Seagulls in my Soul

I'm not a talkative person, but I consider myself to be well-written. Skill aside, written language is my favourite form of self-expression, but I have no place to practice and share what I work on. To fill this void, I have established this journal, documenting only the good things I see and experience day-to-day.

All names have been changed, including my own. In fact, anything that could be used for identification should be taken with a grain of salt, but all events are real.

This journal is mine, not yours, but you are welcome to pursue it if you find here something you've been searching for.

Fair weather, and wind under your wings.

Grey clouds, heavy, pressed in, but to my back the sky was clear, and the sun made its way towards the horizon. I tilted my chin, turned my eyes up to the benches of the cottonwoods. Each drop caught the light and sparkled as it streaked towards the ground.

For several hours I sat in the heat of the day (more like July than June), my notebook out in front of me, but few words did I put down. Instead, I watched the return of those who'd never been here before. The lilac bushes are in full bloom. The scent must travel for miles and miles, awakening in the travellers memories which are not their own. They came in dogfighting for the precious nectar- folk don't realise that they are highly aggressive, territorial animals.

Canada geese are highly adaptable, and will invade human-engineered environments with ease, but within these they will do war for the high-value microenvironments found in parks and other green spaces, such as the place where I work.

Geese will also return to the same place year-after-year. I don't mean the same city, I mean the same stretch of grass where they last made roost. I've gotten to know many of the geese that whose homes I share.

My favourite couple are Eye Ring and Necklace (who I've named for their distinctive markings). Necklace, the female, is extremely friendly- I suspect she was a rehab bird. She will approach us, especially if we're carrying a container, which she knows sometimes has tasty treats like nuts or lettuce. Eye Ring doesn't like it when she does, but he doesn't bully her- he's a very kind, soft-hearted male. He follows her a few steps back, making uncertain little grumbles, and shaking his head. Because he is so gentle, I doubt he's won a fight in his entire life, and I've had to chase other geese off him before, which I think has earned me some grudging trust. Despite this "weakness," and despite the fact that in the years I've known them, they've never produced goslings, Necklace stands by him, and seems to really like him.

I believe their neighbours on the next field over are a female/female couple, as they both appear to have 'egg bums,' but neither has nested yet.

There's a solitary goose who lives in the work parking lot, who I call Two Bands, because they have two leg bands, one on each ankle. This suggests that they've been captured by humans twice, meaning that their predator avoidance skills are pretty bad. Between this, and their apparent lack of fear of cars, means it's pretty miraculous that they are still alive.

There is a second solitary goose I know, who I call The Beast, because they live on a field with one of our more beastly animals, a particular goat antelope I know. This goose will graze in the afternoons, and sit peacefully among the dandelions, but in the mornings sometimes they leave, I don't know where to.

It's raining now, for the first time this spring, and I have exactly six [6] tulip sprouts so far. I can still hear the traffic, but I can also hear the soft paws of each drop hitting the springtime leaf-litter, and the wind breaking the canopy just as a whale breaks wake on the sea.

Solitary, but instead of living in an old castle or a high tower, I live in a sub-level condo. Still, the neighbours have no idea what I'm up to in here.

Familiars. You'd think I'm talking about my boys (budgies), but I actually mean the single fungal gnat that always seems to be orbiting my head.

Hat Collection. However. Mine is drifting dangerously close to cowboy territory.

That being said, A Fashion Sense that Makes a Statement.

Words, and an obsession with their power.

This is pronounced gidgy-gidgy-gaw-nay-shee.

What's extremely funny about this to me, a person who definitely doesn't study language academically, but has a good handle on it, is that it's functionally the same as 'chickadee.'

Two peoples with two very different languages encountered one funny little bird. This funny little bird yelled at us in bird-ish. We as humans applied pokemon logic, and named them after their call.

Both of these words are phonetic representations of the gijigijigaaneshiinh/chickadee alarm call.

A sea there was, an inland sea where gulls lived. A lake there has been also, and fishes swam where we now tread. In between there was ice, so thick it pressed the crust of the earth down into the mantel. To this day the places where the glaciers were the thickest still bear water, but they're rebounding. The day will come (not within my lifetime) when the bottoms of Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Lake Winnipegosis, and Cedar Lake will rise, and the rivers that now feed them will drain them instead.

All this water and all its weight has scraped the land down, and made it flat and wide. The sky is huge (and thus ever at the forefront of my mind). The horizon is a great wall, wrapped around on all sides. The land is all a marsh, full of singing insects and blackbirds- the rascals- and the trees that like the swampy lowlands. The south is prairie, the most endangered habitat in the world. The middle is parkland, defined by its prairie potholes and hammocks. The north is all low tundra, all dark rock and carnivorous plants, and the ice flows that wash up on beaches made of smooth, round stones. There are mosses, and grasses, and lichen. Great mammals, and great birds, and frogs that freeze solid, and mudpuppies. But most important to me, we have wilderness.

There are places in this world where there are no people.

They were taller than the tallest mountains we have these days, and formed when the continent that became South America collided with the continent that became North America- this was before these two land masses unfolded like a book opening into generally their modern configuration. Time, and glaciation, has worn these mountains down, so that all that remains are the twisted, tortured roots, like the bones of the earth broken through its skin. In the hight of these rolling formations (nothing compared to their former majesty, but still fifty, sixty feet above standing level in places) you can read a history of heaving- where the ground was forced vertical- and breaches- when magma made its way up through the cracks in the earth. In the gullies are ten thousand lakes the colour and texture of green and brown glass, and even more impenetrable marshes. It's said that when they were attempting to run the railroad through here, a whole locomotive was lost as the track sank into the mire, deeper and more powerful in an ancient way than even humans could imagine. The train was never raised, it's said, so it's still out there somewhere in the reeds, with the leeches and the herons.

