By Trileigh Tucker
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands?
T.S. Eliot, Marina
“He’s just not here,” says my husband Rob. “Should we try again back in town?”
On this isolated tip of rocky land, I scan the sky along the strait, shivering in the late-October breeze channeled to this inland sea. As I’ve been doing for two days, I check every single large light-colored bird with my binoculars, looking for one with a long narrow beak and tapered wings. Behind us stands the lighthouse that for over a hundred years has guided ships returning home and those departing west into the dark Pacific Ocean. Clouds billow across the northern sky, and the Olympic Mountains on the western horizon lie shadowed by the oncoming rain. A huge flock of mergansers wings past the lighthouse as gulls wheel and cry around us. But nowhere in this birdscape is the one we’re seeking.
We pack ourselves and my camera gear back into our trusty old Honda and make the two-mile drive back into Port Townsend, with stops along the way to check out the various spots—the marina, the park, the ferry dock—where the bird has been reported. No luck.
“Maybe he’s finally heading back home,” says a local birder sharing a pier with us. She’s been tracking this rare visitor for weeks. “I sure hope so,” she continues. “This cold can’t be good for him. And that eagle who almost grabbed him the other day—he’s in a kind of danger here that didn’t exist where he came from.”
We need to start heading back home ourselves, with a two-hour drive to catch a 2:25 ferry, but after an early lunch we decide to head back to the pier near the point for one last try. As with so many earlier visits, there’s a big whitish bird on the pilings we’ve checked a dozen times. Of course, I think as I clamber out of the car, here’s another gull giving me false hope. No offense to gulls.
Then through my binoculars I see that long, thin bill and the dark-brown wing feathers that set this bird apart from our local denizens. I call to Rob, who’s still huddling inside the car against the cold wind, “Honey, can you grab my big lens? And the tripod? Fast?” Racing across the gravel parking lot to the shoreline—well, maybe not racing, but striding as quickly as I can while lugging along fragile, awkward equipment and trying not to make a big jangly movement that could spook a bird off its perch—I take a quick look through my optics. It’s him: the Red-footed Booby.
This sleek traveler has mysteriously appeared here, four thousand miles from home. What is his story? I want to figure out how he could have gotten all the way to the Pacific Northwest—and understand why. And I wonder with sinking heart how he can possibly find his way home.
# # #
I’ve been feeling lost at sea myself. After a career teaching environmental studies, I’d turned to writing a few years ago. Then the pandemic hit. And then my father died.
I’d followed Dad in choosing a life of the intellect, taking a scientific career in academia. He and I loved talking science together: his physics, my geology. Like so many scientists, he was a committed atheist, and he’d always sounded matter-of-fact about death. When I once asked him what he thought happened afterwards, he said he guessed probably nothing, but he’d be interested to find out when the time came.
The time came. And whatever Dad might have experienced afterwards, I felt suddenly alone in a way I’d never known. For more than a year I wept every night. Until he died, I hadn’t realized how much his presence had given me an anchor and a sense of home. Dad’s death was the hardest among so many recent other passings: mother, friends, animal companions. At each loss, my heart shreds further. I know that coming years will only accelerate that pace, as we all age in step, stopping one by one.
I’ll turn seventy soon: late October in my life’s seasons. I can feel my body, my mind, changing in unnerving ways these days. Who will I remain, I wonder, as I lose core parts of myself: each beloved person in my life, each of the senses that connect me to this astonishing world? Will I still be myself when I can no longer sing or even hear the music that fires my spirit, or see the Earth’s transcendent beauty? And at some point, quickly or slowly, Rob or I will go first into whatever’s next. If anything.
Small everyday beauties now trigger weeping spells. The golden ginkgo in my neighbor’s autumn yard is enough to shatter my heart as I imagine leaving this beloved earth forever. Floundering amidst the turbulent waters, as I survey the wind-rocked seascape where beloved companions can disappear in a breeze, I’m scared.
