May 1998

We were perplexed why a mixed squadron of thirteen herons and terns were in such slow flight, almost a hover, a meter above the surface, pointing into the westerly breeze on this sunshiny spring afternoon. The calm sea was mysteriously broken beneath them by the surfacing of a whiskered dark mass. A harbor seal! It quickly resubmerged. They intensified their wing flapping, even though their flight bearing and speed remained the same.

The seal reappeared and spun into a backstroke, revealing a whole wildly squirming fish in its mouth. Wing flapping became more intense. The seal now brandished its prey back and forth beneath its aerial visitors a half-dozen times, then it resubmerged. After 20 seconds, it reappeared, this time without fish-in-mouth. It reverted to its backstroke, then proceeded to spray the flock with a steady stream of sea water from its mouth, to and fro across the flock, in seeming equal opportunity harassment of its feathered brethren. After shooting a few more streams, the seal performed some axial rotations as it continued on a slow westward course. Then, continuing in a backstroke, the seal hissed at the flock and cajoled them with fishy breath.

This spectacle continued, to our glee, from left to right across our luncheon table, traversing a course 20 meters into the bay and about 100 meters' entertainment long as triangulated from our lunch plates through the Chardonnay and White Zinfandel bottles. We anthropomorphized the scene into Sammy (or Samantha) the Seal and His (Her) Flying Feathered Friends. He and his acrobatic circus were our dining room's afternoon delight. "Hangin' with Sammy the Harbor Seal."

1963

My neighborhood buddy and classmate, Tom, and I continued our walk on Church Street on a late nippy, albeit sunny, Sunday afternoon. We had just passed the cream colored meat locker building and were in front of our former music and singing teacher's, Mrs. Revenaugh's, huge house. (Coach Chuck Todd rented a room on the upper floor from her during school term.) Next up was the red brick Methodist church. We were unusually quiet this day, when suddenly Tom pushed me into the bush on the front left side of the church and exclaimed that the birds perched above and on the church marquee "wanted a piece of me!"

This would have been an early teenage benign horseplay prank had it not been that we were walking home from the downtown Oak Harbor Royal Theater's presentation of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Chills reverberated up and down my spine. Those black birds and sparrows and martins became unsettled at our presence, especially at my unwitting lunge in their direction due to Tom's push. They must have had a nest nearby because, rather than simply flying away, they chose to buzz around us, in contrast to my everyday tranquil experiences of delivering The Toledo Blade on both sides of Church Street on my bicycle, particularly at Mrs. Revenaugh's and at the Methodist Church there.

After I had protested to Tom by using his rather pejorative nickname, "Head," due to the then disproportionately large summit between his shoulders, we continued on our way, next past Saint John's Lutheran, followed by Saint Boniface Catholic Churches. Saint John's is where Tom's family were members; and mine, Saint Boniface; so, we exchanged opinions about what our community would do if the birds were to become uncharacteristically pesky.

As 13-year-olds, we applied a very nuts-and-bolts mechanical perspective to our assessments. Our churches would be exceptionally good conclaves of aid and assistance for our bird-tormented villagers because each afforded strong brick walls, tile roofing, and tough reinforced stain glass windows -- not the relatively weak wood roofing and siding on the homes, school, church, and businesses depicted in The Birds. Plus, there would be the spiritual factor, those familiar places where we could pray and panic together.

We knew some of our classmates would have a good excuse to use their fathers' shotguns. Pillaging birds would present a great Boy Scout "Be Prepared" opportunity for those with marksmanship merit badges that they'd earned in conjunction with the annual summer rifle and pistol national competitions at nearby Camp Perry.

A block from our final turn, it was unnerving to witness in Linda Laubacher's garden a bunch of black birds sitting atop her family's scarecrow. Of all the days for that device to loose its efficacy! No harm done, however, because we were still on the opposite side of Church Street, plenty of buffer between the critters and us.

As we approached our homes near Wistinghausen's Greenhouse, we both opined that, in the event of major bird mischief, there'd be a bloody bird and who-knows-what mess over there, and that a greenhouse would not be a good place for humans to be. We could vividly envision the dive bombing antics from the movie we'd just seen translated to virtual ruins of the greenhouse, replete with blobs of feathers, flesh, gizzards, and ironically, beautiful flower blossoms intermixed in a surreal ready-to-go mass funeral scene. These visions regenerated chills up and down my spine and, this time, to my extremities as well.

