A few lines written Tuesday, 7/23/2013- I found myself walking the beach this morning just after sunrise. Large, fluffy clouds of grey loomed in the horizon, serving as a canvas for the reflecting rays of the breaking Sun. While I watched, the warm waves of the surf splashed over my feet, and the clouds began to fill with deep hues of purple and blue. Before long, these tones softened to include brighter shades of brilliant pink and the entirety of the dawn sky was soon dripping with color. As it was early, everybody else was still bound in deep slumber. For twenty minutes or so, I had the long stretch of shore line to my lonesome and nothing to disturb my thoughts. Nothing that is, but the seagulls. Now I had no food with me as I strolled, but this did not stop the gulls from following me along the surf, hoping against hope that I may produce and toss from somewhere, a scrap from last evening’s supper, or that I might drop a crust of bread amongst the moist pebbles. Some followed me on foot, pecking at the imprints I left in the sand. Others hopped onto picnic tables as I walked by, trying to spy out any tasty tid-bits that I might have been carrying. They mostly kept a respectful distance, as these apprehensive fowl are wont to do; close enough to first claim any hint of consumable human waste, but at such length to make good their escape should I suddenly make an unexpected movement. Each had a look in his eye which conveyed a polite but sad message; “please don’t mind me, I wouldn’t want my near and certain starvation to bother you.” More interesting to me were the opportunistic gulls who spied from a distance, a solitary walker and took a gamble at an early breakfast. These feathery descendants of the dinosaurs, abandoned their posts to fly to my location. Some of them must have flown in from half a mile away and I took great pleasure in watching them as they closed the distance. I tried to capture a few of them with my camera as they hovered and swooped in circles around me letting out their raspy cries. I suddenly found myself feeling very envious of their ability to fly. How awesome would it be to take flight at will, to ride on the wind, to hang on the morning breeze and hover like an unbound kite in mid-air. If I could have taken to the wind at that moment, instead of just watching the evolving colors of the morning sky, I would have spread my wings and soared amongst them, screaming out with joy as I did so. But the calls of the gulls brought my thoughts back down to Earth. These greedy creatures were taking no more pleasure in their ability to fly than I might take in walking about my house. It’s nothing special to them. The cries they uttered were not pangs of excitement or joy, but just a warning to their brethren that a beachfront territory was being claimed. It then dawned upon me that I had been being jealous of a filthy flock of scavengers and beggars. Winged rats really, that describes them best, but with a friendlier reputation. It was then that it occurred to me that these humble beasts had far more to be jealous of. All day long they witness packages of cookies and crackers, bags of potato chips and other delicacies resting on picnic tables and blankets, or hidden beneath the lids of coolers. For the want of opposable thumbs, they could be Kings of the Beach. Instead they are hungry beggars, circling in hope but finding nothing to fill their gullets. If not that I enjoyed the irony so, I may even have felt pity for them. A faint smell of smoke lifted from the dying embers of a nearby fire ring and wafted on the breeze. As its scent filled my nostrils I was reminded of my sleeping children who would soon awake and want to scramble eggs and bacon on a campfire of our own. Though we may be firmly grounded, some of us more bound by gravity than others, we would not go hungry this or any morning; not as long as we could control our own fates. As I walked back to my tent I saw another lone wanderer combing the surf for beach glass and I pondered; If to us, the grass always seems greener on the far side of the fence, do the birds always perceive our horizons to be bluer than those they take flight to? It must suck to be a sea gull.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 17:50:52 +0000
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