This Month's Story

(it’s warm. Here is a story for what is supposed to be the warmest day of the year)

It’s late morning, the Sunday after New Year. Warm, about 68 degrees, and there is a heavy fog. It’s a pleasant fog; not dripping and its mute gray color hides anything that lies at any real distance. Stella and I are walking the beach in front of our cottage. We find ourselves walking in an isolated universe; ramblers on a sand beach limited in breadth by the fog with no ties to time or place.

Around us, the birds, the water, the sand are much the way they have were the thirty five years ago when Stella and I first began living here; more than half her life and almost half mine. Several skimmers flash by, low, their beaks cutting the water. These could well be the same skimmers we saw on this same beach those thirty years ago. On a small sand bar neatly placed a short distance out in the water just ahead of us, a group of sand pipers work their way about their tiny island, pecking, searching for food. These birds don’t look thirty years old, but we’ve seen their much older twins walk similar bars these many years past.

The temperature, the beach, the day, it’s all very idyllic, far removed from the turmoil of our last few months. Life at times can feel good even if that feeling is a deception.

Something yellow catches my eye and I stoop and pick it up. It’s labeled “Mississippi Oysters” and it states that it is from a sack of oysters harvested two days before Christmas. Printed neatly on it as well, is the name and license number of the person harvesting the oysters. He’s from Bayou Caddy. My pleasure at seeing the “Mississippi Oysters” label is short lived however. I soon find a similar label, this one white with black print stating that it is from a sack of oysters from Louisiana. The Louisiana state line is just a mile or so south of us. Perhaps the coastal current…

The next label I find, however, stops me cold. It also is white but sports a reddish ink and the fact that its oysters are “Certified Texas Oysters.” Now how can that be? Texas is not only a long ways away, but the entire Mississippi Delta and a completely different current system interferes with any possible drift pattern to our coast. I point this out to Stella and she shrugs and points out a white egret moving in a low flight over the water just a short distance away. Its image, slightly distorted is wondrously mirrored in the water below. I guess she has the right idea and so we continue our walk; let Texans drop magically from the sky; on a day like this, who cares.

But now things become not so nice. There is a duck sitting on a jutting bar of sand just ahead of us. Birds don’t usually rest during the day; something is odd here. I walk to get a closer look. The bird appears unusually dark, a dirty dark. He waits till I am only about ten feet away and then stands up and, rather than fly, waddles into the water and paddles away. Stella comes up and we watch the bird move slowly away from us. At my feet, the webbed footprint of the duck in the sand indicates that he had waded ashore some hours earlier when the tide was fuller and evidently from fatigue had not moved from that time hours ago till now.

“Is it hurt?”

“I can’t tell.” I answer, “Its exhausted, that’s for sure. It looks like it has some type of coating. It looks like oil, maybe diesel fuel. I didn’t get close enough to tell.”

We stand for a moment watching it and then walk on.

The fog is lifting and we can see further out than we had before. Stella stops.

“Listen”.

It’s a flapping noise, heavy flapping; some large bird taking off or, from the long continuation of the sound, trying to take off. We look out over the water. At about the limit of our sight, perhaps two, three hundred feet away, a large blackish bird, perhaps a pelican is making a disturbance as if trying to fly. Then it stops and a few feet from it another equally large dark bird begins an equally futile attempt. As we stand and watch we see there is another bird, a large dark hump floating close by. It does not try to fly.

I look around us. As best I can see in the limiting view offered by the fog, the water is clean of any contaminant.

“Some oystermen or shrimper probably pumped out its bilges. They landed in it. Probably the duck did as well.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

I shrug, “Who is going to complain? Those three pelicans? The duck?”

“Let’s go home, I’m getting cold.”

I look out over the water where the birds have stopped flapping and then turn and the two of us head back to our pink FEMA cottage, now barely visible in the fog.