All About Science
The Great Cormorant
By Bruce Edward Litton
Dry sand scrunched like popcorn under my boots, uneven steps carrying me south. A wet tongue where surf had pushed up on the beach probably covered broken shells near the churning wash. On other occasions, my son, Matt, dug through the like. The bits of calcium revealed shades of tan, but on this day, the weather was too cold for sunbathing.
I got to the wet stuff and my foot took hold. A wave rumbled like a kettle drum, grumbling like the empty stomach of a giant, making me wonder if no fish were in the surf. Matt walked a handful of paces ahead of a woman and a man belonging to a group of us. He called out, “Dad! Wait up!”
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Why did he care all of a sudden? I amused myself, thinking my thought of fish had to do with it. Unlike the eagerness he felt when I did take him fishing, he had been lagging behind sullenly. Now he was running, hair the color of sand riffling in the breeze before he settled alongside me for comfort. I stuffed my guilt for putting him up to birding, but when I looked again, I saw no interest on his face. His dejection placed a question mark above the hike.
The goal, Barnegat Inlet’s North Jetty, wrinkled in the distance like a heat illusion. Twenty yards ahead, the naturalist, Michael Pollock, stood taller than the three other participants
with him. Matt and I had joined him on other New Jersey Audubon outings. The suggested minimum age for a fossil-finding trip we attended four years prior was ten, but Matt’s mother managed to have him admitted at seven. He was a riveting little adventurer who distinctly impressed Michael.
Three miles of Island Beach State Park lay ahead. Time yet for interest to take hold. And despite bright sun promising to accompany us—Matt’s red coat reflected it loudly—perhaps Michael’s hands were becoming chapped. A brown parka with a feather-encircled hood protected him otherwise. I watched him mount a monocular on a tripod he dug into dry sand while I hoped the equipment would pique Matt’s interest.
“Those are gannets,” Michael said, gazing naked-eyed beyond breakers. They dove from twenty yards aloft straight into cold brine. “They’re devouring peanut bunker—first year menhaden.”
Matt and I knew striped bass devour peanut bunker, but this was the first either of us had taken conscious notice of gannets. Not a dour recognition for me, and I felt no absurdity while watching them, despite my son’s mood hinting otherwise.
Fellow members began taking looks through the scope. I let Matt go before me. When he stepped away, I asked, “What did you see?”
“I saw one dive,” he said indifferently.
“Did you see it take a fish? His eyes flashed. “No.”
I quickly looked to the right. An older man squinted at the eyepiece. I looked back at Matt. “What do you think of the monocular?”
“It’s pretty cool.” A moment of interest became indifference again.
I gazed through the glass after everyone else had enough. A gull-like gannet with a dagger for a beak plummeted at thrilling speed. I tried to zoom close, hoping to see a fish caught between edges of the beak, but I fumbled. Michael stepped in front of me, corrected something, then backed away so I could look again. The demand to trek onward made my view of a dive and zooming in close to watch the gannet’s reemergence feel especially dramatic. I didn’t see the fish the gannet surely caught, but that didn’t matter.
Scanning the beach as we trudged on, some of us noticed a loose aggregate of perhaps a dozen ring-billed gulls near dunes. Each brain processed more awareness than John James Audubon might have imagined, but a contemporary of his in England, William Blake, wrote, “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” Empathy and a dose of science allowed me to imagine something approximate, but when I turned my look towards the surf near the edge of the wash, I felt astonished merely to see a bird I wouldn’t expect.
“Matt, a laughing gull!” The head dipped, the beak clipping and pointing skyward to allow straight passage down the gullet for whatever it got. My favorite kind of gull, now lifting wings to escape a surge of froth. I knew they migrate south, and I felt surprised because this one seemed out of place in the cold, straggling behind usual whereabouts in early November, lingering here while cutting its way to Virginia or perhaps further south to the Caribbean. Sanderlings nearby chased receding wash. They poked beaks like hypodermic needles in pasty sand, heads pressing like manic fingers on syringes, an alertness that did seem absurd.
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The endpoint was a black blur. An impressionistic image. We would take our time getting there—determined, but not without viewing more birds.
Again, Michael dug the tripod in. Red-throated loons in winter plumage—white throats and grey backs—paddled beyond breakers, disappeared behind swells, rose into view. Matt didn’t seem impressed, but when my turn came, the view penetrated any lingering defenses like a visionary experience, and yet despite luminosity, the grey back I saw, patterned by a web of white, prompted the thought of a fish net.