# # #
The booby’s Latin name is Sula sula, so I decide to call him Sully. His feet, pink instead of the brilliant red of the adults, mark him as young, maybe a year and a half old. He’s probably from an atoll called Kiritimati (formerly known as Christmas Island). We can’t be sure of that—his true origin is known to him alone—but his plumage matches that of his kin there.
Watching Sully preen himself on the pier, I picture the life he’d had back home. Boobies nest in vast colonies. They forage in flocks, plunging vertically en masse into schools of flying fish or squid. When they’re not tending to their offspring or eating, they hang out in huge numbers at their roosts. They spend their entire lives in community. They don’t sing, but they do talk: greeting their lifelong mates when they return to the roost, yelling at harassing visitors, chatting quietly with their beloved or their children at their nests.
With those images in mind, I try to imagine how must Sully feel in this life he has now: all by himself, alone on his piling, no one like him to talk with, in a place colder than he’d ever known.
# # #
As my sister-in-law Monica’s mother Audrey lay dying, her family gathered around her bed. Monica, my brother, and several of Audrey’s grandchildren joined in singing the hymns she loved. Rob and I had visited Audrey a month earlier, and with her characteristic brilliant smile, she said she was doing OK and didn’t have much to complain about, even though she knew, as we all did, that her health was fading fast.
Now, at her bedside, Monica asked, “Mom, how are you doing?”
“I’m ready, honey,” she replied, with light in her eyes. That smile again. “I’m ready to go home to Jesus. I want to be back with Alex,” meaning her beloved husband. “It’s time.” A few days later, she let go.
Audrey had always believed in heaven. Her strong faith had gotten her through Alex’s passing a decade earlier, as she held to the conviction that he was going to a better place. Now she knew she’d be reunited with Alex before too long. When we heard about her passing, Rob and I had the same thought: the ideal death, surrounded by family, music in the air, looking peacefully forward to reunion.
# # #
We tell stories about each other, about nature, about death. While I’m with Sully, I chat with two birders who arrive at different times to check on him. Each woman expresses her worry for his well-being, wishing he were heading south. I can’t help being glad he’s still here where I can see him with my own eyes, see the spark in his own, feel the breeze on my face as it caresses his, smell the salt air that fills his lungs. Yet it’s hard to reconcile that gratitude with my conviction that yes, he should be on his way home. All three of us saw him as lost and bereft.
The booby’s, um, evocative name probably came from sailors who interpreted the bird’s lack of fear around humans not as courage but as stupidity. Like all storytellers, they could have crafted a radically different tale. Their choice—the name by which millions now know him—might say more about their self-image as fearsome buccaneers than about the booby’s character.
# # #
Birders think Sully came from Kiritimati because his feather colors match the Red-footed Boobies there. Why did he leave this home where boobies have roosted for hundreds of years or more? Why does anyone leave their ancestral home? Sometimes we’re torn away by conflict, a storm that forces us helplessly away from the familiar. Maybe Sully arrived in the North Pacific on the wings of a typhoon, or a series of them. Or we might flee starvation, departing in desperate hope of finding abundance far from the newly barren fields of home. Boobies have been known to follow schools of fish for long distances; perhaps hunger brought him here.
Like many wayfarers, he might have found along the route new comrades who helped each other find sustenance. In Port Townsend, Sully was often spotted hanging out with a group of Heerman’s Gulls, who migrate annually from Central America to the Pacific Northwest. If he made it as far north as Mexico on his own, he might have encountered them there and stuck with his new friends on their journey here.
Was Sully pushed or pulled into new territory? For that part of his story, at least, we can find some hints. He might be one of a growing number of climate refugees. That summer held one of the strongest El Niños on record, and those winds blow increasingly warm Pacific air eastward—which quashes the cold upwelling currents that bring fish up to where a diving booby can nab them. Without his reliable food sources, he might have chased others north to where he could have encountered the Heerman’s Gulls. But maybe there was more to his tale.
# # #
As I approach my elder years through rocking waters, I’m feeling a fresh wind on the horizon, a hunger for new nourishment. I’m still utterly in love with my husband. My remaining family members hold each other tight and it’s a joy to spend time with them. My close friends are woven into my heart.
