Poems by Susan Pope
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Albatross
by Susan Pope
Susan lives on the traditional homeland of the Denaina Athabascan people. She is surrounded by boreal forest on land sculpted thousands of years ago by glaciers stretching from the Chugach Mountains to the waters of Cook Inlet. She hikes, bikes, and skis on hundreds of miles of trails near her home and explores the wilderness of the Campbell Creek Watershed in Chugach State Park.
You won’t forget your first sight of an albatross, its size—the largest of flying birds—its grace, its effortless flight. You want to be that bird, the fulfillment of all your flying dreams, soaring just above the waves, wings catching the currents, tipping slightly side to side. It travels the open ocean thousands of miles, coming to shore only to mate and raise a single chick at the same nesting spot each time.
Metaphor for a burden one can’t escape, the albatross is on my mind as the sky shifts from pale pink to fiery orange, the shadows of night gradually giving way to a bright new day. I stash my sandals in a clump of brush near a tire swing, stealing time for myself as my husband sleeps. For forty years I’ve come to these islands in winter to relish the warm, clear waters of the south Pacific. In a village far from the sprawling city of Honolulu, on a beach that curves for miles, my feet sink into the fine, cool sand still wet from last night’s tide.
Tiny, scratched trails radiate from small round openings in the sand just above the surf line. Ghost crabs, scavenging the beach last night, now safely returned to their burrows, unseen but familiar, stitched into the paradise of memory. Not so the trash, fragments of blue, pink, white, black, and yellow in all sizes and shapes scattered throughout the sand. Coughed up from the ocean: from tsunamis, sunken boats, lost marine containers, tangled fishing nets cut to float free, and trash dumps in faraway nations. The chemicals in plastic leach into the ocean and create a toxic soup, slowly poisoning the food chain.
Here it lands.
An image haunts me, a photo from an exhibit on the Pacific gyre, that whirl of currents where debris collects and churns. Desiccated carcasses of albatross chicks on an otherwise pristine landscape—bones, feathers, beaks, and, inside their partially decomposed stomachs, plastic bottle caps, pink cigarette lighters, bits of blue rope. To the parents that fed them, these brightly colored objects must have looked like squid, crabs, fish, and krill.
Stooping, I gather the bits of plastic, feel their uneven shapes in my fingers, some burnished smooth, others with razor sharp edges, most too small to identify their original shape and purpose. These I stuff in my pockets. A black bait basket the size of my hand, a razor-sharp remnant of hard plastic as long as my forearm, a smashed green soda bottle, shreds of a turquoise fishing net, a faded pink cigarette lighter—these I cradle in my arms.
I pass other walkers, imagining how I must look to them. An artist gathering materials for a plastic mosaic. A collector. A homeless person, scavenging bottles. I approach a tall lifeguard station and spot a trash can beside the concrete restroom block. Stepping carefully in my bare feet through ironwood needles and cones, pieces of broken glass, and sharp stones, I dump my load with a crash into the metal barrel. A futile effort. So much remains.
The next morning, I wake again at first light to the cooing of doves outside my window and the crowing of roosters somewhere in the neighborhood. I don’t want to return to the plastic beach but can’t help myself. I dress in the semi-dark and fumble around until I find the plastic bag in the bottom of the closet. I stuff the bag in my pocket and head out the door.
I fill the bag in minutes. I work purposefully. No longer shocked or angry by the multi-colored mess, my mind wanders as I stoop, fill the bag, and empty again and again. What were these objects? Where did they come from? Were they tossed on purpose or unmoored by some catastrophe?
Long ago, from a much colder beach on a rocky cove in Alaska, my husband lost an entire nineteen-foot fishing boat when waves from a storm far at sea snapped the anchor line. Although the boat and motor were later salvaged, everything else on the boat turned to ocean debris. My beach-gathering is penance for that smashed boat, penance for the carelessness of my fellow humans, the same sort of penance I did last summer, when I joined hundreds of volunteers in our hometown to sort tons of debris collected on the remote shores of Alaska and packed it up to be shipped to Seattle for recycling.
The next morning, I tell myself I’ll just walk around the neighborhood near our B and B and avoid the shore, the guilt, and the overwhelming hopelessness of my pathetic efforts. But again, I return to the same beach. Into the same bedraggled plastic bag I stuff colorful chunks of poison. I no longer notice the sunrise, the curl of the waves, or the shorebirds probing the smooth sand. I’m Sisyphus on the beach.
After three days, we leave the village and the beach of never-ending plastic flotsam for Ka`ena Point, the island’s westernmost promontory. We travel a narrow strip of road that hugs the coast until it dead ends at a muddy parking lot and a yellow iron gate.
Proceeding on foot, we follow the abandoned bed of a sugar cane railroad through land that is now part state park, part military satellite tracking station. We reach another gate, squeeze between two posts and hop over a knee-high bar, only to confront a metal fence higher than our heads, running along the coast as far as we can see. I tug on the gate and budge it open with my husband’s help. With a loud clang, it snaps shut behind us.
The massive fence keeps dogs, pigs, goats, and cattle from this protected land, but other marauders get through. A brown weasel-looking creature skitters across the dunes—mongoose.
Scattered among the dunes are several small black boxes with round openings the size of tennis balls. Most likely poisoned traps for mongoose and the other island vermin, rats.
We wade through soft sand as the trail snakes toward the point. In my peripheral vision, a slight movement. Not more than fifteen feet away, an albatross sits on its nest, head and chest white as fresh snow, wind ruffling its dark gray wing feathers. I’m stunned by the clean beauty of its contrasting feathers and by the sheer size of the bird. Standing, it must surely reach my waist.
Eye-to-eye, we acknowledge the other, sharing this dune, this point of weathered lava, this island thousands of miles out in the ocean. Black eyes stare at me as if to say, This is my spot. I’m not moving. A small metal sign confirms this: Albatross return to the same nesting spot each year. Do not disturb.
Among the dunes are more nests. Hikers pause, whisper, snap cell phone pictures. No one disturbs the birds as they wait for mates to relieve them so that they can take their turns at fishing.
At least the trash I’ve gathered won’t wind up in the stomachs of the chicks that are incubating in these nests. But I inflate my own importance. Always, there’s more.
We reach the point, washed by waves from three directions. A short descent leads to a cobbled beach of black lava and white coral. Farther out, on weathered lava rocks, two endangered Hawaiian monk seals rest in the sun. No one disturbs them.
A shadow passes overhead. White breast, gray wings as wide as my outstretched arms. An albatross gliding out to sea, lifted by the wind, sharp eyes spotting swimming shapes, long curved bill poised to scoop up the fish.
Far out on another Hawaiian island on Midway Atoll lives a Laysan albatross that has raised forty chicks in her sixty-five years of life. She’s earned the name Wisdom. Grandmothers, both of us. Still productive.
On the trail back to the car, I pick up two plastic bottles, crush them, and stash them in my pack, burdens worth carrying.
© Susan Pope