On Knowing Where You Are
Encounters with a stranded sea turtle, a caffeinated plant, and other virtues in nature
IN the pantheon of trees and shrubs, you could do worse than Yaupon Holly, even allowing for the problem with its scientific name: Ilex vomitoria.
An evergreen, this plant is verdant and leafy when so much of the world is gray or brown or frozen stiff. Its fruits glow scarlet. And Yaupon Holly is essentially the only caffeinated plant native to the United States. Long before coffee joints became houses of worship, Indigenous people of what’s now the American Southeast drank Yaupon tea as a stimulant, medicine, and the beverage of choice during purification rituals. Because the ceremonies included willful vomiting, Europeans watching from the sidelines wrongly assumed Yaupon Holly was an emetic. So a Scottish botanist gave the plant the Latinized epithet vomitoria, a genuine and original misnomer.
By any name, Yaupon Holly had a role in my own purification ritual during a recent journey to the southeastern US. To escape the cold and take a break from the troubling news of the world, I drove the shortest route I know from Vermont to warmth: the coast of North Carolina near Cape Lookout National Seashore, where the tropical waters of the Gulf Stream graze the continent before flowing northeast out to sea. My plan was to walk the shoals and beaches, the scrublands and forests, so that I might regain some equilibrium.
It began well enough. On my first day in unfrozen woods, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet flashed his crimson crest at me. Soon enough, a Sleepy Orange (Eurema nicippe) butterfly floated by in the sunshine. On a shoal I walked with beach-running sandpipers and collected a few seashells along the way, including a prize aptly named Angel Wing (Cyrtopleura costata).
During a day offshore, on the island known as Shackleford Banks, I came upon a beached and listless Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas). A spate of chilly weather had probably sent it into the reptile version of hypothermia. Never before had I seen this turtle species, not its chestnut hues nor its dazzling mosaic facial pattern. And yet its predicament superseded my predilections for this trip. Rather than a return to the ocean, the turtle needed warmth and most likely a boat ride to the local sea turtle hospital.
