What
" If "
... there were abundant birds, fish, and clean water?
... our needs for clean water and food were protected?
... we planned for water?
... all the marshes, where fish and birds are born, were restored?
... we designed the oceans with adequate space for dolphins and whales?
Ecoartist
Aviva Rahmani suggests, not the perilous world many scientists believe
we inhabit, but a beautiful and utopian future based on a world of "If."
She believes we can bring the needs of our daily lives into harmony
with those of the earth...
This
seal story is reprinted with permission by the author: Aviva Rahmani
(www.ghostnets.com)
"What
the Earth needs now is a good housekeeper. Habitat was lost by increments,
it can be restored by increments."
I get an
early January morning call from my neighbor Alicia, who, with her husband
Bob, teaches in our local school. We have a hooded seal up on my wharf.
Bob talks to a couple marine mammal rescue people and then he goes down
and snaps some pictures of the seal. He emails them to me.
Apparently,
hooded seals are extending their range and this one came up in high
tide to spend the day sunning itself. We are warned to keep the dogs
away, as they will be in danger from the severity of the aggressive
bites from this species and the viruses they carry (not the seal in
danger but my dogs), and now it's on a 24 hr watch to see if it will
go back over the edge when the high tide comes back. I call Joy &
Billy, whouse my wharf to row over to Narrows Island and cull the trees
to prevent fires, not to go down there till the seal launches itself
back into the water.
But
I couldn't help walking down for a fairly close encounter (though I
stopped and backed off as soon as it moved) and spent a few heartstopping
moments gazing into it's eyes, that seemed ratherannoyed
to be disturbed and ready for action if necessary. It's pretty big,
about 6-7 feet long and would occasionally lift and stretch it's tail
for all the world like elegant human gams in a pale grey sheath and
I knew then why sailors might have been beguiled. I thought of the Scottish
custom of singing to the seals and was sorely tempted to try out my
Christmas cantata solo... "in the siii-i-i-ilence of the winterrrr........."
and then decide the words themselves warn me off from piercing the quiet,
let alone what it might do to my voice to sing outdoors just now in
this cold air, especially when I'm due to sing in church here in an
hour. We're singing something about Jesus in the stable for the Anthem
today but I've already had my epiphany for the morning with nature in
the outdoors. In church, I can find a few rock movers who can help me
decide what to do about stabilizing the boulders down by the Ferry,
that the last big storm threatened. So life goes on here on the island
for the time being while politics in Washington, DC far away from us
rumbles of wars to come.
The seal has traveled a bit back towards the wharf edge which will take
him/her to the open sea. Maybe its' haste reflects something the rest
of us should know... or maybe not. It's still very low tide and a long
trek as well as a sharp drop for a while to come.
Just before
I leave, I watch the seal move about ten feet to the edge, curl up and
then come back. I had thought it was deciding the tide wasn't high enuf
but something about the way it has curled up worries me and the labored
progress it made.... At church, our minister spent a lot of time on
prayers for various people, including one gentleman who asks for prayers
for someone in town. When Michele asks, "isn't he doing well"
He replies laconically style, "No, not really. he's dead."
I am tempted to ask her to pray for my gray hooded seal too but I keep
quiet. When I get back there is a message from Alicia that from the
jpegs, the sea mammal rescue people thought the seal's eyes looked sunken
and dry and they are sending a boat out.
I look down the hill towards my wharf, and see the hunting orange of
someone's jacket and something about the way the seal is lying looks
wrong... too limp. So as quickly as I can on the ice and snow, I walk
down. There are three Marine Patrol volunteers who have come out and
Walmart has donated a crate (the first good thing I've ever heard about
Walmart). They warn us it would probably thrash and growl and to stay
clear. Up close, it is considerably smaller and more pathetic than it
had looked hours earlier. Maybe four feet and weak. I come up by it
and start to sing low to it. The seal is quiet and they get it into
the crate. And it lies still there. I stop singing, and it immediately
begins to thrash violently.
I ask if we can call and see how it is doing. They say, " we are
overwhelmed at our facilities and have only volunteers helping."
They pick up the crate and carry it to a small inflatable at the dock
and from there to a 40 footer to bring back to the mainland. Four people
and two boats came over in the dead of Winter, from a facility in Portland,
another two hours down the coast. It took them almost two hours to get
here over the water and it will take at least as long getting back,
for one four foot sick seal. Not to mention the three of us on the island
and everyone I spoke to at church and the magic of digital cameras and
the web. As Alicia and I begin trudging back up the hill to our homes,
she says, "Greg (the guy in charge) told me the facility on the
mainland is already full: they had twelve strandings this weekend so
far and if they can't rehabilitate it soon, they will have to euthanize
it." I suggest we name it Silkie, for the Scottish Faerie creatures
who are half human and half animal, in a human gesture of naming I can't
resist.
Did I sing it it's funeral song? Will being euthanized by humans be
any kinder than drowning at sea or dying of
dehydration and starvation on my wharf? I don't know. And why are we
having all these strandings? Last summer, fishermen were saying the
seals were eating all the herring they catch for bait but others were
saying there wasn't enuf food for both the fishermen and the seals.
I have heard scientists say there's a beneficial relationship between
the proliferation of plankton and the seals. If we kill the seals, the
lobsters will suffer because the larvae need the plankton.
Someone
says cynically, "on most wharves around here they'd shoot it, leave
it to die or just shove it back in the water". I call my studio
assistant, to tell her the story and ask what she might know about the
seals. She says, " the seal must have known where to beach. Animals
always know and it must have known where to come."
I have several moments of awe in the presence of this beautiful wild
animal, the moments we gazed intently into eachother's eyes, in the
generosity of people at their best to the creatures we cherish and the
hope that it might survive, that in fact there was some radar my little
marsh sent out to guide it here, the fantasy that indeed, I sang it
a Silkie song of comfort. I am glad of the opportunity to let my friends
all in on it. "In the darknesssss of theeee Winnnn..terrrrr.....(sung
in a minor key)".
Silkie,
it turns out, survives and is thriving on being hand fed. We don't yet
know why she got sick. But one biologist says, " in ten year cycles,
they come up here and give birth to young." I think Silkie's survival
is a "test" of and a lesson about whether any of us will survive
in our brave new world of population and progress and conflict.
Time goes
by and I call the Marine Rescue people. Silkie did not survive long.
She came in riddled with parasites and very dehydrated. But she gained
weight while she was there and lived for almost six weeks, She came
to trust the people there. She was a favorite and they named her "Robin".
They tell me, "she was gorgeous and intelligent and unusually good-natured,
especially for a grey hooded seal. The day she died, she had been very
active, jumping in & out of the water and eating fish. Suddenly
she developed a cough. We put her on an IV and noticed that she had
become very quiet. She died in her sleep. When they did the autopsy,
they found her lungs were absolutely ravaged. The wonder was",
Lynne, the Vet who attended her said, "that she had lived as long
as she did".
a rocky shoreline, with cliffs & smoothed out channels, caused by
the ocean wave action. Suddenly we saw a HUGE grey seal swimming towards
one of the channels, then he allowed himself to slowly be pushed up
into the channel, by the action of the tidal waves coming in. (Maybe
it was his regular bed for the night?)