The Canadian Shield has my imagination in thrall.

However.

This is functionally the soundtrack of my life. Welcome to the circus...

Death Wish Love, Benson Boone. I like his new song, Mr. Electric Blue, but I've only heard it twice, and don't know it well enough yet, so it kept morphing into Death Wish Love in my head.

The Cremation of Sam McGee, arranged by Kate Reid. Words by Robert Service. If you're looking for spooky poetry, 10/10 I recommend Rhymes of the Midnight Sun, specifically The Yukon movement.

Pink Pony Club, Chappell Roan. I'd never actually heard it before, and then, inexplicably, the rock station DJ played it at least twice in a single six hour period. Not complaining, just confused.

Mulberry Street, Twenty One Pilots. Is it in a strange time signature? I thought it was 3/3 for a second. I grew up in a musical household, so I know how to look for these things, but I'm not a musically gifted person myself, so I don't know how to find them.

Vanilla Twilight, Owl City. I was really into Owl City for a while when I was much younger. People made me feel a little embarrassed about it- I realised even then that the music itself was mid. I've finally sort of come to terms with the fact that what I like about it, and most music, is the words. They don't even have to mean anything, as long as they're... right. They fit.

Tell My Boss, Mattstagraham. What an anthem.

Chills, Down With Webster. I like the whomp-omp-omp sound, and that the chorus is in double time.

Gone, Gone, Gone, Phillip Phillips. This one's just always kind of kicking around in the ol' thinker. Maybe it's been in too many movie trailers or something.

DRUGS, Tai Verdes. Again, relatable.

The Mary Ellen Cater, Stan Rogers. What a great piece of Canadian folk music. This is the Maritimes. Also, it's relatable in the same way as Tell My Boss, or DRUGS- it's also a working class struggle, flipping off The Man sort of song, only in this one, the narrator has pulled one over on the powers-that-be, and is laughing in their faces.

Desperate Measures, Marianas Trench. I can't believe I went all month with only one of their songs making the list. Somehow, I'm in the top 1% of their listenership, as per Spotify Wrapped, and I know it's kind of a hot take, but I really enjoyed Haven. Not all of it, but it opens with three bangers I just can't get enough of. Also, I know now truly that our tastes in music do not really change, because when I was growing up, all the good music my parents listened to was classic rock, especially Queen, and when I was in high school, all the good music was mass-market indy like Marianas Trench and Imagine Dragons (and Owl City, haha), and now that I guess I have to admit that I'm an adult, all the good music is classic rock especially Queen and mass market indy like Marianas Trench and Imagine Dragons.

Mostly this is seaweed, pond scum, tree roots and the likes. I wouldn't say I'm afraid of it- I know slime isn't going to hurt me, but I do find it yucky enough that I will shout and dance away from the slightest wisp of goop drifting towards me. This is why, when I was told I had to tong-feed the sea anemones, I thought it was going to be a terrible experience.

It was one of the most serene things I have ever done at work, and easily in the top five best moments of the week.

I save a life almost every day- mostly, the lives of insects. Ants shaken off a plate instead of going down the sink, or spiders ignored as they go about their noble work. When it rains, I am the poncho ghost streaking across the employee parking lot, stick held pointedly in front of me, bearing worms being airlifted to safety the same as any other wild animal that's wandered into a place where it shouldn't be. Just a few- it would be insane to try to save them all. My motto is, regrettably, 'I can't hug every cat,' for those of you who remember a time before the internet was rotten, and our collective sense of humour broke. I can hug a few, though, and just because I can't hug them all doesn't mean that I shouldn't try.

The other day was different. It wasn't an invertebrate I saved. It was a fish.

I don't mean to imply that the fish is ultimately more valuable, it's just a more rare occurrence, and harder to do. It involved hip waders, and a two-hour search for my friend, because I know these fish personally, and I knew it was strange when he didn't show up to feed. A guest had reported an orange fish looking to be in distress, but for the life of me, the only sign I could find of him was a dull glimmer, seen from above, way deep in the depths of the dangerous end of the pond. In the end, after being soaked, and scooping net after net of sludge blindly, fearing each time I'd be bringing up a corpse, he wasn't there. We were about to admit defeat when suddenly, miraculously, he reappeared, thrashing his head and climbing the walls of the pond as if he were on a line. Then he'd stop, exhausted, and drift to his side. It was in this state that I managed to net him, or rather, scoop him into the net- he was so exhausted, he couldn't keep his nares below the water's surface, and I had to wafter water over him to help him breathe while we got our transportation ready (it's viciously cold all across the country right now, and it was sitting around -36 celsius (-33 fahrenheit)- not great conditions to be moving a fish in).

When all was said and done- after I'd changed from my sopping clothes, my boss guarding the door to make sure no one would walk in on me, after I'd learnt that my fish was likely septic from an opportunistic infection due to over-breeding (the horny devil)- I found myself thinking, 'What else would I be doing but this?'

But then I returned to my normal life, the one where the work is fine, but there's just too much, so that I am doing the bare minimum for the creatures under my care daily. There's a stack an inch thick of paperwork I've been meaning to do- enrichment requests that will be denied, training pathways that'll come back asking for more detail- and now because of the cold, there's no water in the building, and our plumber has a good, long, rant about it, and how there's nothing he can do if the pipes aren't insulated.

"The quietness of being with the animals. The silent communication of a koi who's clearly a little annoyed with you, but you're not sure why, or a snake who is desperately trying to get to the boy-stink across the room."