The Wisdom of Wet Wings

For the better part of a year I’ve had a slight obsession with double-crested cormorants.

It all began in September of last year. I had just arrived at my vacation rental house in Stone Harbor, NJ. Ever since my first summer renting this house 6 years ago, it has become my home away from home for at least a week each year. This little seaside cottage is unimpressive from the street. The house is dwarfed by the fancy new houses around it, and its charcoal gray siding doesn’t glimmer the same way as the dazzling white condo buildings in the neighborhood. But what it lacks in style, it more than makes up for in substance.

The house has been split by its owners into two units: the first floor is one rental property and the second is another, but if you book both there’s a doorway you can open up to access the full house. I rent the top floor. To get to my unit you have to climb up to the porch on a rather steep set of unfinished wooden outdoor stairs. (I learned the hard way that going down barefoot will lead to splinters.) When I’m about four steps from the top, I begin to catch glimpses of the reason I rent this specific unit of this specific house. The porch overlooks a tranquil bay, with a perfect view of the drawbridge that gets you on and off the island. Boats, paddleboarders, kayaks, and jet skis come and go throughout the day, sometimes with the fanfare and clanging of the drawbridge bell, and other times with no introduction at all. In the evenings you can see the most spectacular sunsets from that porch and, if you’re lucky, some nights you’ll get a silent lightshow of a distant thunderstorm as the stars above you twinkle away with their secret messages.

In years past, I’d always invited a few friends to join me in this little haven. Partly for financial reasons at times, but mainly because renting a house that sleeps six for me, myself, and I felt far too indulgent. But last year was different. After a year and a half of a pandemic, leaving a toxic relationship that I stayed in far longer than I should have, moving to a new apartment and neighborhood, and a promotion and accompanying shift in work responsibilities I was just completely done with being around people more than I had to. I was making enough money that I could pretty comfortably afford to rent the place alone, so I said fuck it, and went on my own.

The day I arrived was a perfect late summer day. I pulled the car up to the curb, walked up and down the stairs four times hauling in bags and suitcases, a box of groceries, my yoga mat and guitar, and then parked the car down the block. When I returned, I got a well-worn plastic tumbler with faded green and blue stripes from the cupboard, silently thanked the person who had filled the ice trays before I arrived, and headed back to the deck with delightfully cold water. I slowed as I passed all the things I’d tossed down in the front room - bags to unpack, things to organize, groceries to put away. I really should just take care of this now and get it over with, I thought. But then I looked through the screen door in front of me at the perfect view of a perfect day. Well, I’ll just sit down for a few minutes, drink some water, and then I’ll take care of this stuff. Besides, it’s not like I have anywhere to be. That last reminder is one I would have to give myself repeatedly for the next two days as my brain slipped slowly into “vacation mode.”

I pulled out two patio chairs - one for my ass and one for my feet - and settled in with a deep, long sigh that released more than air. After I’d been there for about 15 minutes I thought about getting up to go start unpacking. But I didn’t. Just a few more minutes, I thought.

As I sat there looking at the perfect view of the perfect day, I started to notice these weird looking birds. They looked kind of like a cross between a duck and a goose, but with way less grace than either. They’d paddle across the smooth bay surface, and then dive down under the water, disappearing from sight. They’d re-emerge sometimes a full minute or more later, sometimes on the complete opposite side of the bay. Over and over again they’d paddle, dive, disappear, reappear, repeat. As I watched them, I noticed they weren’t all that great at the paddling part. As time went on, it looked like they were genuinely struggling to stay afloat. They’d pop back up above the water, but less and less of their bodies would be visible until only their necks and heads were above water. Eventually they’d make their way to one of the buoys or docks, hop up onto them, give a little shake and just sit there, barely moving. Much like I was doing as I watched them.

At the time I didn’t know anything about these birds. Not even their name. Later that evening I would do some googling and discover that they were called double-crested cormorants. If you’re not familiar, allow me to provide some background. (Cue David Attenborough-esque voiceover.)

Double-crested cormorants are spectacularly accomplished diving water birds. They can dive to depths of up to 24 or 25 feet - deeper than a typical two story house is tall - staying underwater for well over a minute at a time to catch the small fish that make up their diet. In order to achieve these impressive diving feats, they have some unique qualities that differ from other birds - especially other water birds. For starters, their bones are very dense. While most birds’ bones are designed with flight in mind, the hollow, light-weight nature of this design would make cormorants too buoyant to dive the way they need to. To me, the most interesting thing about them is that unlike other birds that spend a lot of time in and around water, their feathers absorb water rather than repel it. This is why they slowly, but surely, begin to sink further into the water when they return to the surface after each dive

The very traits that make them so well suited for the way they live are the same exact traits that force them to find refuge from the waters where they do their best work.

