The Hog Blog

I’m sitting here in my office this morning, reading through my email and organizing my thoughts for the day, when a sound cuts through the double-paned glass and then slices smoothly through my shirt, drilling painlessly into my chest, until it tears with gentle but insistent tugging at my very heart.

I’ve never been especially happy with a desk job, but it pays the bills… nicely.  It lets me take care of the things I have to, so I can do the things I want to.  Most folks probably know what I mean.  It’s a sacrifice I make at the altar of my dreams, really…an offering to the ravenous and insatiable beast called, “responsibility”, in hopes that he will allow me to slip past on occasion in pursuit of things that please me.  It’s worth it, in the end, because when I’m gone people will look back at the comic strip that was my life and say, “maybe he was a little odd, but he took care of business.” 

I tell myself these things that I’m telling you in order to justify the long, unsatisfying days I spend inside this cage of glass and steel.  The ability to rationalize, I’ve always said, is really what sets us apart from the other animals.  It’s not language or opposable thumbs, but the ability to twist reality and logic until it suits our current perspective. For other animals, everything is simple cause and effect… action to reaction.  But not for us… we justify our mistakes, excuse our errors, and create our personal myth. 

But I digress.  This sound I heard… the faint utterance that made me turn and catch my breath… the siren call to make me wreck this ship of efficiency on the rocks of a daydream… that’s what I was on about.

I only heard it twice, and it was gone.  The first time broke into my reverie and alerted me, but the second stole my soul away. I did not need to hear it a third time, because it is a sound that haunts my dreams and echoes through my mind at every moment of every day.  Once the pump was primed, the song flowed through me as it used to all those years ago, when I never dreamed I’d be sitting in some high-rise office building, in a place where I can see and even taste the very air I have to breathe.  The sound re-awakened a longing that lay dormant… a volcano moved to near eruption and seeping, oozing through the spreading cracks and heating the cold surface of my mind. 

I am a child of the sea, of the waters, and of the sun.  Most of my life was spent near, on, and under the warm waters from the mid-Atlantic to the Caribbean.  I barely knew a time when I could not feel the salt air on my skin, or hear the rumble of surf on sand.  Even now that I am so far from my childhood home, I still feel the tides as they draw me close…although today they are the roiling tides of the murky, cold Pacific.  Sure, I enjoy the red rocks and sparse beauty of the deserts, and I appreciate the towering grandeur and craggy heights of the mountains, but the sea is my home. 

So this sound?  The call of a common seagull, winging across the peninsula to some place known only to him. 

It’s usually a raucous music, the gull’s cry.  When in a group it’s harsh and cacophonous as they circle and strafe over a school of baitfish, or flock and dive to terrify the tourist child whose mistake was to offer a crust of bread.  In a flock they’re maligned and derided as they crowd the fishing pier, begging for scraps and guts.  “Winged rats,” they’re often called… carrion eaters and pests at the dockside restaurant. 

But the call of a single gull is a moving, lonesome song.  It pries at the edges of my mind, lifting up the corners of my land-locked urbanity to let the sea-creature inside slither out.  It sings to me of tropical nights beside crystalline seas, dappled with the phosphorescent trails of unseen denizens.  It’s a song of sunburnt sand and warm waters, enticing as the womb, that embrace my spirit and body alike as I slip down into their depths. 

Like Jack London’s “Buck” when he hears the wolves, I am transfixed by this call.  I push aside the papers of my day-to-day reality and turn to face the window. The call of the gull speaks to something deep and primal in me.  It hurts, a bit, twisting and knifing through my chest and my memories.  But I treasure this pain.  It lets me know I am still alive, and rolls away the stone of this tomblike office existence. 

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