Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
I grew up on another beach down the coast. Way down the coast. My parents moved to California’s South Bay from Cleveland, Ohio, after World War II so my dad could get into making movies. All through high school, he’d goaded his friends (including my mother) into acting in his dramatic productions, showing his movies to the neighborhood in his parents’ basement. He was ready for the big time in 1946. He was a little less ready for me to come along several years later.
When I arrived in this beach town on a different sea this spring, one difference that surprised me was the quiet. There were no gulls. The screeches, laughs, and croonings of sea gulls were a distinctive sound of my childhood. And here I was standing on the Nome beach and I couldn’t hear a gull. Bad enough that the ocean was frozen and didn’t look like my childhood beach. Now it didn’t sound like a beach, either.
I had only to wait. Migrations are few in Southern California except for those of the socio-economic kind. My little California beach town with dirt with dirt roads and bungalows and WWII pre-fabs grew into a crowded over-priced resort suburb of Los Angeles. My mother’s house now stands between million dollar mansions. Hers is a “scraper” meaning if she sells it, the house will be scraped right off the lot and a new house put up.
But the gulls were always there. Year-round you heard them at the beach, at school, at the store, in your driveway. And that was even before people threw French fries to them at McDonald’s. The migration into Nome and environs of the glaucous and glaucous-winged gulls gives Nome that special sound of a beach town again.
Oh, they’re not the same species of gull that haunts the Strand and combed beaches of my hometown. The gulls wheeling through Nome skies, diving for fish, and sailing the gravel bars of our peninsula’s rivers are denizens of the arctic and subarctic of Alaska and Canada. I guess the allure of Southern California and French fries is lost on these pirates of the air.
But these Alaskan gulls are different. They have no manners. These large athletic birds repeatedly bussed my son on the Niukluk River in July as he carried his graylings and trout to the canoe. Unlike the protective tern parents who bombed us when we came too close to their nests, these pirates wanted those fish? But at least Nome sounds like a beach town now. Welcome home.
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