Dallas Road

When I finished my run it was so beautiful I sat by the ocean for a moment, and saw a seagull catch and eat a fish. 

He was a big fat glaucous gull, grey and white, floating in the glittering surf off the steep shingle beach. As I watched, the breeze chilling my sweat, the gull took to the air, rose a foot or two from the water, then upended and dove, beak-first, into the water. He bobbed back up again with something in his mouth. A small fish. I could see it twisting, arching back and forth, clamped in the middle by that yellow beak. The gull flew onto the pebbles, set the fish on the galets, poked and turned it a few times, and then picked it up to begin the work of swallowing. 

Work it was. Him swallowing that fish would have been like me trying to swallow a loaf of bread. He tossed it once, again, and back, trying to find the right angle to swallow. And throughout, he would stop and look up and around. I realized he was vulnerable now. He’d succeeded, snatched calories from the ocean, so of course something would soon try to steal it. 

Watching him finally succeed in swallowing the fish was almost as satisfying as seeing, about three seconds later, an oatmeal coloured juvenile gull swoop past, a few seconds too late. 

It was amazing to see a bird meet its energy needs for the day in two minutes. The best two minutes of his day. Not for the fish, though. While I was burning off calories for fun, and thinking about whether or not I’m an ok person while I enjoyed the sight of a storm out over the ocean, a fish died. It was a beautiful day, and the fish was a fish in it, and then all it is suddenly ended. Boom. Gone. 

I don’t know if there’s a larger takeaway here except that it’s reassuring to remember that nature isn’t a pastoral tableau there for us to enjoy like a painting, and trying and failing and succeeding and being scared and being hungry and winning and losing and dying out of the blue aren’t some human condition thing, aren’t about you. It’s a built-in feature of life.