Winter Wings

March 2003: Gull Point Trail

by Allegheny College student, Jonathan Smith

The sun hangs lazy in a cloudless sky, mid-descent, watching offhandedly but not warming. I pass Waldameer Ride and Water Park on the left at 4:42 P.M., an abandoned greasy spoon diner on the right at 4:44 P.M., and cross the gate to Presque Isle at 4:45 P.M. exactly, destined for Gull Point Trail. Perhaps because of the seasonal chill and perhaps because surrounding businesses won't end their workweeks for a spell, few people are currently in transit. During the summer months, this strip of highway along Neck Beach, regardless of the time, is an electrified hub of activity for the human and the non-human animals. Strings of neon-clad teens, listless in June, reclining on just washed cars line the streets like glittering Christmas bulbs. Burnt-faced parents urge their wet and sandy children to clean their feet off before stepping into the car. Music--all kinds--fades in through open windows and then dopplers out as new music drives the dominant beat. The bright plastic rainbow of beach umbrellas peeks between the trees that divide asphalt and sand. Warbling gulls fill the skies and descend undaunted by humanity. But this is winter.

The uncharacteristic absence of traffic allows me to graciously exceed the suggested 25 miles per hour limit. On one side of the peninsula is Presque Isle Bay. The beaches there are calmer and more protected. In 1812, it served as a safe-harbor for warring vessels. On the other is Lake Erie whose beaches are beaten by more petulant waves. The bay feeds into the greater lake via a thin strip of water called a spit, which is not totally unlike the mouth of a river. This is where the coast guard office is located. My brain goes numb with these facts I've collected. Like in a movie, my mind, goaded by the elemental absence of life apart from my own, reels into flashback.

"Please fasten your seat belts," this disembodied mechanical voice crackles from the overhead loudspeaker, "we're now descending to Erie International."

The Boeing air shuttle, too small in the sky, shakes its contents like an angry paint-mixer as we divorce the jet stream. A dark churning mass of cumulonimbus clouds swells, now visible, around the diving craft. The gleaming wings flap sickly in the crosswinds. Metal sways, metronome-like, inches away from the breaking point. Soft drinks rattle madly on try tables. At nine years old, I register an emotion apart from perpetual smile on the face of the stewardess-sheer panic. The thick pancake applied to hide the years ruptures as she shuffles past, checking belts on the elderly, exposing the fault lines plowed horizontally on her forehead and two sloping channels that flank her lips. Only fear, or wedding joy can do this. I quickly rule out the later.

"We are currently experiencing turbulence," interrupts the voice, "please remain calm."

The nervous mumblings of surrounding passengers couples with the stifled cries of an infant flyer. They press against thin walls of the plane, melting apocalyptic images of church and funeral quiet. Silence roars. An arthritic hand rises in the peripheral and pats my right shoulder.

I glance up into a nest of wrinkles. "Are we going to die, grandma?"

"No, but if we do, at least we've lived," she smiles. Eyes the color of the sea after a summer storm betray her age. "Look down and you can see the peninsula."

"What do you mean?"

"You'll see what I mean. When the French Indians called it 'Presque Isle' [almost an island], they weren't kidding."

The union of land and water, miles down, is partially obscured by the dark-boiling storm. I stare out, then down, leaning out of my seat. I can barely distinguish the rawness of tree-specked land, stitched over with a winding road, from the nebulous depth of the bay. Further out, the lake is a placid espresso black. As we descend, I crane my neck back to see. With the plane rocking like a drowning tomcat, the peninsula comes into clearer view. The changing altitude and turbulence is disorienting. Like overexposed film, with the tiny airline portal standing in for the camera shutter, the peninsula is distorted. Images bleed together. Colors become opaque. At the most severe, the water and land are temporarily reversed. From miles above, in the upholstered belly of this winged whale, Presque Isle resembles a cresting wave. The flourish of land is suspended in eternity seconds before crashing down on the sands of Erie.

Grandma adjusts her glasses, grinning but showing no teeth. She always insisted that I take the window seat.

