Seagulls Are People Too
It was Tuesday May 13, in the year of our Lord 2014, a year that will be known, despite any actual meteorological evidence, as the coldest, longest winter ever recorded.  There had been some talk of altogether removing Spring and Fall from the calendar reckonings of man and renaming the seasons to more adequately reflect things as they were.  Met with some resistance by the serious minded but gaining traction was the suggestion of senior citizen, Ward Ambler, who had remarked off handedly one morning at Gemma's Diner on Montauk Highway that we call the seasons Colder Than a Well Diggers Ass, and, Hot Enough For Ya?  A once amateur meteorologist and handyman, now committed with single minded passion to fishing, even as the fish themselves were committing to warmer waters nearer the Gulf Stream, and were rarely seen close enough to the sandy shores to be caught by a man with a long rod casting chunks of wood and metal and plastic into the Atlantic Ocean.  A warm front moved through the area the last two days and temperatures of 70 degrees were felt for the first time of the year in Winona, NY, a beach community on the south shore of Long Island, where Ward had retired after a client some years ago had made the mistake of giving him a key to their weekend home so that he could attach new screen to the back porch.  He had repaired the screen and fished the falling tides.  The owners had been pleased with his work and asked him to repair the wooden back yard shed, damaged when a neighbor's satellite dish was blown by hurricane force winds onto the shed's roof.  He had finished that job late in the year and as the owners rarely came out in the winter he thought it would be a good idea to extend his fishing season.  So he laid down a sleeping bag on the shed floor. For insulation he had attached sheets of silver mylar emergency blankets to the walls, floor and ceiling, and as it got colder he emptied out the clay flower pots arranged artfully around the house, and with votive candles "borrowed" from what he now referred to as the bighouse, fashioned heaters with a lit votive under one clay pot over which went a larger clay pot.  This is toasty, he said to himself the first night, wearing only a pair of underwear, and socks, of which he had two pairs, each.  On this Tuesday now some years later he felt a little dizzy as he lay propped up on the shed floor reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. That the mylar walls created a sort of funhouse mirror effect and the tequila procured from the bighouse under his own procurement of disuse law was so smooth as to invite overuse could have possibly been contributing factors.  Putting the book down he chuckled.  The previous Tuesday he had been out front, a term used to describe the beach when that beach is only a sliver of land in front of a bay.  The mile walk to the inlet has been easy walking over newly rained on sand. He casted, sometimes with precision, counting the frequency of the waves and timing it so his lure landed just on the back of one cresting and sometimes just casting blindly, lulled by the sounds, and seclusion.  He hadn't seen another fisherman for weeks, musing briefly if people just gave up, maybe you could just give up, and then decided to move to another spot, back towards where he began.  Rounding the first point he saw a sight both exhilarating and horrifying. Fisherman, a whole line of them, out on the bar now exposed at low tide. They were all casting in sync and with purpose. There must be a bite on. Ward Ambler could not reach that bar, clad as he was only in rain pants over rubber boots. You would need full waders to cross over to that bar, as the trench of water before it was deeper than the 15 inch limit of his boots.  He felt like a noob.  He paused, not knowing which direction to go.  He didn't want to trudge past the seasoned fishermen with their seasoned gear, catching fish, only pausing for a single moment to turn in unison and scoff at the dejected, trudging noob behind them. It was foggy.  It had been all day.  Overcast skies can be good for day fishing.  He had been right to come out today, but just like so many other days there was always one thing missing from his gear. Still, its better than a sharp stick in the eye, being out here, he used to say before a couple of actual incidents with sharp sticks in his eye made him find the analogy, while still absolutely apt, not all that funny.  He had been inching closer to the fishermen when like a switch turned on he realized those were not fishermen lined up on the bar facing the raging ocean, but only seagulls. Back in his shed he finished the last of the tequila and staring hard at his wavering mylar reflection drifted off to sleep.