That fuzzy black patch we slogged towards anchored my awareness. I knew the rocks, had already been there on a different occasion, so the illusion of partial transparency didn’t fool me. Any of the boulders could anchor a ship. As if I obsessed on a deeply embedded and not fully accessible idea, the blackness against blue held promise in the vaguely grudging way of an endeavor that could fall into deeper trouble than my son’s displeasure. Requiring more difficult attention than a hike, an idea in my mental substratum involves years of careful excavation to bring it to light. Anyone who entertains subterraneous ideation might risk stability in any event, though an outing might raise an idea to competent awareness better than anything else.
I first stood on Barnegat Inlet’s other jetty in 1980. It leads out to sea at Long Beach Island’s northern end. I lived on that island—self-employed and free to spend time as I pleased—twenty-seven years before my first ride, along with Matt, through sand. My brother David drove, leaving tire tracks as we pursued bluefish and striped bass along the way Matt and I now walked. Besides one other bird hike with Michael and a visit as a botany student, my many visits to the park have involved surf fishing. To me, it’s an innocent place. The island to the south gave me questionable experience.
Over the South Jetty, as the other is named, Barnegat Lighthouse rises a hundred and sixty-nine feet. It would become clearly visible over dunes. The gull passing overhead could see it and surrounding structures, but Michael would name the town it rises over. A gull’s brain interprets pattern and density without the endearment language bestows upon a place, regardless of what Blake believed about a bird’s “delight.” Word counts for something more than focusing a monocular, because instrumental reason seems to resemble, at least to me, the nonhuman spatial grasp of a bird.
Michael mentioned the town, when he said, “A snowy was recently sighted across the inlet near Barnegat Light.”
I believed the owl would remain hidden from us, thinking of white as suggesting spirituality, the red paint of the lighthouse as suggesting power, and imagining the snowy flying invisibly. At age four or five, I drew a mandala with a red crayon, spontaneously inspired. I had never seen one. Structure, like a feather holding a bird’s body aloft. Coming out of nowhere.
Who would expect the arctic air mass to carry a rare sight other than a snowy owl? Michael didn’t. What are expectations, if not sprightly images attempting to leap away from memory? As if one gazes into water like Narcissus and sees no deeper than his reflected image. Even so, structure as underlying natural form is, I think, barren without personal style. When I first lay eyes on the jetty, the glory of my teenaged years gleamed on the rocks. It would soon be as if my life regressed twenty-five hundred years. Maybe for wisdom’s sake. Blake claimed he saw through the eye and not with it. By dependence upon physical sense, we see indifferently what we judge on past evidence; personal value needs to knock us awake, if we are to experience anything new or unusual. The thought might be ironic, considering how troubling the span of years I tumbled into, but for now, we waddled on, as if—unless that snowy owl surprised us—all we could hope for were gulls, gannets, and the occasional loon. Matt, who seemed to hope for nothing, frowned like an albatross.
Michael suddenly cried out, “Snow buntings!” When I spun around, having got ahead of him, he was looking upward, astonished. The flock had passed to his right. “I didn’t see this coming! This is almost the equal treat to spotting a snowy!”
Dozens of them glided low and alighted on the upper beach. White, finch-like birds with light brown markings matching rocky terrain, migrants from arctic tundra. Wintering on beaches as far south as Delaware and rarely on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, they blend in like ghost crabs. One species of about five hundred flying in a great swath as the season shifts, forming the Atlantic Flyway, a region far offshore and as far west as northeastern Ohio and West Virginia.
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Barnegat Lighthouse poked above dunes, rising slowly into majestic view as our pacing brought us closer. Boulders loomed close enough to make out individually, the goal easily attainable. My son had endured without verbal complaint.
I did take the opportunity to shift attention from birds when I began talking with fishermen sitting on tailgates and standing patiently beside long surf rods, telling Matt very few fish had been caught. He shied away from the men. But when at last we did get to the jetty, a pod of striped bass cornered peanut bunker between the beach and boulders, fishermen hooking up as the bass created boils on the ocean surface, taking plugs.
Matt said, “That’s a really good spot because the jetty is so long. The bunker can’t get around it.” His interest had mildly increased. He walked on ahead of me, onto flat-topped boulders, joining the majority of our group.
A dark-haired woman a few years my senior wore a rufous fleece over layers of other clothing. She appeared the classic outdoor type, but when she picked up a discarded metal lure,
the hook large and rusty, she turned and met my eyes fiercely, holding it like a hypnotist’s pendant before them. “Brutal!” she said, then tossed the metal aside contemptuously.
