The Old Man And The Gulls
About sunset it happened every Friday evening, on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast. You could see an old man walking, white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. One gnarled hand would be gripping the handle of a pail, a large bucket filled with shrimp.
There, on a broken pier reddened by the setting sun, the weekly ritual would be re-enacted. At once, the silent twilight sky would become a mass of dancing dots . . . growing larger. In the distance, screeching calls would become louder. They were sea gulls, come from nowhwere, on the same pilgrimage . . . to meet an old man.
For half an hour or so, the gentleman would stand on the pier, surrounded by fluttering white, till his pail of shrimp was empty. But the gulls would linger for a while. Perhaps one would perch comfortably on the old man's hat . . . and a certain day gone by would gently come to mind.
Eventually, all of the old man's days were past. If the gulls still return to that spot . . . perhaps on a Friday evening at sunset . . . it is not for food . . . but to pay homage to the secret they shared with a gentle stranger. And that secret is THE REST OF THE STORY.
Anyone who remembers October of 1942 remembers the day it was reported the Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was lost at sea. Captain Eddie's mission had been to deliver a message of the utmost importance to General MacArthur. MacArthur was headquartered in New Guinea, and Rickenbacker was given a B-17 and a hand-picked crew to take him there. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life.
Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. The B-17 stayed afloat just long enough for all aboard to get out. Then, slowly, the tail of Flying Fortress swung up and posed for a split second . . . and the ship went down, leaving eight men and three rafts . . . and the horizon.
For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark . . . ten feet long. But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them. And a miracle occurred.
In Captain Eddie's own words, "Cherry," that was the B-17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my yes to keep out some o the glare, I dozed off."
Now this is still Captain Rickenbacker talking . . . "Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I just knew. "Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food . . . if I could catch it."
And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles form land, offered itself as a sacrifice.
You know the Captain Eddie made it. And you also know . . . that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset . . . on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast . . . you could see an old man walking . . . white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls . . . to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle . . . like manna in the wilderness.
Paul Harvey
Paul Harvey
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