In the parking lot, I can identify one species, the Western gull, which nests on Mexico’s Islas de Los Coronados, some 15 miles off Rosarito. Don’t stop with the littered bounties of happy-meal fun-packs, half-chomped fries and burger-bun ends. The word morphed to a verb, “to gull,” or trick, and morphed again to the human trait, “gullible.” ( Gulli-gulli chants the conjurer.) These large, arrogant birds gull with an insistence I find spell-worthy: Give us the messiness of your lives. Long ago, the noun “gull” signified a dupe. Surely something greater than gorging themselves on coastal waste has evolved the desire to desire this heap we call southern California over some other heap? I notice them here and in a myriad of elsewheres-bay, beach, dump, slough, flapping by overhead-until their sheer numbers say more than, we are here only to eat. Wanting food, nothing more, nothing Hitchkockian. Hunger in their voices, the hunger of long-distant flights, hunger between seasons of breeding and migration. Has food dropped in his wake? It falls here and who cares how. He chases one or two with a crazy “Aha!” gulls oblige by hop-running off. A homeless man with a shopping cart wheels through the gulls’ threshing floor. The trash also rises every Sunday, here in the peopleless remains of this and countless other oil-stained lots, cars gone, movie-night adolescents history. And still the gulls wait, thinking (no, trained to think) there’ll be more food. Most Sunday mornings during winter-that is, during gull season-Jack in the Box bags and red licorice wrappers have been pecked apart by these vultures of the asphalt range. Its beak visors open, trumpeting rage, and (no exaggeration) the bird hair-balls a squawk. Then one, flat-footed, ruffles its wings up and out, extends its neck, flattens its back. Stick legs and rubbery feet pick-up, put-down, pick-up, put-down. Field vision whole, each sees my coming and a space to move toward. Nobody speak, as if to say we are not one-gull, seagull, shorebird, vagrant, visitor, coastal fisher, scavenger-we possess individualities, alas, that no one can see. Their response-silence, a discontent, standing stock-still. A club, every adult member identical, their grey-and-white plumage fixed. Separate, too, and separating, mocking togetherness. From one, from another, a plaintive cry, that squeaky swing-set sound, an alien despondency. A few gulls perched on the edge of a roof. An asphalt expanse between Town Square Stadium 14 and Burlington Coat Factory. Sunday morning, Clairemont Square Shopping Center parking lot.To Fuse Wind and Its Motion: A Meditation on the Seagull in Fourteen Parts
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