Musings on Albert

There are days when I wish to be a seagull. I mean, more likely perhaps that there could be moments when we could trade shoes, or webbed feet—the seagull and I that is— something like a kid’s transformer character who could move from person to feathered being and back again. The back-again part would have to be guaranteed, as I don’t think I could take the diet change. Especially when it comes to rushing with the crowd chasing cold French fries or unbuttered popcorn tossed with glee from tourists’ hands just so they can witness the ruckus as us birds bunch around as if their offerings were some rare prize. I mean, come on eh, this is not the only feed in town. There are tourists everywhere.

The thing is, it’s more about wanting to test drive free-flight, to wander, to drift freely through empty skies while folks gaze up from beaches wondering about the wonders of being airborne and what the flightplan might be and where a seagull just might be headed. I mean, there is no plan. Better to consult a bird expert more than I, ’cuz for me its plain unexplainable. Besides, if I could be a seagull, I wouldn’t want to be one forever. Nope. Especially the January at Point Petre part. Nada.

I’d just maybe like to have a trialrun incarnation now and then. Especially on an evening like this, when the straw hat of a sun simmers above the beach, now deserted since the Parks guy on the tractor managed to encourage its vacating an hour before park closing time by choosing a particularly quiet Sunday end-of-day to neatly rid the shoreline of sandcastles and guard towers and moats and other fun stuff ,just so he could rake the beach with a contraption rigged up to a tractor. I mean, whatever happened to Monday mornings when it comes to beach raking? Sand castles are no harm. Surely he can wait.

So the tractor rumble and my seagull squawking impersonation has quieted, and I sit here on the storm-cast plank seat of a picnic table reviewing seagulls at dusk. It’s known to happen they say, especially after an over-stay in the sun. Look over there, fer instance. Sunday evening is obviously bath night for one gull. Standing at water’s edge, it plumes and plumes its wings, then dives into the next lapping wave and then picks under its wings and plumes and dives and then back to the beginning again. The process is long and drawn out; more like a hot bath after snow shovelling. Seagull’s ritual completed, he/she’s off with a shake of its wings. Watch it go as it takes to the sky hell-bent for somewhere. Speaking of hot baths: Lake Ontario is not that. Seems like the lake will take a few more weeks of equator-like temperatures to come into the zone of bearable comfort. For me, anyhow. Evan Nash from the hardware store, who takes to board surfing off of Wellington in the November winds, I definitely am not.

The laze of North Beach on an evening like this is a match for the call of the cicada ringing from never-ending fields of hay in the early morn. The atmosphere subtly bookends the time of what I call deep summer. Where the parched round of day lingers into the long shadows of evening; where the birdsong is reminiscent of tropical islands; where damp restful air of the night sky stirs into the rise of the morning star. You know, the kind of memories we cling to for hope on a February morning when the kids have lost the ice-scraper and the car won’t start.

So finally, I watch as another gull I call Albert circles and makes a spectacular dive into the lake. I count to three and up he surfaces and flies, but to come around again. This is the part where I imagine myself, three storeys above calm water and able to not only spot small fish below the surface without my reading glasses, but to then clearly remember the sequence of the fish catch: a mid-air back flip; get everything firmly tucked close to the body; firm focus with eyeballs glued to the target; straight vertical dive faster than the speed of sound and then kabango! A bullet-like plunge into water you damn well hope you estimated to be deep enough so as not to find your head planted in lake bottom. Most importantly is to gauge the correct timing of when to open your beak to latch onto your prey. Open your beak one second too soon, just when you are about to hit wate,r and that’s when you’d wish you never were a seagull. Imagine Lake Ontario in one gulp.