In later high school and college years, as we read about and studied biology and organic chemistry, we learned that left brain rational and logical thought processes are juxtaposed with right brain feeling and aesthetic sensory interpretations. That Sunday afternoon, our left side brain neurons -- "It's only a movie. Repeat. It's only a movie." -- lost the gridiron clash within our crania to the high voltage impulses that Mr. Hitchcock had induced into our right central Sulci of Rolando -- "Holy bleeding orbitals! Those pipsqueak flying marauders have pecked out his (antecedent being the very dead dude in the very broken glass phone booth) eyeballs! What a dreadful way to lose it!"

That was my first cinematographic experience akin to my sisters' antics during KP duty where they had learned to push my heebie-jeebies button by one of them sliding a knife up-and-down between the pines of a fork while the other ran her long finger nails across the family message board. Spine tinkling, indeed! The power of cinematic art!

For a long time afterward our lawn and tree inhabitant, Chewy the Squirrel, and his tree dwelling friends -- robins, woodpeckers, blue jays, sparrows, martins, and an occasional cardinal -- exuded a diabolical aura that I had to attribute to Mr. Hitchcock.

May 1998 (Resumed)

Saint Teresa of Avila Parish drew a congregation that afternoon with folks from as far away as Boston, Dearborn, and Seattle, as well as several San Francisco Bay Area communities, to augment its local parishioners. The immaculately white washed wooden church with its rustic steeple was majestic in the emerald green cushion of neatly mowed grass among the springtime rolling hills of the Pacific Coast.

With the advent of summer, the emerald in the hills will turn to a golden hue; only the intermittent patches that are irrigated will retain their green. Cattle and sheep are gluttons in the spring sun; they seem to know that the easy green grazing is cyclical. Come the dry summer, they will be relegated to meals from hay bales and grain that will have been harvested for them during the splendor of spring.

Potter School, Bodega, California.   Photo by Marilyn Steindam Palmer, May 16, 1998.

Father Walt told us that Potter School, just over the church's south property line and now a private residence, is still a major attraction from its prominence in The Birds. His church was prominent in some of the panoramic views in the movie, also. Currently his Saint Teresa of Avila Church appears for two seconds in a cat food commercial. Don't laugh. The collection basket swelled $500 from the filming fee.

Father Walt also went to lengths to explain that his cute church is in Bodega. Period. The movie's boats, the phone booth calamity, the gasoline station fire scene and others occurred up the coast yonder, in the town of Bodega Bay. This was another instance of civic pride we had inferred from the locals in both places with respect to the other.

We've seen The Birds on cable TV several times since our youth. The special effects pale vis-à-vis the current state of computer aided cinematic art. Something is also lost on the small TV screen from the large theater wall-screen with its 3-to-5 aspect ratio. My spine still tingles during some of the scenes, though.

The youthful nuts-and-bolts assessment of the adversity has matured in an inductive way to our questioning what we'd do when faced with a tragedy. With whom would we want to be? Would our individual character and integrity withstand the stress of such an event?

In repeated viewings, our left brain processes have figured how to prevail over the emotions and suggestions of terror propagated from the right. It really is "just a movie." Now we know that critters like Sammy the Harbor Seal would spit in those birds' eyes. So we play mind games with ourselves and substitute more realistic hardships. What would we do in the event of an earthquake? Mud slide? Flood? Hurricane? Tornado? Stampeding rhinoceroses? Munching mosquitoes? Mass contaminated fruits and nuts?

There are other films to give us clues about the technical and emotional challenges involved in other disasters. However, The Birds is the film event from my youth that has left its indelible imprint on my psyche.

Back Home in the East Bay

These days, when we walk the 2.6 kilometers to the local community college wildlife pond, then trek its 1.7-kilometer irregular perimeter, we note that the ducks, especially the mallards, move out of the way to give us plenty of room to maneuver. The geese, on the other hand, are a stalwart gawking honking bunch and stand their ground along the water's edge, undoubtedly expecting a human handout. We dodge them with two meters' clearance -- one for prudence, the second due to Mr. Hitchcock's influence.

Epilogue

Bird Place curiosity in the beautiful coastal towns of Bodega and Bodega Bay, California, is now supplemented with bell inquisitiveness and gratitude toward The Children's Bell Tower of the Nicholas Green Foundation. This kinetic bell tower serves as a tribute from Italians to Nicholas Green and his parents, who made the decision to donate his body parts to better seven Italians' lives after Nicholas was killed by a gunshot from road bandits while his family was vacationing in Italy.

In appreciation for the Green's profound generosity, Italians gave the Greens 130 bells, the largest of them specially made and engraved by the bell crafters that serve the papacy. It was blessed by Pope John Paul II. The bells were hand delivered to the Greens by the Italian Air Force on a flight to Alameda Naval Air Station on high command of the Italian government.