Sometimes Pointless

Just before sundown, I made my near daily visit to the water's edge (it's only a block, not much of a pilgrimage) where I sat on the rocks to read. I closed the book after one paragraph, however, because it was dinner time for the brown pelicans. I watched with amazement and delight these gawky-looking birds who are surprisingly graceful in flight as they turned themselves into water darts and nose-dived (I guess that would be bill-dived) into the gulf where shallow-swimming schools of mullet were passing by.

At first they were going in one or two at a time, and then more and more arrived until they were diving three, four, five at a time, sitting on the surface to swallow their catch and then rising up as many at once to circle around and shoot themselves into the water again. The flock was about 20-strong, and it was such a beautiful show, I sat for some 30 or 40 minutes. The pelicans are among the most amazing flyers in my opinion, as they can stretch out those long wings and glide for what seems like much too long to go without flapping them. Looking for a fishing place, they'll skim right across the water just inches above the surface, wings perfectly still.

Watching them, I felt that frequent urge to quit blogging and just enjoy the enjoyable things we still have available to us. All the bullshit is as unreal as any other nightmare when I sit at the water's edge and watch the island birds. And all I can think of at those times is what Kurt Vonnegut said his uncle admonished him to take note of when it was happening by saying, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." And then I don't want to read about crooked politicians and war and murder and the evil men do. I don't want to think about it or blog about it.

But this evening when I was watching the brown pelicans and having those thoughts, another one snuck in, and it was this:

If it weren't for some people 40 years ago who realized what the politicians and the corporations were doing in Galveston Bay and insisted on harping about it until the EPA forced a clean-up of the dangerously polluted water (back before Reagan and Bush when the EPA had some teeth and wasn't manned by anti-environmentalists), a bay so polluted that the brown pelicans had become virtually extinct, then I wouldn't have the incredible privilege of sitting here on the rocks watching their dinner dance.

So...it's back to blog-harping. And a most sincere thank you to all the men and women who saved the brown pelicans.

Brown pelicans in Galveston Bay harbor.

Sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston, Texas.
(I took this one on an incredibly beautiful morning last month.)