MARBLEHEAD REPORTER (Massachusetts) 05 July 07 Meet Charlie, the well-traveled tortoise (Kaitlin Melanson)
Marblehead: Tom Saltsman says he now believes wholeheartedly in Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” after his family’s beloved desert tortoise, “Charlie,” found his way out of their backyard and into a wild adventure around town.
“He seems slow when you watch him just walking about the yard, but the minute you turn your back he can really speed away,” he said. “Slow and steady apparently does win the race.”
Charlie was missing for seven days, according Saltsman’s wife, Brooke. In the days since their happy reunion, the Saltsman family is only now beginning to grasp fully how many lives he crossed paths with along his journey back home.
According to Brooke, the family had thrown a party to celebrate the end of the school year on the night that Charlie went missing.
“We had put him in his wired pen, and by the end of the night, we realized that we had forgotten to bring him inside,” Brooke said. “When we went out to look for him, we spent and hour looking in our backyard, because we have a very dense garden that he could easily hide in, but we realized he wasn’t there.”
Slightly distraught by Charlie’s disappearance, Brooke said that she and her daughters, Parker, 8, and Cameron, 6, began making signs and hanging them around town.
It was then that the calls began to come in, and the story of Charlie’s adventure began to unfold.
“We got a call from Amy Federman saying that her daughter Kelie thought she had found Charlie,” Brooke said. “She said she found him by DS Designs [on lower Washington Street], which is a pretty good ways from our home on Pleasant Street.”
The Federmans had at first created home for him in their living room, but after reading a turtle book they thought Charlie might need to be near the water.
“After looking through a book on turtles, they thought he would be better off near a pond, which is the exact opposite of what he needs, because he is a desert land tortoise,” Brooke said.
From there, as Brooke understands, Charlie spent time with another town resident in the woods of her backyard as an e-mail began circulating acknowledging that this roaming turtle may actually have owners who were looking for him.
“After receiving the e-mail, ‘Charlie’ was then brought to the police station by the animal control officer,” Brooke said. “I spoke with Laura Consigli (the assistant ACO), who I happen to know, before she had picked him up, and she said from the description she received, she didn’t believe it was Charlie.”
In the meantime, Brooke said she received another call from a man saying he “definitely” saw Charlie by the Barnacle and down around the Fort Sewall area.
“I don’t know what people were thinking when they saw what looks like a walking rock pass by them,” Brooke laughed.
It wasn’t until June 23, a week after Charlie had been last seen by the family, that Brooke got the call they had been waiting for.
“At 9 p.m. on Sunday night I got a call from the police station to come down,” Brooke said. “ I could just picture picking my tortoise out of a lineup.”
Brooke added, “When I got to the station, I could see through the window into the lunch room area, and there was Charlie running around on the floor.”
Brooke said they were relieved to have found their tortoise, which she said means way more to her family than any normal pet.
“We got him over a year ago when my husband’s father died, and we named him Charlie after his father,” Brooke said. “His father had lived to 75, and tortoises are said to live around 80 years, so we thought having him would be like having his father around for another 80 years. So there was a lot of sentimental value with Charlie.”
Though the Saltsmans may never know exactly all of the places Charlie was able to explore during his seven-day adventure, they are happy to have him home.
“He must have gone through a number of different backyards to get from our house to DS Designs,” Brooke said. “We had only lost him once before, but that was just for two or three days, and he was literally right in our own backyard.”
“It is amazing that he survived,” Tom said. “When we learned he got out, I thought he was gone and would never survive if he met up with a raccoon or something.”
Tom added, “We are going to have to build a better fence. And maybe equip him with a GPS system!”
Meet Charlie, the well-traveled tortoise