Abundance

Pelican Clouds

Clouds and clouds of pelicans rise in God’s generous supply of them

As I was approaching the northern portion of Clear Lake in California on my way home to Crescent City from Los Angeles, rounding a long bend the lake, up ahead, came into view.

Strange, I thought: to my not perfect vision the lake, or a large portion of it, appeared covered with something whitish gray, like a huge, floating, shaggy carpet. Odd, to say the least.

A mile later and closer, I still could not make out what it was. A spill of some sort? A crash-landed cloud of flower petals? Curiouser and curiouser and more so by the minute, until, rounding another bend closer to the lake shore I finally saw what it was: thousands of pelicans, resting on the surface, closely enough to each other to literally form a carpet.

Gray-white, long-beaked heads everywhere, and then word spreads: let’s go.

The carpet shivers and then, stitch by stich, bird by bird, takes to the air, forming first one cloud then another then another of beating wings and sky-climbing intent.

This is why the word “overwhelming” found its rightful place in both our vocabulary and dictionaries. I pulled over and stopped (lest I’d run into someone or something gawking at the unfolding miracle).

It takes a while for a couple of thousand birds that size to ascend and darken the sun and wing their way north to who knows where, but perhaps ten minutes later, they were mostly gone.

I looked around, were there other gawkers? None that I could see. No one else had stopped to take in the wing-borne glory, no one had put their tools down to then shield their eyes to just absorb. I drew one conclusion from this: around here, they’re used to this.

Begging the question: how do you get used to this?

Answering that question: I have now lived by the Pacific shore going on seven years, and there are mornings when I walk alongside this the largest of all waters on earth that I hardly notice or even think of it. I have, in fact, gotten used to it.

Oftentimes, though, I consciously look out, taking in the ever-expanding (and as a rule pelican-free) waters, and then it registers and again tops up my awe-tank, and I again realize why some folks drive half a continent just to see this. It is a miracle, and to think that I live a ten-minute walk away from this, all the time.

My backyard.

Perhaps if I lived by Clear Lake and saw these pelican clouds on a daily or weekly basis I would in the end turn blasé about them, but I have a hard time picturing this. Then again, just having moved here in 2014, I had a hard time picturing ever to turn blasé about the Pacific, but there are indeed days where that word might apply, even if just a little.

Images of seas of flamingoes come to mind, or of wildebeest, or of the incredible air displays of starlings, or of any living creature that God seems to have created in such incredible abundance.

Or ants. Or bacteriophage; the estimated abundance of them is ten to the thirty-first power — that’s 10 plus another thirty zeros — of individual phages, beating the flamingoes hands down, though, of course, I’ve never (although phages are what’s known as everywhere) seen them rest upon the still water like a white-gray carpet, then to take to the skies.

© Wolfstuff