A Bald Eagle Splattering
I crested the dune and gazed south a half mile down to the beach, to the driftwood fort under my construction for the last month. I had worked on it at least a dozen times and erected a dozen spars to give it a striking appearance from a distance.
High tide was closing in and the ocean battered the jetty. No one was around.
Something atop the fort caught my eye. It was a small, somewhat rectangular mass. At first, I thought it was a float I had previously attached to the end of a spar. But the color and shape and angle were wrong. I kept moving toward the fort, curious.
I reached the beach and kept my eyes fixed on the mass.
The mass moved. Then it moved again. There was indeed a living thing perched atop the fort! It was black on the bottom and white on top. A bald eagle.
I stopped and took a couple of photographs with the camera on my ancient phone.
The bird lifted off and pivoted east over the dunes and shore pines. I took a couple more photographs and then headed toward the fort. I was surprised to find myself running. It felt good. Perhaps more people should run toward a bald eagle without stopping to think why.
In all my years of driftwood fort building, I had never seen a bald eagle perched atop a driftwood fort. A driftlog yes, but not a fort. The image belonged on a unit of Oregon currency, a currency secretly exchanged by people secretly building their own country.
I arrived at the fort and searched for a feather. I’ve always wanted to find a feather from a bald eagle, although I had no idea how to recognize one.
There was no feather, but a different sort of decoration left behind. The fort was splattered in eagle shit, and in such a pattern that it suggested a Kandinsky at work. There was even eagle shit on the cairn I’d built outside the fort! I smiled . I marveled. There had to be some powerful magic in eagle shit on a cairn. It was worth mulling over and deeply intrigued me as all bald eagle things do.
I sat inside the fort and ate a simple meal. I considered taking the cairn with me. If I did, I would assuredly be the only person in Oregon, perhaps the world, displaying a cairn splattered in eagle shit on a bookshelf. And the display wouldn’t be décor.
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