A HURRICANE-DELIVERED
MAGNIFICENT FRIGATEBIRD
After providing the Black Widow with a cozy home
I lay back at the water's edge and read while the sun went down. It was a short story by
Gabriel García Márquez, about an old couple who find an aged, decrepit angel half dead
on the beach, locked him in a henhouse because his wings bore feathers, and sold tickets
to the world to see him.
When the light began to dim I put the book down and saw circling offshore before me a
mature male Magnificent Frigatebird, just as you can see at http://www.dlcphotography.net/CR3-3/1D2_02404.htm...
Magnificent Frigatebirds aren't supposed to occur this far inland. Those of you with me
in the Yucatan may recall how Hurricane Wilma blew Magnificent Frigatebirds inland to
Hacienda San Juan. Though that was only ten miles south of the beach I thought it was
pretty good to see frigatebirds there.
Here in Jalpan we're about 130 miles inland (210 kms) and the Eastern Sierra Madres
rise between us and the sea.
Surely Hurricane Dean the previous week had driven the frigatebird here. I've even read
that 1988's Hurricane Gilbert blew frigatebirds north into the US as far as Iowa. Still,
this frigatebird before me over Jalpan Reservoir was something very special, almost
apparitional, just the right thing to see in the magical realism mind the angel story had
put me in.
Imagine, on those 7.5-ft.-across wings losing yourself in a stormy night's winds, but
this night unlike any you've ever experienced, being carried not only far inland but
skywards, all your senses rebelling as you rise and rise up the altiplano's eastern slope,
the acrid, chilling odor of pines and junipers diluting the fish smells you live for, and
then the winds suddenly plummet on the leeward side, and die, and you circle in a kind of
black hollowness, and at dawn the ocean is gone, and you search and search for water and
finally find a silvery spot in a deserty valley without sandy beaches and rolling waves,
without crabs and jellyfish, without seagulls to rob of their catches, just this calm
shininess of saltless reservoir-water...
Sitting there with the book on my lap I figured the storm-buffeted frigatebird before
me must have a hunch what García Márquez's disoriented angel felt that day he awoke on
his sordid beach, and I lay another flat rock atop the widow's nest to better keep the
rain off. |