White Pelicans in the Rain

It rained hard on the way home from Madison. So hard that I got off the freeway when I got to the outskirts of Milwaukee, opting for surface streets rather than the pinball machine that the freeway was becoming.

All the way back, on the freeway and off, I thought about the poem written by my Lake Superior neighbor, Robert Alexander, which his wife read at his memorial service today. It”s called “Eagle and Otter at Midsummer” and begins “It was the summer that fifty white pelicans appeared one Sunday off Coast Guard Point, diving for whitefish as the fishermen strung out along the pier stopped what they were doing and gaped.”

I remember this. I remember standing on our porch on Lake Superior early one Sunday morning before the four kids I’d brought up for the weekend awoke. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, sitting still, as one does there, when a flock of white pelicans flew in formation from west to east, maybe a hundred yards out over the water. It was the most astonishing thing I had ever seen.

The kids were sleeping. My husband wasn’t there. It was before the time when phones were cameras and always in one’s pocket. I had no one to tell. But then I looked over and saw my neighbor on his porch. He saw them and what he saw then lived on in a poem that he wrote about that day, a day when he canoed and saw other wonders – an eagle circling and an otter staring at him and then dipping back into the onyx water of Sable Lake.

The pelicans never returned. There are white pelicans but they seem to follow a different migratory route, only that one time deciding to sail the coast of Superior. I saw them. So did my neighbor.

I thought of that today on the way home from his memorial service, driving in the rain, the wipers unable to keep pace. How we had shared the incredible experience of seeing white pelicans and probably talked about it but it was many years ago and so it had been forgotten until today. Which is the point, I guess, of gatherings like this, remembering what little glories we shared.