Shore Lines by Mari Messer

Author:Mari Messer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

9

A Blue Heron's Vigil

Looking for Fish in All the Wrong Places

The things I thought were so important have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to measure or expect, were the things that mattered.

—THOMAS MERTON

“Looks like he's here again,” a woman behind me pipes, her voice echoing in the vaulted passageway that leads to the pool. I turn around to see her. She's dressed in red and yellow flowered shift and wears on her head a straw hat shaped like a flowerpot. Her husband, whose torso is encased in a Cuban pareo shirt and baggy plaid swim trunks, is right behind. He carries a big canvas hamper with towels spilling out the top. They are obviously headed for a swim. But they pause, as I do, hands on the painted iron gate, to watch what's going on by the pool.

At this early hour, everything's obscured in fog. Sea and shore mingle, blotted by the opaline mist of daybreak. We three are keeping our eyes on a great blue heron inside the pool enclosure. He stands as tall as a full grown human as he clings to the pool's ceramic edge. Feet delicately curled around the tiles, his grip is as dainty as the fragile fingers of an old lady's hand holding the ear of a teacup. When he sees us, his head moves up and down in a slow nod.

“He's always here,” the woman in the flowerpot hat says. “We've been coming to this place for years and he's always in that same spot on the edge of the pool. Every morning. I sometimes think, in this clear water, he expects to find a fish.”

We all chuckle. Imagine showing up in the same place day after day, year after year, hoping to find a fish where there can't possibly be one! Of course the heron may not know that. But wouldn't you think that after a year or two he'd get the drift? He could easily stretch his wings and sail over the railing to alight farther out, in the shallow water at the ocean's edge and there to accost some unsuspecting mullet. But he stays. And stays.

He stays beside the clear pool, watching intently, the whole livelong morning. No fish come. No fish will likely ever come. Maybe he thinks, as he peers into the chlorine blue, that if a fish ever does come, he'll be able to see it, clear, in the transparent water. And then, snap! In a blink he'll snatch the fish in his pointy yellow bill and swallow it whole in a gulp.

“Herons have such small heads,” the woman with the flowerpot hat observes. “So their brains must be about the size of a pea. Maybe that's why this one is dumb enough to look for a fish in the pool.”

Well, no dumber than us humans, I think to myself, not daring to express such a thought to the talking flowerpot. I remember all my own dead ends, the hundreds of times I've looked in impossible places.

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