I sat there on that porch for over three hours before I moved again, the ice in my glass long since melted, watching these four or five mysterious birds take turns paddling and diving and resting. When I did finally get up, unpacking didn’t take too long. Soon enough I was back out on the porch with a fresh glass of ice water, the sky slowly starting to pale as the sun began to move toward the horizon. When I returned to the porch, I looked around for the diving birds. Two were in the bay helping themselves to the shoals of silver fish I could see swimming just below the surface. But the one that really caught my eye was the one on the buoy in the middle of the bay. She stood there facing directly toward the setting sun, wings outstretched as if in worship of this beautiful day. Still as a statue, she stood there, basking proudly with her full wingspan on display. My breath caught in awe. The sight was, in no uncertain terms, regal as fuck.

I stared at her, waiting to see if she would move, but it truly looked as if she were cast in stone. Eventually it began to feel as though I was imposing on a private moment, so I turned my attention back to the others, smiling as they dove into the solid wall of silver below them, scattering it into a thousand individual mirrors like a watery disco. As the sun set, I continued to glance back periodically at the bird on the buoy. She was still there, not a single feather having moved as far as I could tell, by the time I left to get dinner.

The next day, I woke up and had my coffee out on the porch. My bird friends were there, and this time two of them were praising the sunrise with their wings outstretched. I had done enough research the night before to now know that they were doing this to dry their waterlogged wings. I don’t think I’d ever related to an animal instinct so much as I did at that moment.

I, too, in my own way, was waterlogged. All the diving and fishing I’d done for my own survival in the past few years had weighed me down in ways I didn’t even notice. I began to wonder, as I watched the fishing cormorants, if they noticed that they sat a little lower in the water each time they returned to the surface, or if it wasn’t until just their neck and head breached the surface that they recognized their need for rest. I wondered if, during their rest, they noticed the world around them in ways their hyper focused dives wouldn’t allow. After all, I’d been coming to this very house on this very bay and sat on this very porch many times before this, and never had I noticed these magnificent teachers. And yet, I’m absolutely certain they were there. Perhaps by continuing to surround myself with people to please in the years past, I had failed to dry my wings enough to absorb anything new.

As the week moved on, I began to notice cormorants all over the island. They were in the bay, the ocean, the bird sanctuary. Throughout the week, I slowed down my pace to look for them. I did see them regularly, but I also noticed many other birds, landscapes, fish, tidepool-dwelling creatures of all sorts, architectural structures, and plants that I’d never before taken time to properly appreciate. And I’d been coming to this exact town for 30 years.

But those cormorants, in all their awkwardly majestic beauty, genuflecting toward the sunshine in between bouts of doing what they needed to do in order to survive - they spoke to my very soul. As the week drew to a close, I mourned having to say goodbye to these wise wing-spreading weirdos. But I took solace in the fact that I would be back again in less than a year. Because as I watched them take the rest they needed, and began to feel my soul unclench and breathe, I became very aware that I also needed to do this more often.

The day I said goodbye to the bay and dropped my keys in the box at the realtor’s office, I also dropped off a request to reserve my rental house again in 2022 - once for a week in May and once for a week in September. When I had dropped my bags off in my apartment and returned the rental car, I decided to take a walk along the Schuylkill River path. As I walked slowly along the path, music playing in my headphones, looking at nothing in particular, a movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. I strode over to the mud-caked railing by the river bank and watched as a bird that looked like a mix between a duck and a goose without the grace of either dove down below the river water and re-emerged on the surface, settled a little lower in the water than it had been before the dive.

I smiled and tears came to my eyes. I laughed, because of course there are double-crested cormorants all over the fucking place along the route I ran five times a week. I had been so hyper focused on surviving that I’d never noticed. It took driving to a different state and a week of spreading my waterlogged wings in the sun for me to return to notice the gifts in my own backyard. As I stood at that railing, I knew deep in my gut that when, one week earlier, I sat on the perfect porch on the perfect day looking at the perfect view for three hours longer than the “few minutes” I’d planned, the day I watched that first feathered sunbather so long I felt embarrassed, the day I allowed myself to settle in long enough to become a little less weighed down - on that day, these birds had been sent to me for a reason. I needed to get the message they had for me, and - apparently - I would need to be reminded of their lessons regularly, as I ran past dozens upon dozens of outstretched wings along my same old river path every single morning. (I still smile every single time I see a cormorant dive in the river during my run. Every. Single. Time.)

Today, I try to take notice of where I’m sitting in the water. And I panic a lot less when I begin to feel my wings staying below the surface after returning from yet another dive. Instead, I scope out a nice buoy or log or dock, and make my way toward it. Sometimes my head is barely above water by the time I reach it, but I know that when I get there I can spread my wings: not to fly, but to dry.