Five Aprils

Author's Note: This story was inspired by actual events. A few paragraphs are adapted from journal entries. Some dates were not recorded in my journal or public records and thus are best guesses.

April 21, 1973

Grand Isle State Park, Louisiana. A sunny Saturday between Good Friday and Easter morning. That Saturday or another Saturday. My journal lost now in the flood of decades as much as water. A holiday Saturday in any case. Bright overcast. Hot.

Why was I invited? Who invited me? Too far away to find those small facts now. In any case, my group's in one place. I'm in another. Not unusual in those days. Unworried, I drift into the gulf on my inflatable ring floatie.

The pounding surf isolates me from the sound of other human voices. It's all too easy to drowse. Quite suddenly, I jerk awake in a little school of sharks.

Mind you, the sharks aren't little. They're as long as I am tall, five feet. Maybe longer even if I stretch out and point my toes ballerina-style. The school itself is little.

Eight sharks? Ten? Another fact too far away to find. Perhaps it's only four. In any case, a small group. Clique-ish even. Huddled and still in the shallow water, they don't quite acknowledge they've noticed me. Perhaps they haven't. What I think at the time is they're too big to care. Why startle away like one of those running bobbles of a shorebird?

So I hang there on my floatie. They hang there in the water.

Harmless, people said. And harmless is what they seem. I fall asleep and wake up sunburned.

April 24, 1975

The final cut of Jaws premieres in Hollywood, California.

April 16, 1987

With a finicky metal key, I unlock my brass mailbox to find a rejected manuscript. Not a rare event. Inside, the editor has scrawled a message in blue ink. Oh, why must he scribble on the page? Doesn't he know the whole thing will have to be retyped now? Perhaps he thinks it should be. In crabbed old man's handwriting, he has written this:

“Sharks can never stop swimming.”

Huh. Well, that's an interesting factoid, considering I saw for myself that sharks can perfectly well stop swimming.

A little library research solves the mystery. Some sharks can never stop swimming if they like to continue breathing. #NotAllSharks is what we'd say today.

You won't get far fact-checking an editor. I shrug, put the story somewhere, lose it. Name of story? Theme? Something else given to the flood.

April 10, 2003

A birder now, I travel back to Grand Isle. A powerful spring thunderstorm on April 8 has forced down a huge fall-out of warblers and other migratory birds. The wind from the north keeps them from leaving.

In the woods behind the grocery store, we walk slowly-- if we dare to walk at all. Hooded Warblers have rained down in their thousands to the point of being a nuisance underfoot. Warblers, tanagers, catbirds, hummingbirds, vireos, buntings, grosbeaks. Every color of the visible spectrum from Scarlet Tanager to Indigo Bunting rests or feeds around us.

Road-weary from their long and interrupted trip, most ignore the little band of binocular-heavy humans. Grub clutched in its bill, a curious Worm-eating Warbler does take a few steps in our direction. Pauses. Poses. Perhaps the bird imagines we can have a word or two with this unhelpful wind.

A Swallow-tailed Kite spins low and lazily over Bobby Santini's famous garden.

April 17, 2010

From a dock on Grand Isle, we set sail for Queen Bess Island, the rookery of the Brown Pelicans. Hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Also a few dozen American White Pelicans who have not yet departed for their breeding grounds. These sail in the small bay of Queen Bess with their wings partly open like so many gigantic swans.

American Oystercatchers. Roseate Spoonbills. Tri-Colored Herons tall and lean trying to blend into the high grass. Jaunty tufts of feathers on the back of heron heads keep giving them away.

Next, Grand Terre. Once home and workplace of some of the park employees, it's abandoned now after Hurricane Gustav. The structures are collapsing, but the isle is green and thriving without us.

There's such a wealth of fish in the water. Diving, swimming, scooping Brown Pelicans surround us on all sides. Dozens of Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphins join in the feast.

One Brown Pelican, apart from the rest, has discovered a huge palm frond. With visible pride-- and I don't think I imagine this pride-- the bird flies it back toward Queen Bess to decorate a nest.

April 20, 2010

I have not returned. Perhaps next year.

***

Image Notes:

Shark: Author's digital watercolor based on author's photographs of captive animals at the Aquarium of the Americas, New Orleans.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Author's digital watercolor based on a public domain image from the National Archives and the Defense Visual Information Distribution System.