Odyssey

“Kyip! Kyip!”

Inside its cardboard box, the bird seems to sense that freedom is near. As a volunteer for the local wildlife rescue organization, I often transport sick, injured or orphaned birds to their hospital. On this September day, though, I’m to release this healed bird back to the wild. I expect it to be a journey of celebration.

“It’s a juvenile Forster’s Tern”, said the hospital technician, “so it needs to go to the Bayshore, and it needs to be with adults who can teach it how to be a tern.” To be a tern: to hover on invisible air currents; to arrow into the water in pursuit of fish; to be at home in the ever-changing salt marshes, where water becomes land and land becomes water.

So began the drive away from the city, south to what locals call the “lower, slower” shore: the Delaware Bayshore, an oozy, tattered edge very different from the state’s glittering ocean beaches. Autumn on the Bayshore is a slow fade: people, birds and color seep away, the landscape turned to an Andrew Wyeth painting. In the small Bayshore communities, summer houses are boarded up. The tiny beaches are deserted, except for the ghosts of horseshoe crabs, their cracked empty shells littering the high tide line. As the September days pass, the bright green of summer begins to leach from the marsh grasses, their stems turning first gold, then brown. The summer birds – including Forster’s Terns - drift southwards, bound for the warmer shores of Florida and the Gulf, where they will spend the winter.

***

My plan is to take the tern south to Port Mahon, where a road dawdles its way from the village of Little Creek through farmland and saltmarsh to the muddy shore, ending at a small boat landing. It’s been a few weeks since I was there, but on that trip, I photographed Forster’s Terns perched on the rotted wooden pilings at the end of the road. With long tapered wings and tail streamers, decked out in grey and white plumage that flashes silver in the sun, all set off by scarlet legs and beaks, they are elegant birds. Graceful fliers, they hover over the water before plunge-diving for fish, shaking the water from their wings as they rise from the surface. I’m excited, picturing them welcoming the newest member of their flock.

But as I round a curve, where the waters of the Delaware Bay press up hard against the road, I am confronted by a sign: “Road Closed”. At some level I’m not surprised. The port that gave Port Mahon its name is long gone, lost to erosion and changes of fortune. Its namesake road is on life support, more sand and potholes than asphalt. Each year, the road erodes more, and last week Tropical Storm Ophelia lashed the mid-Atlantic with heavy rain and string winds. No doubt there’s been fresh damage that hasn’t yet been fixed.

So clear in my mind is the image of terns at the end of the road that I’m half-tempted to trespass beyond the sign. But then I have a vision of my car, stranded in a giant crater, and me trying to explain my location to someone from AAA…

“Sorry, bird” I say to the cardboard box, and turn around.

***

Where now? South, always south, following the flightpaths of the migrating terns.

My next stop is just south of Little Creek, at a new public landing built to give access to the creek for which the village is named. Memory supplies another image of terns on pilings. By the time I get there the clouds have turned to mist and light rain. As I pull in, I see that Little Creek is no longer a creek, but a wide expanse of rippling water that overflows the parking lot. A boat trailer, listing to one side, pokes out of the water, but neither boat nor owner is visible. I slosh through the cold water to the fishing dock, disturbing a heron who departs, indignant, with a prehistoric “g-r-r-ronk-k-k.” The grey mist seems to condense into the grey creek waters, and the mist to rise from the water. It's impossible to tell which comes first, where one ends and the other starts; the dock and trailer seem to dissolve into both. I feel a sudden chill, as if in an hour I’ve gone from summer through autumn to winter. Or as if I’ve stepped through a time portal into another world.

I try not to think that this is what the Bayshore – indeed, all the shores of the world – will look like as they are drowned by the steadily-rising seas.

“Sorry, bird” I say again, and drive south to Pickering Beach, a small community huddled right against the Bay. I’ve seen terns here, in summer, fishing off the beach.

As at Port Mahon and Little Creek, nobody is around. The emptiness is unsettling. But at least the road is higher elevation here than at Port Mahon, and I’m able to drive to the end.

