A Horror

-

Laughing Gull, photo by Ed Konrad.

 
Last night as darkness was starting to fall I was walking our dog Gracie when I saw this gull standing by the road that runs in front of the house, Fulton Beach Road.  As it started towards the water I realized it could not fly.  It had no sooner begun to cross the road then it was hit by a truck.  The poor little thing was convulsing in agony.  I went and got a shovel, then I had to go back and change my shoes, that road has a megafetid water filled ditch between it's edge and my house and I could not cross it in the Fairmount calfskin loafers I had on.  By the time I got to the gull I think it was dead, but I cut it's head off anyway and put the body in the ditch.  I looked up and the children staying at the rental house next door were all on the porch staring at me.  I am sorry that I could not jump the ditch and break the bird's neck, but the shoulder of the road is nonexistent and traffic was heavy.  Like most in Rockport I find the gulls a nuisance, they are constantly dropping dead fish in the yard and once a baby duck, deceased.  Try and eat anything outside down here and you will be ringed by a cloud of raucous, hovering sky bandits demanding to be fed.  But I am very fond of animals and I hate to see one in such pain.  The driver of the truck probably thought the bird would fly off, gulls are always standing in the road and will scatter when a car is heading their way.  The body will be gone by this evening, there is a colony of vultures right down the street that are living in scavenger hog heaven next to the water.
It is not the scale but the immediacy of violent death that makes such an impact.
 

 The gull died in front of that gap in the grass to the left.  This is the Connie Hagar Wildlife Sanctuary.


Those who would judge me should walk a mile in my shoes.  995.00 bucks.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Father's Last Escape

-
Image
It happened in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting and unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumour, but all trace of the girl was lost and we never heard of her again.  A new age began - empty, sober and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anaemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.  At that t
Read more

Two Bad Men, Said Their Murderers

-
Image
John Choate, 25 August 1818 - 3 August 1869 Crokett Choate, 1842 -3 August 1869 This tells of a grave by the dashing wave A fond friends lip that did quiver Of an eye that's hid by a leaden lid And a voice now stilled forever. John on the left.  They were originally buried where they were killed but October of that year the Refugio Masons moved the bodies to Rockport.  This was all part of the Sutton-Taylor feud, the Suttons were backed by the U. S. Government and of no particular righteousness, they were badge wearing murderers and bullies.  The two story house with the porch running around the second floor in the left background belongs to my sister.  A lovely house and the best behaved neighbors possible! Photos by Steve Davis. The man who killed them.  Sheriff.  Regulator. Murderer. https://books.google.com/books?id=PUvanZiwzdUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=john+and+crockett+choate+death+jack+helm+gunfight&source=bl&
Read more

Roller Ball Murder

-
Image
The game, the game: here we go again. All glory to it, all things I am and own because of Roller Ball Murder. Our team stands in a row, twenty of us in salute as the corporation hymn is played by the band. We view the hardwood oval track which offers us the bumps and rewards of mayhem: fifty yards long, thirty yards across the ends, high banked, and at the top of the walls the cannons which fire those frenzied twenty-pound balls-similar to bowling balls, made of ebonite-at velocities over three hundred miles an hour. The balls careen around the track, eventually slowing and falling with diminishing centrifugal force, and as they go to ground or strike a player another volley fires. Here we are, our team: ten roller skaters, five motorbike riders, five runners (or clubbers). As the hymn plays, we stand erect and tough; eighty thousand sit watching in the stands and another two billion viewers around the world inspect the set of our jaws on .multivision. The runners, those bastards
Read more