Fascinated by her passion rather than feeling any insult, I said nothing. My gaze was soft and open. Her eyes stayed fixed on mine as she backed away, afraid. She must not have expected my empathy. She abruptly turned, jaunting off to join the rest of the group. Matt stood beside an aging man in a blue overcoat and Michael with his hood down. Just as well my son had missed the drama.
When I joined everyone, I heard the elder man say, “What sort of sandpiper?” I turned and saw a bird the size of a flicker, which, for a sandpiper, impressed me as large.
Michael said, “It’s a purple sandpiper. You find them associated with rocks, eating periwinkles and snails. Not a common bird.” It busied about at the shifting edge of brine and barnacle-covered basalt, just a few yards from us. “They come from arctic or subarctic Canada.”
Michael bridged the age gap midway between me and the others, besides the woman who disagreed with fishing. I became intimately aware of their agedness. Then I noticed Michael looking seaward.
“There, atop the channel marker,” he said. I saw a large, black bird.
The marker rested on a platform constructed by evenly cut basalt supported by metal beams where the inlet becomes ocean. It was as if blue-black depths of surrounding water created the appealing isolation of its elevation, rather than dragged it under. The bird looked like a sentinel atop a watch tower, gazing endlessly over the brine. I vaguely felt as if the sight addressed the call of origin within me, my having read ancient Greek philosophy during the years I lived on Long Beach Island.
Michael set up the monocular. For once, the tripod erected on hard surface. Having viewed the bird closely, he said, “Great cormorant,” as if now perfectly certain.
“I’ve never heard of any but the double-crested,” I said.
“These are much less common.” He offered me a look.
I noticed off-white on the underside of a long, thick beak, before I beheld the majestic black creature in profile. A patch of orange at the top of the throat accented the ominous darkness, and a white patch on the bird’s visible left wing could have reminded me of bufflehead ducks’ flash of white during flight. For the great cormorant, the same likeness to a strobe sequence might suggest light is its internal nature. I couldn’t evaluate it as I do the double-crested cormorant, a slate-black bird that seems as common here as the crow at home in Bedminster, though I like crows and detest the cormorants. But the deep wonder the great cormorant provoked would never leave me. As for crows, they remind me of a novelist I admire. I revel in the call: “ka! ka! ka!”
Franz Kafka wrote in his journals, “I am a jackdaw.” The jackdaw’s range includes Europe, Asia, and northern Africa—as members of the crow family. The urgency of Kafka’s name in short form, expressed by a crow, isn’t lost on me. Nothing could be more urgent than a reminder of getting words right as he did. I am patient. My journals can always absorb handwritten impulses. Kafka spoke to me with exquisite personal clarity a week or two before my twenty-second birthday. I found the two journal volumes in the Ship Bottom Library while living alone on Long Beach Island during the fall of 1982, knowing nobody there. Having pulled one of them from the shelf, I read, “I am literature,” and proclaimed that, no, I am literature. At some time or other associated with this encounter, I remembered a close high school friend nicknaming me “Lit,” although my presumption primarily stemmed from my youthful sense of
unlimited potential. In the next moment, I contemplated a photo of Kafka and saw his head drop, dejected. I tried to ward off desperate guilt he seemed to forgive, and while I read in the house I rented, we seemed to become the best of friends.
A metal hook is brutal, but impulse can knock the soul out of a picture. After my son was born, I deeply considered the likes of that attack. I would never unleash such antagonism upon him. The hallucinatory intensity of my imagination I would always welcome, but it, too, is problematic, involving an attempt to unify a double life.
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No doubt, we witnessed a great bird, rather than an ordinary cormorant, a common crow, or a jackdaw, but when I do see a crow, I often notice the cleverness. At work, when taking lunch in my car, I toss bread out the window. A crow will watch me until it swoops down when I’m not looking. But crows don’t have the stately presence of the great cormorant, which winters in New Jersey, southward along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and rarely in northern Florida, breeding from New England to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. A devourer of fish. I could have seen any number of them during fall or winter when I lived on the island, none during the crowded summers. Distinctly solitary, the one we viewed appeared to me as no representative of a species, looming high over the ocean as if judging the world alone.
If I had done that as a young man, I no longer do. Besides, if I play with any comparison, it would be hard to read The Castle while knowing about Kafka’s ordinary work and family life and not feel awe for the breadth of his achievement in isolation. My life among society has affected me like a net thrown across the abyss, catching me like a fish that would have fallen forever into a bucket without bottom. I thrive on connections. My son needed some, and here at
our goal, Michael had a proposition: “Would Matt be interested in caring for the reptiles at Sherman-Hoffman Center?”