I pass picnic shelters, nature shops and boat launches on the long arm of Neck Beach. Just above the tree line, a gauzy stripping of mostly oak and hard maple, several gulls are cavorting about, dumb to the commercial invasion. They swoop down, now interested in the quiet hum of the motor. One, flying parallel to the car, eyes me warily. I can easily imagine his curiosity, or disdain. Evolution has made him a beggar for the bread of tourists. A sign: "Do Not Feed The Animals", discourages me from surrendering a bit of the bread I packed for this forbidden purpose. I'm now about half way to Budny Beach, where the Gull Point trail begins. A familiar boat launch sign stirs recent memory. I remember a pontoon boat ride I took on whim last summer at Grave Yard Pond.

In July, the pond is thick with algae and, at dusk, mosquitoes. The boat moves far too slowly to avoid them and far too loudly not to attract them, so they begin diving, advertising the smorgasbord in a high-pitched, always close-to-ear whining familiar to all those who inhabit Western Pennsylvania. As the little vampires bury their needles in virgin vein, the guide starts clapping his hands. The gesture is more clumsy than authoritative, but works. The kids, all ten of them, and their parents, get quiet. In time with the setting sun, he begins a well-rehearsed ghost story. "Aptly named," he went on in his Boy Scout roasting marshmallows round the fire voice, "Grave Yard Pond is actually a graveyard. Many of Commodore Perry's men lay decomposing at the bottom, tossed off deck when they succumbed to smallpox in the winter of 1812." He described in detail the once-fatal malady-the red and risen pustules, the gross inflammation, itching and burning and the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

"When a person got smallpox in Perry's time, there was no hope. He died. Rather than risk an epidemic, the sailors sometimes sunk people while still alive. They attached weights to the afflicted, sometimes calling them life preservers." The water, I found as I reached in to test it, was not warm now. In the winter, hypothermia, when attached to a life-preventing life preserver, would come quickly. Fatality soon after.

Grave Yard Pond, Misery Bay and Dead Pond are just a few of the names fixed to the waters of Presque Isle. One of the reasons I'm walking Gull Point is that it isn't synonymous with death.

I exit my vehicle, and a cold wind, full of dirt and snow, slaps at my face. Goosebumps erupt under my sweater. I didn't dress for this, but am pleased enough by the sight of sand in March. Shivering, I walk out to the edge of the water and realize that were it summer, my feet would be wet. Now, the sand is hard, glossy, and, in places, exceedingly icy. My feet remain dry-thankfully.

Lake Erie looks as though it was painted in soft watercolor and touched up with an expert airbrush in the places where nature only borders perfection. Two hundred years ago, the Eriez Indians lived here, on the Southern shores of Lake Erie. They made their way fishing these waters in birch bark canoes, hunting, and hoarding edible leeks and mushrooms. Legend has it that they embarked to pinpoint the exact location where the sun disappeared into the lake. In the winter, they found life cruel in the barren winds. They prayed, and their god extended his left arm out into the Lake to protect them. This is how the peninsula was formed. Such nostalgia is incredibly seductive, and even more foolish. However it was, they found life on the beaches bordering Presque Isle Bay more palatable.

The motions of waves have been stilled by the cold and the maritime scene is awash in the arrid palette of winter. Dark blues at the base of the summer swells telescope into progressively lighter blue, then snow white, followed at the peaks of the ice-dunes by the dirty white of snow dusted by soil and sand on top. The waves nearer shore are arrested in mid ebb like souvenir versions of the glaciers that once carved Lake Erie in the crust. Sometimes, the pressure of still active waves underneath the ice dunes can cause geyser-like eruptions of water through the smallest crack. This last happened in 1981 and now only a thin line of water creeps under the ice.

Budny beach, which adjoins the trail, sits between Sunset Point and Gull Point. The former is popular with mating teenagers. The later is equally popular with mating migratory shorebirds. Numerous types of Loons, Grebes, Herons, Ibises, Cranes, Avocets, Plovers, Sandpipers, Cuckoos, Swifts, Owls, Hummingbirds, and Gulls have been spotted here in the summer months. Though I've brought no binoculars, many birds now fill the sky. They trace figure-eights and complicated root patterns just above the ice, sometimes swooping down and landing on either the dunes or the sand. At this distance, not many, apart from the gulls, are distinguishable. A fat whitegull with graying feathers lands mere feet from where I'm standing.

