle, as it was discovered one day that Cameron’s two blinking eyes had been replaced by what appeared to be peeled grapes, swollen and gummy white. As we watched him walk into walls and swim aimlessly in circles, there became no question of his ailment. Cameron had gone blind, and would spend the rest of his days as such.

A heartwarming tale it would be to recall Cameron’s strength and perseverance through crippling disability, strengthening his remaining senses and struggling towards an eventual against-all-odds story of success, much in the vein of Helen Keller or the blind guy from American Idol. Pity, though, for Cameron did not take well to blindness. Days passed in which he hardly stirred, his seemingly lifeless body languishing on the rocks or bobbing listlessly in his increasingly soiled water. As if losing complete visual perception were not enough, Cameron developed, by our best guess, a serious intestinal bug (likely from snacking on feces) that presented him the rather unpleasant task of expelling hundreds of live, wriggling gut-worms from his body on a daily basis, the likes of which he would then be forced to share his tub with until one of us mercifully changed his water. I can only hope that on some level, the influx of additional creatures to Cameron’s tub helped provide some kind of company for him in what I’m sure were dark days of loneliness and depression.

At this time, in our living room, seated at the coffee table, I can glance up from the computer and look into the corner where Cameron’s tub still rests. The water has evaporated and all that remains are walls smeared with feces and some brown sludgy rocks, the latter at which I still look twice to be sure one among them isn’t Cameron in disguise, asleep with extremities hidden. There are many times I find myself aching to once again look down into his tub and marvel at the filth in which he and his wormy playmates wallowed in together. But surely it was for the best, this ending. Cameron had lived up to and exceeded all expectations of him, but now, much like a worn-down athlete or rock band driven to self-parody, his moments of glory were behind him. Indeed, it is best with him in my memory, freed from the filth of his existence, and it is now I can fully treasure those golden days of our turtle, beady eyes blinking, wandering rooftops, sliding down bed covers, and, in the evenings, nestling a crack in my stomach to hunker down and drift off to somewhere far beyond that orange tub.

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