I called Matt over, and said, “Matt, how would you like to care for the reptiles at Sherman-Hoffman?”
“Sure!” His face beamed, keenly alert.
On a strap, I carried my son’s Nikon camera. He habitually photographed many species of snakes, lizards, turtles, salamanders, and frogs. Michael was well aware. He got news from one outing about him coming upon an uncommon pine snake; on another, he found a timber rattlesnake. I had borrowed shots from the camera little over the course of our walk, no reptiles or amphibians here for him to capture on pixels. Why—had I the requisite eight-hundred-millimeter lens—capture the cormorant? It haunts my memory like books drawing me into ancient depth.
Matt would volunteer for several years, and I would feel grateful to Michael for more than his leadership on outings. Perhaps we four confided together at the end of Island Beach. As if the great cormorant’s left eye turned to join us.
May 2023
The Mystery of the Ages
The Life and Times of Voyager
Television Review by Charles E.J. Moulton
We could be watching Harrison Ford running through the wilderness hunted by U.S. Marshalls, we could be following Charlton Heston lost in the future hunted by apes or just following Thelma and Louise on their road toward crime and debauchery.
Then again, we might be travelling with Captain Kathryn Janeway and her crew lost 70 000 lightyears from home.
However we choose to experience our lust of joining mutual seekers of the journey, the result of that search is the same. The road is the way.
We all love seeing people travel, but why are we drawn to stories about seekers?
If we don’t travel ourselves, we do so through others. That conveys movement and there’s nothing we love so much as movement. Many people are lost, many people hope to find something real beyond that proverbial rainbow. Then, of course, there is the afterlife. We really belong somewhere else: in heaven with God. Every life we lead here on Earth really brings us back to work on some task or solve some problem.
“Star Trek: Voyager” ran for seven seasons and the reason for its success is the fact that it really is an extended road movie. So, here it is: a team of space explorers is sent out on an away mission, prepared to be away a couple of months at the most. Among them are talented prisoners on parole, fresh graduates and experienced veterans. The ship, however, gets catapulted through the galaxy 70 000 lightyears from home by mistake and so the crew has to find another way home.
On their way home, they encounter a hundred species, visit hundreds of distant planets and ultimately change the course of time.
The fascinating aspect in general is the eternal question we always ask ourselves every time we read a book or watch a film: what if? What would a world based on interstellar communication look like? What might aliens look like? What would their world be like? We know how it is to travel between New York and Rio, but what would a world look like that is based on travelling between planets on a regular basis. Roddenberry continues on a very old tradition that Homer, Voltaire, Melville and Verne dwelled in: the journey.
Captain Janeway is a future day Don Quixiote. Encountering barbarians and killers just as much as benevolent philosophers on her seven year odyssey, she perseveres in spite of incredible setbacks. Actress Kate Mulgrew’s uncanny resemblance to Katherine Hepburn got her the job portraying the famous thespian in a one-woman show. It is also Mulgrew’s almost painful and ruthless, Hepburnesque, honesty that keeps the spaceship going and eventually takes the weird and wonderful crew home to Earth, eventually happy, eventually joyous.
Robert Beltran’s extraordinary mixture of internal depth with an angry command, as First Officer Chakotay, gives Janeway’s Sherlock her conscience of an eternally wise Watson. In more ways than one, we here have a resiliant team that would not survive as a singular unit. Even when they are stranded alone on a lonely planet, their almost marital team inspires Chakotay’s Adam to create an unusually resistant Eve. Only toward the end of the episode, when Janeway gives in to her quiet seclusion, are they saved to return to Voyager. Adam and Eve again, willingly unwilling, become Bill and Hillary.
Robert Picardo breathes life into The Doctor in a role that couldn’t be more different than his most famous portrayal as the Cowboy in “Innerspace”. For those of us who followed Voyager through its journey, the holographic doctor’s love of opera he presents created episodes like “Virtuoso”, where Verdi could be introduced to viewers and aliens alike alongside simple songs like “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah”. The Doctor also becomes an author, a husband, a commanding officer and an advocate of human rights. Wonderfully holographic.