He approaches with some temerity, but his step is choppy and distrustful. The way he moves his head, it seems like it's attached to a small motor that works unrestricted by spine. It spins 90 degrees to the right and then farther, past 180 degrees. Then, quick as a gunshot, he snaps his beak back around and looks straight at me. I stare him down and take a step back. He ducks his head and I can see his lungs, then belly, then even below his belly fill up with air. In a movement quick enough to trick a camera, he launches himself up. Several feathers, like the wake of a rocket ship, fall from one of his wings. They smell like Lake Erie-the strong scent of fish and brine. He ascends, parting his wings to swallow the updraft, and then rejoins a flock that is pecking at one another madly mid-air.

Floating effortlessly, they closely resemble the drawings of six year olds, the "M"'s that stand in for the flesh of the breast and the cartilage of wings. To these flyers, I imagine that Gull Point is a sort of one-stop-shop, an airport refueling station or hotel with all the requisite accommodations. They fly in with family, nest, rest, eat, mingle, couple, reproduce, and then fly-out (more or less a little different). At most, this takes five months. In April-when they come-and September-when they go-more than 300 species of birds have been recorded here-from the easily recognizable Great black-backed Gull to the more bashful Blue Heron. Even the Red-shouldered hawk and the Greater Yellowlegs have been spotted dawdling about Presque Isle's shores and skies. I'm now looking at a section of the "Presque Isle" map concerning Gull Point I picked up last time I walked the trail:

"The most ecologically dynamic area on Presque Isle, Gull Point harbors some of the best examples of ecological succession in the park. This dynamic area, however, is also the most fragile. Many of Gull Point's plant species are threatened or endangered in Pennsylvania."

The pamphlet flutters in my hands as I approach the entrance to the trail itself. 39 endangered species have been recorded here and yet hypodermics wash up, more lethal than driftwood, on the shore. The information kiosk is closed, and the trail looks abandoned and swampy.

"Jutting out into Lake Erie, Gull Point offers a safe haven and resting spot for migrating and nesting birds. Shorebirds migrate yearly from beyond the Artic Circle to the southern reaches of South America and back again."

The many-thousand mile journeys that these birds take twice a year dwarf the 1.5 mile walk that will take me to the observation platform overlooking the nesting birds. During my last visit, I was disappointed that I couldn't walk amongst them on the point itself, but I understood:

"To preserve the resources of this area, the easternmost portion of Gull Point has been set aside as a State Park Natural Area for rare and migratory shorebirds to rest, feed, and possibly nest."
Ok, off limits.

In the tail-end of winter, the grasses along Gull Point Trail more closely resemble trampled lichen. The chlorophyll that makes them green, eaten by winter, leaves them brownish-red, a bizarre, ugly carpet that encourages me to pick up speed so that I can return to the gate before I'm locked inside Presque Isle for the night.

I reach the observation platform overlooking Gull Point at 5:30 P.M., just as the sun is setting. The blazing sun, orange-now as it descends into a frozen lake that glows with a purple cast, bathes the locus of my journey in an eerie half-light. Gull Point is a craggy and constantly growing slab of soil and rock. Soil is washed from the Neck Beaches and is drawn here by the current. As grass and other small plants grow on the new land, trapping windblown sand and creating dunes, it grows and develops progressively more complex vegetation. As the dunes get higher, larger plants and small trees grow; water-tolerant plants spring up in ponds and swamps between the ridges. The process is not totally unlike the formation of a volcanic island. However slow the growth, the activity of the area is startling.

Thousands of gulls, literally thousands, are up, down, to the side, to that side and everywhere. They dodge in tandem, out of tandem, in synch, out of synch, right, left, up, down, a twisting effortless mass of feathers-a reckless airborne armada. In order to reorient myself amongst this feathered-chaos, I pick one bird-a black back gull, I think-and try to follow him with my eyes. One moment he darts up, flaps briefly next to another gull, then darts back down. This excited order, if ever you've seen it, is like those Pacific islands inhabited by sea lions and gulls only. Everything about the place conforms to their mastery of it. The lazy air, the heaps of feces and kelp, and the packs of slimy seagoers huddled are atmospheric. If a certain fern grows on such an island, or on Gull Point, it is somehow altered by the mere fact that it exists there.

As the sun sets, the gulls become darting shadows. I envy them. They call out madly as day becomes night and, never fearing the storm, rejoice in flight.