At age six, Gordon Cormorant suffered a midlife crisis. Sensitive and melancholy, Gordon believed that he’d explored every mystery that life had to offer a Brandt’s Cormorant. It seemed that the only thing left was to while away his remaining seasons on Cormorant Piling, with similarly disillusioned members of his species, gleaning hollow accomplishment from ferryspotting and offending humans with the frequent and hoselike power defecations peculiar to his kind.
Cormorant Piling stood fifty yards out in Philo Bay. There were other pilings, but the one taken over by the large black birds was by far the largest. It was composed of twenty steel-banded telephone pole timbers sunk deep into the floor of the harbor. The human reason for its existence was to correct the crooked approaches of incoming ferries to the terminal dock. The large vessels brushed their sides against the piling several times a day, with varying intensity. Most times there’d be a slight bump, on rare occasions the boats would strike with such force that the piling would rock violently–sometimes even cracking the timbers.
Continue reading “The Cormorant and the Afterlife Coach By Leila Allison”
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