But many of my old sources of meaning, like teaching, no longer energize or fulfill me. Something’s deeply different now. Peering ever closer at death, I feel lost. I can’t tell whether I’m being pushed from my old home by fear, or pulled by this storm of losses toward something more beautiful.
Long after Audrey died, the scene of her passing kept calling to me with its tones of comfort and peace. I wondered whether that underlying faith could ever be available to me. While Dad was alive, I’d dabbled in religion from time to time but mostly stayed on his atheistic path, supported by the dismissive voices of my scientific community. After his death, though, my psyche was unexpectedly awash in religious images, like salt spray from a rocking ocean. Now I’m navigating waters uncharted, at least by me, following nutrition as a booby pursues fish. I’ve started going to a church. I’ve joined its choir. Like a young booby’s feet as he matures, my life is gradually turning from muted tones into bright color. I yearn for knowledge like Audrey’s, that ultimately I’ll find myself reborn to wholeness as I reunite with my lost loved ones in a new heavenly home.
Yet I haven’t been able to bring myself to truly believe in an afterlife. I can viscerally feel a flowing river of goodness and grace that infuses life on earth. I’m happy to sing the music of belief and to share in the lovely rituals that connect me to people who lived thousands of years ago. But I can’t seem to push my mind into true conviction that there’s some continuance of spirit after death. It all feels like a beautiful novel, not nonfiction.
# # #
What does it really mean to “believe” in a story? As a scientist, all my life I’ve based my beliefs on facts that were woven into a scientific narrative: a rigorously tested hypothesis about how they came to be. The idea that Sully might have come here because his fish supply ran low from El Niño effects is more an idea nugget than a work of scientific nonfiction. To convert it to a narrative that a scientist could believe in, we’d have to put leg bands and tracking devices on a lot of Red-footed Boobies, then observe their movements closely for years, mapping those against climate and weather events.
But it’s not scientific truth that lets novels, mythology, and poetry move our spirits. It’s truth of the heart, the truth of tears and forgiveness and hope. Tales with lone white seabirds have offered these truths for millennia. Homer wrote that when Odysseus was being tossed in a storm whipped up by an angry Poseidon, he was visited by the marine goddess Leucothea, who rose from the waves in the form of a white bird. She told Odysseus how to save himself from the tempest before plummeting like a booby back into the deep—though you won’t be surprised that our hero doesn’t listen until later, just in time. Coleridge’s ancient mariner had his albatross, that doomed savior. The “Lone Wild Bird” of the old hymn, in lofty flight to “the ends of Earth, the sea’s dark deep and far off land,” remains yet in the sight of God. From such stories, even though we may not believe in their literal truth, we learn the wisdom of attending to bird messengers, whether fictional or perched on pilings, preening themselves for whatever’s next.
And tales don’t require scientific truth to become real for us. Kazantzakis’s novel God’s Pauper portrays the simple little man from Assisi who listened well to birds. When I open its pages at bedtime, Francis and Leo and Clare come alive with their dramas, struggles and victories, real within that framework. Real enough to affect my body: I clench with their anguish, smile when Francis speaks to the bird-gathering with delight and compassion, weep when Leo sees upon Francis’s death the tiny chilled, drenched sparrow who carries his spirit. The truths of a great novel leave us deeply changed, more empathetic, with perhaps more courage and understanding as we grapple with our own lives and weather their windy challenges.
# # #
In this troubled time, it’s easy to think Sully’s message, the tale he’s telling us, might be of threat, of starvation, of inexorable climate danger. But what if instead of being lost in that poignant way that had my fellow birders and me aching on his behalf, he’s actually an explorer? Maybe he’s an exceptionally curious fellow, someone who gets a kick from probing beyond the boundaries that enclose others, and who has the unusual energy to keep following his interest—or the trust to hop onto a passing ship’s mast and ride it to wherever it’s headed.
