Coda
THE INHABITANTS of the Norwegian coast must have been nonplussed by the flocks of seagulls that began to appear toward the end of the eighteenth century, and they must have been amazed, perhaps even intimidated, by the strange mixture of aggressive persistence and wariness, of sagacity and simplicity, that these creatures displayed. Unlike other birds, they associated with people and hung like a veil in the wind after fishing boats, giving their melancholy wail — kyyyyow-kyyyow-kyow-gah-gah-gah — while always being careful to keep their distance, and refusing to pick up food the fishermen threw to them before they saw it floating on the surface. With astonishing deftness they would then dive and take the prize in their beaks, only to lose it again in the violent scuffle that always followed, the melee of thrashing wings and greedy cries, which each day filled the air above inlets and bays the whole length of the coast, and gradually extended inland during the twentieth century, when the spectacle of enormous flocks of gulls gathering on the landfill sites on the edges of cities became more and more common, as if they’d used their time on the coast to train and now were at last prepared to take up the cudgels against the rats, pigeons, dogs, and cats that had once driven them out. They even settled deep in the countryside, where they followed the tractor across the fields, as if it were a fishing boat on the water.
The origin of seagulls is uncertain. The first Norwegian to describe them was Peder Claussøn Friis, priest of Audnedal and Stavanger, in 1632 in his work The True Description of Norway and Its Surrounding Isles, which contains the following mysterious statement about them: These are the first summer birds to arrive in spring: seagulls, shoregulls, black gulls. That’s all. Although this doesn’t tell us when or how they developed, the description is nevertheless invaluable, as it allows us to state with absolute certainty that there were gulls in Norway at the beginning of the seventeenth century. That gulls existed before that time is quite possible, but no one can corroborate it. As we know, evolutionists maintain that all life originally came from the sea, in the shape of single-celled organisms that over time came together, gradually becoming more complex and specialized, in accordance with the demands made by their environments, and controlled by the principle that the best adapted always survived, so some remained unchanged, some died out, and some developed in new directions. This, according to evolutionists, applies to all living things, and, of course, to seagulls. Some of them quite seriously believe that birds have developed from dinosaurs, while more moderate theories say that modern birds are descended from certain primeval ones, coarser and simpler than those of today. They claim that fossils prove them right, but fossils show only that other creatures have existed on earth. The development hasn’t left any trace, and when they say they can read the past by studying signs in nature, they do no more than the Assyrians and Babylonians did when they looked for portents of the future in viscera or the night sky. It may seem impressive, but science it isn’t, except in name.
The only thing we really know about seagulls in Norway is that there were three kinds in 1632: seagulls, shoregulls, and black gulls. Furthermore we know that something happened to these gull species about a hundred years later. They underwent a kind of change. Their wings got a trifle longer, their feathers a trifle whiter, their knees a trifle gristlier. Their behavior became more aggressive, while a streak of shrewdness simultaneously began to manifest itself in their character. This was the change the inhabitants of the Norwegian coastal regions witnessed at the start of the eighteenth century. A new kind of gull had arrived. It looked like an ordinary gull, it moved like an ordinary gull, it sounded like an ordinary gull, and it behaved like an ordinary gull. But with some small and, for the custom-rooted Norwegians, almost spectacular differences. It followed them! For days it might hover in the wind above their boats. And in the instant they sliced the head off a fish, it came diving down and grabbed guts and intestines with its strong yellow beak. No other bird had done this before. And while other birds kept a constant distance from man, whether it was the tame bird’s extreme proximity or the bird of prey’s haughty aloofness, the gull’s distance altered continually, and that was the strange thing, how the distance between this new bird and man was regulated by things beyond the purely spatial.
When I grew up in the 1980s, there were seagulls everywhere. Each morning, on the estate where we lived, I awoke to hear them screaming on the grass in front of the houses, and when I closed the door behind me and, with satchel strapped to my back, began to walk toward the main road, the sudden noise made them take wing, flapping and crying. There was something loathsome about them, perhaps because of the nakedness and openness of their bodies, which sat so badly with the impression they otherwise gave: gluttonous, brutal, primitive. Or maybe it was because I knew what they were capable of. During the war in my grandfather’s time, they were always supposed to be circling above the battlefields, and sometimes would land on dead soldiers while they were still warm and the battle still raged around them. We used to hurl stones at them, but of course they were too quick for our slow, childish movements, and took off without difficulty long before the stones could reach them. Only when some of the older boys got hold of saloon rifles were they seriously threatened. I remember clearly how we’d go off to the scrap heap on Saturday mornings, hot on the heels of the older boys, who would take up position in the woods above the heap and begin to let loose at the screaming gulls, and the jubilation when, on some rare occasion, someone scored a bull’s-eye and the bird hit the ground, spasms racking its body for minutes afterward. I could never share their enthusiasm, in some odd way my sympathies were displaced; suddenly it was my young neighbors who were loathsome. When I think about them now, their freckled faces, red heads, and lean bodies mingle in my imagination with the sweet, moldy smell of the garbage heap, as if they were two sides of the same coin, that this is the real landscape of childhood: a mountain of wrecked furniture, broken fridges, stoves and radio cabinets, smashed crockery, garbage bags full of outdated clothes, old newspapers and magazines, old-fashioned bottles and cast-off games, all bathed in bright spring sunshine, surrounded by forest stillness. Occasionally we caught glimpses of roe deer, foxes, badgers, elk, weasels, and mice, as well as all the birds of the district, but none of this impinged on us at all, we’d simply been dumped there, a crowd of kids on an estate in the middle of the forest, and it was this lack of belonging that we shared with the gulls, for what were marine birds like them doing here, so far away from the open sea? The common assumption was that they were sponging off us, rather like rats. Nobody considered that they might be yearning for us. That that was why they lived so close to our world.