A few minutes with a solitary seagull

A lone seagull floats easily over the calm water, rising and falling on the unseasonably small waves between storms. His bright white head, free of dirty gray streaks, highlights his maturity among his kind. He’s alone, yet unbothered by his solitude. Peacefully, he coasts slowly northward atop a royal blue sea on a cold winter afternoon.

A quarter mile away, a churning flock of his brethren flip and flap above the creek. It is chaos: blurred wings, screeching heard the length of the beach, birds on the water, birds in the air, birds in constant, frenetic motion. They’re busy, every one of them. But busy with what, I can’t tell.

The sun is gold on the horizon. The breeze streaming down from the eastern hills is cold. Tomorrow’s storm appears in the distance, a dark wall of gray rising north of the setting sun. The seagull is unconcerned.

He pauses briefly when I stop to pull out my notebook. Does he wait for me? Probably not, but I imagine a kindred spirit, another soul seeking quiet and calm amid the season’s frenzy. For him, this solitary swim is a moment between storms and raging surf, away from the daily squabble for food and shelter necessary to survive the harsh winter. For me, the solitude of the beach pulls me away from the activity and noise and chaos and crowds and stress that have come to mark our American Christmas.

“Alone among others.” It’s a phrase I stumbled across in a book a couple years ago, and one that could be the pithy caption under my grainy black and white photo in life’s yearbook. In career, home and community, I am surrounded by others. Yet, increasingly, mostly by choice, and especially in this season, I enjoy my own company more than the camaraderie of the crowd. The world swirls around me, and the faster it swirls, the more I seek solitude.

In the couple of minutes I’ve paused to scribble these notes and chill my fingertips, the seagull has vanished. There’s no sign of him on the water or in the sky. The seagull flock flutters in the distance, their wings flashing white in the reflection of the setting sun. Perhaps he’s joined them. Maybe two proved too much a crowd for him.

As much as I want to imagine the gull as a spirit or heavenly metaphor intended for my personal reflection, I realize it’s mere coincidence. The cosmos don’t work that way. Still, it’s heartening to know that the search for quiet and solitude is not mine alone. It’s part of the way things work. For each of us, there comes a time to be together and a time to be alone.

Four minutes

It’s 4:40 in the afternoon, two hours since a near-minus tide turned on itself and started its return towards the crest of the beach. Even now the beach is wider than I’ve seen it in weeks. Redwood Creek’s 67 mile run extends several yards farther out in the ocean than normal. Dark rocks usually encircled by ocean waves at the outpouring creek are reachable by dry sand this afternoon.

Don’t look at the sun! Tiny circles of gray temporarily burned into my eyes force me to use my peripheral vision for tonight’s sunset. A cold wind streams down the broad boulevard of sand from the north. One hundred gulls gather at the mouth of the creek. Two large and out of place pelicans do a poor job of hiding amidst the flock of gulls.

At 4:44 the edge of the sun kisses the thin line at the end of the world. A narrow band of distant fog shades a dark line across the sun’s bottom edge. The sky mellows, pale blues slip into soft grays while a fiery orange glows on the horizon.

By 4:46 the sun is nearly halfway gone. Baby blanket colors, pinks and blues, tint the thin clouds. At 4:47, it’s just a rounded orange speed bump, then a thumb tack, then a dot.

By 4:48, the sun is gone. No flash of green. No angel choirs. No great splash or sizzling steam. Just gone. The ocean seems calmer and quieter though I know that’s my imagination. The beach darkens to a cold gray. My northbound footprints at the water’s edge are dark shadows in the sand where they haven’t already been erased by incoming waves.

Four minutes from beginning to end. Four minutes for a burning ball of gas 870,000 miles across and 95 million miles away to slide across the line between earth and sky three miles from where I stand.

In the east, in the fading pink sky, the pointed green tips of the world’s tallest trees serrate the pink-tinged eastern horizon where tomorrow, it starts all over again.

December Sunset

I closed the gate to the Redwood Highway a little after four and had the beach to myself for an hour. A cool, late afternoon breeze blew down from the north. Hundreds of gulls gathered at the mouth of the creek while dozens more rafted through the narrow outlet to the sea or flittered over the booming surf. The ocean was rough and ragged, a churning white foam stretching well beyond the last rock which stood silently above the fray a half mile off shore.

I've watched sunsets countless times in my two score and six years, but I continue to be fascinated by how effortlessly the sky melds from one color to the next and how fast the sun slides into the black line of the horizon.