I remember seeing Tom Paris-portrayer Robert Duncan McNeill in a Twilight Zone-episode named “A Message from Charity”. Since then, he has come a long way. His matter-of-fact-way and almost functional form of acting grew in time and became a real jewel of storytelling toward the sixth and seventh seasons of Voyager. McNeill’s very American truthfulness is sympathetic and his cute and constant reparté with Harry Kim in the Captain Proton episodes are worth while to say the least.
Jeri Ryan’s looks have been described as worthy of expressions like “Va-Va-Voom”. Although rather sterile a role, she manages to unify moments of tenderness with a cyborg’s hard battle for individuality as “Seven of Nine”. Tender episodes such as “Someone to Watch Over Me” give us that sweet sneak-peeks of viewing other talents emerge other than looks and strong acting. Her duet with Picardo makes the listener wonder what she would do as the vocalist of a big band. Maybe she already is one. If that is the case, a fellow big band vocalist like me would like to hear her perform songs like “Fly Me to the Moon”.
No Star Trek-ship is complete without a Vulcan. So it is actor and Blues-singer Tim Russ that gives us his constant concentration as Tuvok. The moments when Tuvok is allowed to step outside his own controlled boundaries, however, are the most memorable. Russ is allowed to become a tender and angry soul, happy and enthusiastic, and we find much more beneath that controlled enigma.
Shakespearian actor Ethan Phillips turned Talaxian tour-de-force and Janeway-Alter-Ego Neelix into a weirdly wonderful Pumbaa-like caleidoscope of alien and gastronomical wit. I know he has spent years doing Star Trek, but I also know he is a playwright and the owner of a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Cornell University.
UCLA-student Garrett Wang became everybody’s favourite little beginner as Ensign Harry Kim. His smart and honest portrayal was believable enough to inspire people to review the episodes in which he played the focal part. He is and remains Voyager’s charming conscience.
Roxann Dawson created a feisty, angry character with a sensitive core in B’Elanna Torres. As with many of the portrayals in Voyager, we see the development with the oncoming years. We, as actors, do grow with our assigments. Roxann presented superior theatrical skills even in her first episode in addition to being what you could label as versatile and supremely interesting.
Jennifer Lien’s work as Kes unified strength with tenderness. Of all the characters in Voyager, hers is the most feminine, the one with the most thespian introspection.
On the surface, Star Trek Voyager is a sitcom, a soap-opera set in space. At a closer glance, it is a deep and heartfelt plea to enjoy the knowledge the ride itself provides. It is the discoverer’s dream, the seafarer’s love for eternal wisdom.
As I said, we are all seekers and we all love to see that other enjoy seeking, as well.
We Wondered … and Found Out!
Surreal Universal Parable
By Charles E.J. Moulton
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Dear Human,
Beyond the river, there’s a stream. Beyond the stream there’s a rainbow. Beyond the rainbow, there’s a sun. Beyond the sun, there’s a solar system. Beyond the solar system, there’s a galaxy filled with a hundred billion stars. Beyond the galaxy is another galaxy, filled with a hundred billion stars. Beyond that other galaxy are a hundred billion other galaxies filled with a hundred billion stars. Beyond those hundred billion galaxies there’s the wall of the soap bubble all these galaxies are inside. Beyond that soap bubble there is the vortex of space, before another soap bubble can be found with another hundred billion galaxies inside it.
There are a hundred billion of these bubbles around, floating in this space of quantum candy. All these bubbles float together in that raindrop that landed on your window during the storm last Tuesday.
You didn’t realize it, but you wiped out a trillion lives when you washed the windows the next day. It didn’t matter, though. Because time doesn’t really exist, the space-time-continuum just switched all those bubbles to another reality.
That happens through love, really. When someone loves someone, all that can be repaired. The energy sort just exuded out of your heart because of your new girlfriend. So your angels could actually retrieve all those lives and put them all in another bubble in another universe.
But we are worried about the dog that is about to sneeze in front of your house in a few minutes. He doesn’t know that the universe he is living in actually has landed inside the dog biscuit he couldn’t digest.
So we are actually writing to you, dear maker, to consider preventing the dog from sneezing. It will likely cause some sort of galactic storm. All you have to do is to love the dog. Pet it and you will all be saved.
Maybe he then could just somehow breathe out the crumb and we could then let a butterfly by and pick it up. Maybe we even could put it on your window. If you promise not to wash your window for a week, the time of your world will have passed for a thousand generations and will have transported into other realities, anyway.
Let us know what you decide to do.
You don’t realize it, but you are all creators. The aura of your house is a whole universe and it would be nice if you considered which raindrops you wipe away.
Sincerely yours,
God