I was lying on the couch watching Pawn Stars, it was the one
with the guy who brought in the document that was signed by Jefferson, and he
wanted like $30,000 dollars for it and it turned out it was either a fake or an
auto-pen signed by Jefferson’s secretary or some shit, and was worth maybe $60,
and they couldn’t come together on it, and I got a text from a friend of mine
who is a rock star. There was a pelican
caught up in fishing line floating around in front of the fuel dock, and his
boat was not operational, could we use mine tomorrow and try to get it?
Pelicans are some of the most regal birds I know. The state I live in, they were only recently
removed from the endangered species list.
They are susceptible to a long list of threats, including toxic algae,
overfishing, diseases, and by-catch in the form of fishing tackle. If you have been to the shore, anywhere, you
have perhaps seen a V-shaped formation of them flying low over the cresting
waves as they relocate from one place to another. You can almost hear a flight of B-52s rumbling
overhead when they cruise past. Pelicans
are big, and when they hunt, they dive-bomb their prey from upwards of twenty
feet in the air, looking and sounding like a window air conditioner falling out
of an apartment building, and they come up out of the water with a fish nearly their
same weight, gulp it down, and then float around with a well deserved look of
satisfaction on their beaks.
So I met up with my friend this morning, and we went out and
looked at all the pelicans hanging around the fuel dock and the bait
barge. All the pelicans we saw seemed
fine, they were floating around waiting to eat bait thrown by the fishing poles
by the guys also floating around on their boats who were too lazy to actually
go out into the ocean beyond pelican flying range. Except for the one pelican, who was hunkered
down behind some kind of netting-screen thing on the bait barge, designed to
protect the bait from the pelicans. I maneuver (I spell-checked it) my boat to
the edge of the bait barge, the musician jumps on to it and grabs the downed
pelican, gets back onto the boat and we float back off into the bay.
If you know anything at all about boats, including old
canoes, models that float in swimming pools, or for example cruise ships, stuff
breaks when you need it. My friend is on
the deck examining the pelican, to figure out our next move.
“Dude, you good there, should we just float around or do you
want me to tie up somewhere?”
“No, we’re good floating.”
I let us float away from the barge some more and my friend
says, “you know what, I need a hand here.”
I look around for the nearest dock and it is the Harbor
Patrol dock where the sheriffs, Homeland Security, State Fish and Wildlife and
a few others live. I key my marine
radio, which is probably, after life jackets and knowledge of how to swim, the
most important piece of equipment on a boat where we are.
“Harbor Patrol, this is vessel xxxx, do you copy?”
Nothing.
“Harbor Patrol, this is vessel xxxx, I will be side-tying to
your dock in a few minutes to conduct a wildlife rescue operation, do you
copy?”
Nothing, again.
These guys have some pretty sweet assets in their docking
area, including a couple of boats that look like mine but are three times
longer, have three more engines on the back, and also big machine guns mounted
on the bows. As I bounce my boat off
their dock and tie on I am fully prepared for incoming projectile grenades or
at least a blast of that microwave heater thing I saw on Discovery Channel last
year.
Nothing.
So I help my musician friend restrain the pelican and we
spend maybe ten minutes or more cutting free a hellaciously huge fishing lure
the size of a cheap cigar with three or four nasty treble hooks embedded in
this poor bird’s leg and abdomen. I keep
expecting a helicopter to rappel down a bunch of operators or at least a SEAL
team to pop up out of the water and offer to help, but clearly whatever
trespass we were committing was not on their radar.
The rock star disentangled the pelican, we relocated back to
the launch ramp where he had parked his truck, and he administered some fluids
to this poor, lethargic, starved and dehydrated bird. And its attitude picked
up, considerably. My friend put the
pelican in a kennel and into his truck and transported it to our local wildlife
rehabilitation facility, and I motored back to my dock, wondering to myself
what I would have to spend to fix my marine radio. And my hydraulic steering went out, and it
took me twenty minutes to get my boat the last five feet into my slip without
carving into my neighbors’ boats with my propeller, and a squadron of pelicans
did a low fly-by and one of them shit a glop of brown schmoo the size of an omelet
onto my engine.
