Albatross: An Excerpt from David Carlin’s & Nicole Walker’s ‘The After-Normal’
Nonfiction by David Carlin & Nicole Walker
The number of things I do not know could fill a book. I did not know there were parrots in Australia. I knew that Australia had been part of South America at one point, but I did not realize it hadn’t just floated away. The land is tied to the Earth’s floor. It’s a continent. A big one. Full of birds and surrounded by its own ocean. Seismic fluctuation folded the tectonic plates, wrenching one of the planet’s huge masses into two. We are forever dividing the planet up into pieces. I was born to my own piece of a place called Utah. I come from a landlocked state where seagulls are the state bird. The Great Salt Lake is useless, except to the seagull, which pops along the lakeshore looking for brine shrimp. It would be nice to pretend I grew up near the ocean. It would be nice to pretend all the oceans weren’t one big ocean. Then, when something goes awry in one, maybe the others could stay safe.
It was early 1984. I was 13. Monty and Darryn and I sat on the floor listening to Public Image Limited. I had been Monty’s girlfriend. Now I was Darryn’s. They shared everything, those two friends, including a love of Johnny Rotten’s distortion-filled song “Albatross” that went: Slow motion, slow motion / Getting rid of the albatross / Sowing the seeds of discontent / I know you very well, you are unbearable / I’ve seen you up far too close / Getting rid of the albatross.
I preferred “This Is Not a Love Song,” which was about getting rid of old girlfriends as well, but Monty and Darryn thought it was a bit too peppy. I asked them if they knew that “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink” came from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which also takes from these lines the other old adage, an albatross around your neck:
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
I hadn’t known any of that. Until I did.
The albatross, which looks like a giant seagull but is not in the same family as the seagull, has been dying for a long time. They are extinct now in the Atlantic. An excavated site in Bermuda shows where they once lived until an intergalactic warming period buried the island in melted sea ice. They predominantly range now in the Southern Hemisphere between South America and Australia, although a few species call Alaska, California, and Japan home.
On Midway Island, thousands of albatrosses are born. Fluffy baby albatrosses stick their beaks way too far down their mamas’ throats. They feast on her regurgitated stomach contents. If she can regurgitate the food. Thousands of albatrosses die here, too. Midway Island is littered with plastic. Walk a few feet. Step around the garbage that litters the island. Look down. An albatross decomposes into the tufty brown grass. What does not decompose is the plastic she’s ingested. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. Bottle cap. A filmmaker named Chris Jordan, in a film about Midway Island and the birds, captures an albatross as it lies down, rests its head on the ground, and goes still. Then another one lies down and goes still. And then another one. Fourteen pieces of plastic per bird. An island full of birds. An island full of plastic pieces. An island full of pieces of birds.
Soon, the water will rise to wash those pieces away. As if there were an away.