But as I walk towards the Bay, all hopes of finding terns fade. There is no beach. Huge waves are breaking over the line of small dunes that separate the houses from the water, flinging salt spray against the shuttered windows, eroding the foundations. What is happening? Surely last week’s storm is long gone.

I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe. I used to fantasize about retiring to a little Bayfront cottage here, where I could watch the passing shorebirds in spring, the terns fishing in summer, and the clouds of geese wheeling over the marsh in winter. I never imagined this.

Feeling increasingly desperate, I drive south again, heading for the Dupont Nature Center at Mispillion Harbor. According to tide tables, low tide will be in an hour, but the tide shows no sign of falling, and the road to the Center runs through a mile of marsh that floods even on normal high tides. And if there are no terns at Mispillion, I don’t where else to go.

There is a rustling from the cardboard box on the back seat. The bird is getting restless.

I have a sudden vision of myself, pulling into the driveway of some cheap motel a hundred miles south of here, the tern still in its box. I picture calling my partner: “Umm, so I’m not going to be home tonight. You know that I went to release a tern? Well, something has happened, I don’t know what, but everything is underwater, and I can’t find any terns, and…well, I need to keep going south until I can find a tern family that wants to adopt this bird.” I picture buying a can of sardines and dropping the small salt fish into the cardboard box; I picture the bird shaking its head sadly at the dead fish. It wants live fish, caught by its own skill. It wants life as a tern.

***

I drive on towards Mispillion, past the “High Water” signs, turning onto Lighthouse Road (also named for what has vanished). The road is almost indistinguishable from its bordering marsh. I drive slowly, a small wake forming behind my car. At the end of the road, perched on pilings, I see big white birds with orange beaks and feathered tonsures: Royal Terns. And scattered among them – can it be? – yes, yes, it is – smaller birds with black smudges behind their eyes, as if their eyeshadow had smeared in the rain.

Forster’s Terns.

I’m so relieved to have found them that I start talking to the bird as I open the box. I have visions of a rapturous scene of welcome from the adult terns, though I don’t why. In human terms I’m about to walk up to a group of strangers, deposit a child in front of them, and wish them all good luck.

The bird, a soft ginger-brown wash on its wings and nape marking it as a juvenile, stares up at me. Slowly, carefully, I tip the box on its side so the bird can see the water and the other terns, and I step back to give it space to fly into. After a few minutes the bird walks out of the box, tentatively stretches its wings - which must be stiff after hours in confinement – and sits down. This sequence, walk—wing-raise—sit, goes on for a while; I start to wonder if the bird has forgotten how to fly. Then suddenly I feel a brush of wings past my face and the bird is gone, past the preening terns, soaring then swooping over the water.

Until it drops out of the sky.

This doesn’t look like a plunge-dive in search of fish. It looks like…a fall. Time seems to stop. A minute feels like forever. Finally, I see the bird, on the water’s surface, seemingly caught in a current that is fast pulling it away from the harbor and out towards the Bay.

This is not supposed to happen.

As the bird begins to thrash its wings, my heart and mind race. Is it drowning? What do I owe this bird – do I have to go in after it? I look at the current and think I can’t go in without drowning myself.

Then the bird shakes itself, lifts its wings, and rises slowly from the water. It circles the harbor once, then turns away from me and the adult terns on their pilings, flying along the line of the breakwater out towards the roiling Bay, following the shoreline south until it disappears into the mist.

***

I tried to tell myself that this was a happy ending.

That the tern didn’t need foster parents, or that it was pulled by some unknowable instinct south to where its birth family was waiting.

That the tern already knew enough to be a tern.

That my role was simply to set the bird free into a world of choices and chances where it might – or might not – survive.

That the tern, being a creature of water and air, would find a home anywhere along the marshes of the East Coast. That, unlike us humans, the only land it needed was in the form of pilings, rising above the waves.

I also told myself that the water levels would go down.

That sealevel rise doesn’t happen overnight, that there was some other explanation for the high water.

That the Bayshore that I love, with its horseshoe crabs and shorebirds and terns and wild geese, would survive.

But I can’t unsee what I saw, the Bayshore of the future, drowned by the rising waters. Where will home be then?