(View of Turtle Island. Photo Credit: K.H.)
The Pacific Ocean is to our
left, and tall, green mountains are to our right. The skinny highway cuts
through the small patch of space between them reserved for humans. I’m wearing
sunglasses on top of my glasses, which looks stupid but prevents the scorching
Sun from burning through my retinas.
A sign for a lighthouse and
the easternmost point of Taiwan brings us to a sudden stop, and we turn off the
highway and onto a narrow uphill road. Curved mirrors help us to see if anyone
is coming down, but, the way the cars and scooters zoom past us, I don’t think
they are looking at them. On the hillside are small structures with white
pillars and family names on top. Some have Christian crosses, while many have
Buddhist imagery on them. They are family crypts, given the best real-estate so
that the departed can be pacified by the Pacific for all eternity. I read some
of the names. The Li family. The Wu family. The Yang family. In death, as in
life, Taiwanese families stick together.
(It looked a lot like this. Photo Credit: dreamstime.com)
Driving past the crypts to the
top of the hill, we park our car and get our umbrellas ready to block the Sun.
It’s windy, threatening to make our umbrellas “bloom” (The Chinese word for
when the wind makes your umbrella fold inside out), but we keep control. The
lighthouse is rather stout, but, already being perched on a hilltop, I don’t
suppose it needs to be much higher. It’s closed to the public, so we cannot go
in, but there is a fence on the edge that we can climb to look over the
vegetation and out at the ocean. Climbing up, we gape at what we see.
The ocean is shades of blue: a
shallower, lighter blue and a deeper, darker blue. A few birds get lost in the
cotton ball clouds, and the ocean is the sky’s mirror. And in the foreground,
only about nine kilometers or so away, an island like a giant turtle, lazily
swimming in the water. It has a small, slightly pointed head, a rather large,
angled shell, and little feet, too. It is both adorable and powerful, and we
are captivated by it.
I don’t know for sure, but I
imagine the indigenous people of Taiwan must have worshipped it. Perhaps they
thanked it whenever they caught fish. Perhaps they feared it, believing that it
would attack them if they got too close to it. But over time, they realized it
would not hurt them, and so came to believe that it was protecting them from
typhoons and other dangers from the sea. Maybe some people even watched it
every day, to see if it would move. I certainly would have. And then, after
years of watching, it would be concluded that the Great Turtle never moves
because it is so diligent in its duty of protecting Taiwan.
As we drive along the coast, I
keep looking over at it, to make sure that it is still there, and that it still
looks like a turtle. I think about the
“World Turtle,” the origin story about how a giant turtle holds the entire world
on its back. Maybe Turtle Island is the World Turtle’s baby? So it carries its
baby along with everything else on its shell, too.
No matter how it got there or
what it means, I think that Turtle Island is a symbol for the slower pace of
life along Taiwan’s east coast. While people in Taipei and Taichung are flying
through red lights and cutting people off, on the east coast we can spend all
day looking at the ocean, and all night sitting around a low-table enjoying the
saltwater breeze and gazing at stars that west-coasters have never seen before.
Life here is turtle slow.
The main path from Taipei to
the east is the Xue Shan Tunnel, which cuts 13 kilometers through one of the
many mountains that surround Taipei. The moment you emerge from the tunnel,
Turtle Island is there to welcome you, floating lazily, encouraging you to slow
down. And when it is time to go back home, Turtle Island is the last thing
you’ll see before the darkness of the tunnel reminds you that you are returning
to the fast frenzy of life on the west coast. Hopefully, its fleeting image
will remind you to take some of the calm of the east back with you to your
frantic life on the west.