Among my friends, and probably yours, there are some who are more adventurous than others. Some ornithologists think that’s also true with birds. And those avian explorers might serve their companions well, by seeing whether useful new feeding opportunities might be found beyond the city limits. Or at a diner in a small town; after we leave the dock, Sully is spotted hanging out at the Four Seasons Chinese Restaurant along the Port Townsend waterfront.
If our Red-footed Booby’s flockmates are equally intrepid, it’s possible they might find their own way to the Pacific Northwest. Whether or not they choose the Four Seasons, they could find the plentiful seafood so enjoyed by the Heerman’s Gulls who were Sully’s new friends. And perhaps they’ll find Sully when they get here, and a new booby colony will be born. So Sully may go down in booby history as the swashbuckling seafarer who helped expand his species’ range, opening new possibilities for all boobykind. Maybe the story Sully tells is about not danger and fear, but courage and faith.
# # #
After we return from Port Townsend, I start checking eBird daily for reports of Sully. He hangs out where we saw him for a couple more days, then disappears for a few. As sightings subside, our hearts rise, in hope he’s headed home.
On November 1, All Souls Day, he reappears at the tip of the peninsula. That night my choir sings the Mozart Requiem as thirteen hundred people grieve their loved ones. Speaking to all of us who are suffering, Mozart opens and closes the Mass with a profound prayer: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Two days later, Sully is spotted heading toward the strait that leads to open ocean and a brewing storm. The next day, amid howling westward winds and rain, he disappears for good.
Does he finally succumb to cold and fear and heartbreak, leaving him weak when that hungry eagle swooped down once more? Does he instead find the wind that will steer him back south to see whether the dreamlike images that occasionally float through his mind, of lux perpetua and warm green water and red-shod companions, are of real places or just ones he’d love to believe in? Or might he decide to venture still further away from his origins?
If Sully is truly a boundary-pushing adventurer in search of new realms, he had to start by taking wing. Maybe a storm gave him an initial boost, but then he chose to travel with it to an unknown destination. Which tale shall we tell?
# # #
We can choose how we see Sully’s story. What about our own? When I do get ready to leave this life, I most want two things: to be outside, and to be with at least one person who loves me. But what a further grace it would be to depart as Audrey did, in peace and joyful anticipation, surrounded by loved ones singing my favorite music. Can I find a path to that grace, one that’s broad enough to hold my scientific mind as well? Is there a way to believe that I might really pass into the embrace of my father and mother and all my departed beloveds when I leave this exquisite home?
My search, perhaps like Sully’s, was launched by loss, a tempest that blew me off my familiar atoll. I found myself awash, afraid. It’s hard to change a familiar story (so I’ve heard from parents trying to skip reading a few pages from a toddler’s well-loved storybook at bedtime). When you try a new belief, you’re inviting transformative change in how you understand yourself as well as your world’s meaning. You don’t know who you’ll become as you fly with the cyclone, and there’s no guarantee of where you’ll end up—maybe on pilings near a lighthouse, with new companions and strange-tasting cuisine.
But I want to try those deep new waters, trusting that I’ll find the fish who swim down there. So I’ll take wing with the storm. I’m still a scientist, so I’ll gather data: locate the prevailing winds, assess roosting places, seek healthy nourishment. But I’ll also plunge like a booby, headfirst and full-bore, into this greatest of novels: luxuriate in my religion’s rich symbols, sing with my choir the music that comforts the bereft and heals the soul, find a new community of flockmates. I’ll hold to lux perpetua and let myself be windborne toward a place of warm green waters, surrounded by winged kin who have, through whatever plotline, found their way here. And should I reach that blessed roost, perhaps I’ll spot a large whitish bird with a narrow pink beak, preening his sleek feathers on a sturdy nest in a beloved colony, a seafarer whose story has finally carried him home.
Trileigh Tucker, who lives in West Seattle, Washington, has published creative nonfiction in venues such as About Place, Cold Mountain Review, Panorama, Flycatcher, and the anthology Women on Nature. She is working on a book exploring paths to deeper meaning through encounters with everyday birds. trileightucker.com